Americans can't move overseas and take jobs away from locals? What is this world coming to? I mean we let people from all over come here and work. Ummmmm, except we don't.
Ummmmm, except we do. In the last place I worked (last summer) almost a third of the people were from either India or China here on H1B visas.
The laws are probably similar to the US: You can't immigrate to work unless you can prove that you can do a job that no one else in the country can do.
I dunno, I see a lot of Indians here in the US doing jobs that I could be doing. Must not be too hard for them to immigrate here.
Basically here's the phone conversation between the US Dept. of Immigration and the HR person for the company trying to hire an Indian worker:
Immigration Officer (IO): "So there's nobody else in the US who can do C++ programming and who can fill your position?" HR Person: "Yeah, that's right." IO: "OK, you can hire Asok."
It seems that in India they don't let people from the US (or other countries) come in to work at all - that's much different from how it works in the US.
I also found myself wondering about the lack of discussion of how to integrate these Ruby tools into a typical Java build process. Many developers I know use ant to bring automation and consistency to their builds, yet the book doesn't mention this. (JRuby anyone?)
Just a heads up about integrating Java and Ruby: There is a tool called rjni (Ruby JNI), from the README:
"What is rjni?
rjni exposes the Java Native Interface to Ruby. This allows the programmer to instantiate Java objects, manipulate them, define Java classes, etc... from Ruby. " [and that's the way it should be, use Ruby to drive Java;-) ]
You could probably use this to drive ANT from Ruby.
You can find rjni at: http://www.thekode.net/ruby/rjni
It only recently became available (in July) so it wasn't available in time to be included in the Code Generation book.
The author has chosen to use Ruby as his working language. This is an interesting choice. Ruby is certainly a language that is inspiring a lot of admiration these days..., but with the majority of the code-generation examples being for Java-related technologies, I wonder why Java was not selected instead.
I think the author makes it pretty clear why he chose Ruby instead of Java. Essentially, in order to parse text (which is one of the primary functions in code generators) you would have to write 2 to 3X more code in Java than you would in Ruby. Java is not an optimal text parsing language - first off you have to find a regex engine for it. That leaves you with choosing one of the scripting languages: Ruby, Perl or Python.
Here's what the author says about the cons of using Java for code generation (page 41):
* Java is not ideal for text parsing. (I would agree) * Strong typing is not ideal for text processing application (again, I would tend to agree, strong typing only gets in your way) * The implementation overhead is large for small generators. (you'll be writing a lot more java code than you would in Ruby to get the same thing done)
Overall, I'm finding it to be a great book, and the use of Ruby for implementing the examples is a plus as far as I'm concerned.
As far as integrating Ruby into the build process goes, I recall hearing something about a project that uses Ruby to drive Ant.
Come on SCO, get a clue! If Darl & the boys hadn't acted like such idiots for the last six months this wouldn't have happened. Now the truth is out there and it's clear that SCO's claims are totally bogus. Now it's payback time! What did they expect was going to happen?
Let's see: SCO: There's millions of lines of our code copied into Linux and we won't show it to you because there's too much and they would just fix it and we want to be compensated and we've been harmed and the GPL is bogus and invalid and..... Open Source Community (SCO's expectation): Oh, SCO, we're so sorry. We'll just roll over now and pay your license fees. We're erasing Linux from our servers and loading up SCO! Yes, were so very excited about SCO! NOT!
If they can't take the heat they should get out of the kitchen (and file for bankruptcy while they're at it.)
Simpson promoted August 10, 2003 Springfield, Ohio
Springfield's own Homer Simpson was promoted to IT manager of Springfield's nuclear power plant today. Simpson promised that his first act would be to remove Unix from all of the power plant's computers. "Whoever heard of Unix anyway? I run Windows at home as do most Springfield residents. If it's good enough for playing games, it's good enough to run our nuclear power plant!", Simpson declared.
I'm also considering getting a PhD. I'm currently working on my Master's in ECE, but it doesn't look like the job market will be any better by next spring, so I might just continue on. Since I've got several years of industry experience I find that I've got a leg-up over my classmates who went into the Master's program right after completing their undergrad. (Tip: If you've been in industry for a while and are now working on a grad degree, send your resume to your advisor - I found I got a lot more attention and respect from faculty after doing this: "Oh, this guy can program").
Sure it probably _is_ harder to get a job with a PhD, however, that's because there are fewer jobs at that level (Chief Technology Officer, Chief Scientist, etc.). I think the upside is that those jobs which PhD's normally have will be less likely to be outsourced than the so-called "lower-level" jobs. So a company might decide to move most of their development to India, but keep some PhD's in -house.
A couple of other things to consider: Don't plan on having the same kind of job as a PhD as you have now (yeah, it seems obvious). You should end up higher on the development chain (or in research). Since there are fewer of those jobs around, they're harder to find. But there are also a lot fewer PhD's out there (of course, by the time this Tech Depression is over, maybe a lot of us will have gotten PhD's as we wait it out).
Also, as you get a PhD, you automatically become more specialized which may be why some people have a hard time finding work. The trick is to try to predict what very specialized area will be in demand by the time you finish - that's not easy to do. It's sort of a bet: if you bet wrong you could lose big, but if you bet correctly you could win big.
A PhD also opens doors for jobs in academia. At least if things are still really bad out there you'll be able to teach some classes which in general you can't do without a PhD.
And finally, I think if you've got several years of industry experience prior to getting a PhD that it will be easier to find a job than if you had no industry experience.
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer). It just feels a whole lot better than doing OO-Perl.
"RedHat, I'm disappointed in ya. What are yaz do'in on my turf? If you're not careful, I'll have da boys ruff ya up."
Of course, he can threaten RedHat like this because the two 'gangs' are roughly the same size... But IBM is standing over in the shadows behind RedHat.
Darl needs psychiatric help and someone should should get his HBO shut off to help him come out of his fantasy world.
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I thought that code blocks were a pretty lame excuse for proper functions-as-data, so I'm a little bit surprised to see them mentioned as a great feature. Did I miss something?
You did.
Code blocks are probably one of the most important features of Ruby that differentiates it from Python.
From what I understand, code blocks are basically anonymous functions that the method they are passed to can only invoke with yield, right?
wrong.
Or is it possible to treat them as any other parameter, i.e. store them, pass them further around, take more than one etc?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes (well, that last one is a qualified yes, if I understand your question correctly: you have to convert them to Proc objects before you can pass more than one of them to another method due to the fact that the '&' block delimiter in the method's parameter list can only be on the last parameter - it's not a big limitation).
At first glance, code blocks don't seem that interesting, cool or useful, however, I was able to create a domain-specific hardware description language using them without the need to create any parser for that langauge. It was written in pure Ruby, but to the user it looks like another language in it's own right.
So I could do things like (if you're familiar with VHDL this should look familiar):
process(clk,rst) {
if clk.event and clk == '1'
counter.assign counter + 1
elsif rst == '1'
#do resest:
counter.assign 0
end } #
It's all written in pure Ruby. The part between the '{' and '}' is a code block that's being passed to the process method which will execute the block whenever the value of clk or rst changes. So essentially, code blocks allowed me to make Ruby look a lot like VHDL. It looks very natural. AFAIK, this sort of thing is not (easily) doable in Python.
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
From all I have read about Ruby, it is flexible and clearly OO, but what about speed.
I'm a former Perl programmer myself and my reason for moving to Ruby as my primary development language a couple of years ago was Ruby's great OO features. I tried to like doing OO Perl, I really did, but it hurt too much. I tried to like Python's indention-as-syntax, but that hurt too. But Ruby was just right.
I recently spoke with a developer who is doing a lot of OO Perl (he'd like to be doing a lot of Ruby, but there's too much legacy Perl code where he works.). He told me that he had done some comparisons between OO-Perl and Ruby - Ruby comes out faster apparently because of the overhead that is incurred when you do OO-Perl (method dispatch issues, I suspect).
Of course this is comparing OO-style-Perl with Ruby. Non-OO-style Perl will be faster than Ruby in general.
I never encountered an actual application written in Ruby
Check out the RealWorldRuby wiki page for a list of real world applications of Ruby. It's in use at NASA, Intel, HP and Agilent among others.
the latest news item on RubyForge is about a program for sorting (sorry, but it did not impress me very much)
You have to remember that RubyForge has only been up for about a week. A couple of applications that are coming soon: * A genetic algorithms package * A swarm particle optimization package
For instance, over the 80's and 90's you have seen a large influx of foreign automakers' assembly plants, because it's cheaper for them to procure parts within North America and assemble over here rather than make everything in Germany or Japan and ship it over.
That's quite true. However, note that wages in Germany and Japan are roughly equal to wages here (perhaps even higher). Also note that in the case of software development there's nothing physical that needs to be shipped - when you're done you send some bits over the internet and they arrive on the other side of the world within minutes for a few cents cost.
Obviously assembly line workers can be anywhere...but in software there is no assembly line worker.
Actually quite the opposite: With the internet it's possible to have software written anywhere where you have trained workers (India, China, Russia all meet the trained worker criteria when it comes to software development). Software is only 'bits' that can be sent down a wire. Manufactured goods like cars, shoes, etc. need to be transported (as do the raw materials to build them) and factories need to be built to build them. Sure it's much easier to find workers who are qualified to build cars or shoes, but other than that, it's much harder to move a car factory overseas than it is to set up software development operations overseas.
Software is slowly and painfully learning the lesson that manufacturing learned a long time ago: "Build where you sell".
Uhh... but most manufacturing moved overseas in the 80s and 90s and I haven't noticed that it's been moving back because they've learned that they should "Build where you sell". Mostly I think manufacturers (and now technology companies) have learned that they should "Build where it's cheapest".
...people who use WiFi on their laptops to access the internet and those who attend baseball games is probably pretty small, no? I mean most of us here couldn't care less about (baseball|football|) games.
You don't have to wait. You can get 0% interest* on anything you want. I bet you'd change your tune if one of your cars dropped a transmission or required any other major service.
Well, since I'm not working (and haven't for some months) and my wife works temp, if one of the cars dies she'll get the working one and I'll be taking the bus. 0% interest is nice, but I still can't afford the payments at this point.
I don't know where you've been living, but cars don't get 'fixed' anymore, they get 'replaced' with cheap imports
I don't know where you live, but nobody where I live can afford even a 'cheap' import since we're all waiting for the economy to come out of recession... (Oh, wait, I forgot the economy came out of recession over a year ago according to that group of economists.)
I'm driving an '87 model car (actually bought it new in '87 and have had no reason to replace it). And my wife drives a '94 model car.
Identify what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else (or at least, anyone who is willing to work for your salary)
And what exactly might that be? Just saw an article on EETimes the other day where India is now targetting embedded development, so they're not ignoring the niche areas either.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans can't move overseas and take jobs away from locals? What is this world coming to?
I mean we let people from all over come here and work. Ummmmm, except we don't.
Ummmmm, except we do. In the last place I worked (last summer) almost a third of the people were from either India or China here on H1B visas.
Where have you been working, McD's?
The laws are probably similar to the US:
You can't immigrate to work unless you can prove that you can do a job that no one else in the country can do.
I dunno, I see a lot of Indians here in the US doing jobs that I could be doing. Must not be too hard for them to immigrate here.
Basically here's the phone conversation between the US Dept. of Immigration and the HR person for the company trying to hire an Indian worker:
Immigration Officer (IO): "So there's nobody else in the US who can do C++ programming and who can fill your position?"
HR Person: "Yeah, that's right."
IO: "OK, you can hire Asok."
It seems that in India they don't let people from the US (or other countries) come in to work at all - that's much different from how it works in the US.
I also found myself wondering about the lack of discussion of how to integrate these Ruby tools into a typical Java build process. Many developers I know use ant to bring automation and consistency to their builds, yet the book doesn't mention this. (JRuby anyone?)
;-) ]
Just a heads up about integrating Java and Ruby:
There is a tool called rjni (Ruby JNI), from the README:
"What is rjni?
rjni exposes the Java Native Interface to Ruby. This allows the programmer to instantiate Java objects, manipulate them, define Java classes, etc... from Ruby. " [and that's the way it should be, use Ruby to drive Java
You could probably use this to drive ANT from Ruby.
You can find rjni at:
http://www.thekode.net/ruby/rjni
It only recently became available (in July) so it wasn't available in time to be included in the Code Generation book.
The author has chosen to use Ruby as his working language. This is an interesting choice. Ruby is certainly a language that is inspiring a lot of admiration these days..., but with the majority of the code-generation examples being for Java-related technologies, I wonder why Java was not selected instead.
I think the author makes it pretty clear why he chose Ruby instead of Java. Essentially, in order to parse text (which is one of the primary functions in code generators) you would have to write 2 to 3X more code in Java than you would in Ruby. Java is not an optimal text parsing language - first off you have to find a regex engine for it. That leaves you with choosing one of the scripting languages: Ruby, Perl or Python.
Here's what the author says about the cons of using Java for code generation (page 41):
* Java is not ideal for text parsing. (I would agree)
* Strong typing is not ideal for text processing application (again, I would tend to agree, strong typing only gets in your way)
* The implementation overhead is large for small generators. (you'll be writing a lot more java code than you would in Ruby to get the same thing done)
Overall, I'm finding it to be a great book, and the use of Ruby for implementing the examples is a plus as far as I'm concerned.
As far as integrating Ruby into the build process goes, I recall hearing something about a project that uses Ruby to drive Ant.
Poor little SCO - boo hoo!
Come on SCO, get a clue! If Darl & the boys hadn't acted like such idiots for the last six months this wouldn't have happened. Now the truth is out there and it's clear that SCO's claims are totally bogus. Now it's payback time! What did they expect was going to happen?
Let's see:
SCO: There's millions of lines of our code copied into Linux and we won't show it to you because there's too much and they would just fix it and we want to be compensated and we've been harmed and the GPL is bogus and invalid and.....
Open Source Community (SCO's expectation): Oh, SCO, we're so sorry. We'll just roll over now and pay your license fees. We're erasing Linux from our servers and loading up SCO! Yes, were so very excited about SCO!
NOT!
If they can't take the heat they should get out of the kitchen (and file for bankruptcy while they're at it.)
Is there a Springfield in Ohio?
Simpson promoted
August 10, 2003
Springfield, Ohio
Springfield's own Homer Simpson was promoted to IT manager of Springfield's nuclear power plant today. Simpson promised that his first act would be to remove Unix from all of the power plant's computers. "Whoever heard of Unix anyway? I run Windows at home as do most Springfield residents. If it's good enough for playing games, it's good enough to run our nuclear power plant!", Simpson declared.
I'm also considering getting a PhD. I'm currently working on my Master's in ECE, but it doesn't look like the job market will be any better by next spring, so I might just continue on. Since I've got several years of industry experience I find that I've got a leg-up over my classmates who went into the Master's program right after completing their undergrad. (Tip: If you've been in industry for a while and are now working on a grad degree, send your resume to your advisor - I found I got a lot more attention and respect from faculty after doing this: "Oh, this guy can program").
Sure it probably _is_ harder to get a job with a PhD, however, that's because there are fewer jobs at that level (Chief Technology Officer, Chief Scientist, etc.). I think the upside is that those jobs which PhD's normally have will be less likely to be outsourced than the so-called "lower-level" jobs. So a company might decide to move most of their development to India, but keep some PhD's in -house.
A couple of other things to consider:
Don't plan on having the same kind of job as a PhD as you have now (yeah, it seems obvious). You should end up higher on the development chain (or in research). Since there are fewer of those jobs around, they're harder to find. But there are also a lot fewer PhD's out there (of course, by the time this Tech Depression is over, maybe a lot of us will have gotten PhD's as we wait it out).
Also, as you get a PhD, you automatically become more specialized which may be why some people have a hard time finding work. The trick is to try to predict what very specialized area will be in demand by the time you finish - that's not easy to do. It's sort of a bet: if you bet wrong you could lose big, but if you bet correctly you could win big.
A PhD also opens doors for jobs in academia. At least if things are still really bad out there you'll be able to teach some classes which in general you can't do without a PhD.
And finally, I think if you've got several years of industry experience prior to getting a PhD that it will be easier to find a job than if you had no industry experience.
All this dealing with cameras and lavalamps seems like a lot of extra work.
Why not just get random numbers from random.org?
I believe they get them by monitoring certain radio frequencies which are predominantly white noise.
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer).
It just feels a whole lot better than doing OO-Perl.
"RedHat, I'm disappointed in ya. What are yaz do'in on my turf? If you're not careful, I'll have da boys ruff ya up."
Of course, he can threaten RedHat like this because the two 'gangs' are roughly the same size... But IBM is standing over in the shadows behind RedHat.
Darl needs psychiatric help and someone should should get his HBO shut off to help him come out of his fantasy world.
I thought that code blocks were a pretty lame excuse for proper functions-as-data, so I'm a little bit surprised to see them mentioned as a great feature. Did I miss something?
You did.
Code blocks are probably one of the most important features of Ruby that differentiates it from Python.
From what I understand, code blocks are basically anonymous functions that the method they are passed to can only invoke with yield, right?
wrong.
Or is it possible to treat them as any other parameter, i.e. store them, pass them further around, take more than one etc?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes (well, that last one is a qualified yes, if I understand your question correctly: you have to convert them to Proc objects before you can pass more than one of them to another method due to the fact that the '&' block delimiter in the method's parameter list can only be on the last parameter - it's not a big limitation).
At first glance, code blocks don't seem that interesting, cool or useful, however, I was able to create a domain-specific hardware description language using them without the need to create any parser for that langauge. It was written in pure Ruby, but to the user it looks like another language in it's own right.
So I could do things like (if you're familiar with VHDL this should look familiar):
process(clk,rst) {
if clk.event and clk == '1'
counter.assign counter + 1
elsif rst == '1'
#do resest:
counter.assign 0
end
}
#
It's all written in pure Ruby. The part between the '{' and '}' is a code block that's being passed to the process method which will execute the block whenever the value of clk or rst changes. So essentially, code blocks allowed me to make Ruby look a lot like VHDL. It looks very natural. AFAIK, this sort of thing is not (easily) doable in Python.
From all I have read about Ruby, it is flexible and clearly OO, but what about speed.
I'm a former Perl programmer myself and my reason for moving to Ruby as my primary development language a couple of years ago was Ruby's great OO features. I tried to like doing OO Perl, I really did, but it hurt too much. I tried to like Python's indention-as-syntax, but that hurt too. But Ruby was just right.
I recently spoke with a developer who is doing a lot of OO Perl (he'd like to be doing a lot of Ruby, but there's too much legacy Perl code where he works.). He told me that he had done some comparisons between OO-Perl and Ruby - Ruby comes out faster apparently because of the overhead that is incurred when you do OO-Perl (method dispatch issues, I suspect).
Of course this is comparing OO-style-Perl with Ruby. Non-OO-style Perl will be faster than Ruby in general.
If I'm not mistaken, Ruby is the first language to include built-in support for YAML!
Thanks to Matz for such a great language!
I am not fond of Perl but I love CSPAN
Yeah, I agree; now that I know Ruby I'd rather watch CSPAN than program in Perl.
It looks like the Perl6 folks are borrowing a lot of ideas from Ruby.
Looks like Perl6 will be great when it comes out in 2007 or so, but if you really don't care to wait that long give Ruby a try.
I never encountered an actual application written in Ruby
Check out the RealWorldRuby wiki page for a list of real world applications of Ruby. It's in use at NASA, Intel, HP and Agilent among others.
the latest news item on RubyForge is about a program for sorting (sorry, but it did not impress me very much)
You have to remember that RubyForge has only been up for about a week.
A couple of applications that are coming soon:
* A genetic algorithms package
* A swarm particle optimization package
Mostly it's just that we Rubyists are having so much fun writing Ruby code that we didin't notice this 'back page' /. posting...
For instance, over the 80's and 90's you have seen a large influx of foreign automakers' assembly plants, because it's cheaper for them to procure parts within North America and assemble over here rather than make everything in Germany or Japan and ship it over.
That's quite true. However, note that wages in Germany and Japan are roughly equal to wages here (perhaps even higher). Also note that in the case of software development there's nothing physical that needs to be shipped - when you're done you send some bits over the internet and they arrive on the other side of the world within minutes for a few cents cost.
Obviously assembly line workers can be anywhere...but in software there is no assembly line worker.
Actually quite the opposite: With the internet it's possible to have software written anywhere where you have trained workers (India, China, Russia all meet the trained worker criteria when it comes to software development). Software is only 'bits' that can be sent down a wire. Manufactured goods like cars, shoes, etc. need to be transported (as do the raw materials to build them) and factories need to be built to build them. Sure it's much easier to find workers who are qualified to build cars or shoes, but other than that, it's much harder to move a car factory overseas than it is to set up software development operations overseas.
Software is slowly and painfully learning the lesson that manufacturing learned a long time ago: "Build where you sell".
/. ?
Uhh... but most manufacturing moved overseas in the 80s and 90s and I haven't noticed that it's been moving back because they've learned that they should "Build where you sell". Mostly I think manufacturers (and now technology companies) have learned that they should "Build where it's cheapest".
Hey, what's with all the Micro$oft ads on
...people who use WiFi on their laptops to access the internet and those who attend baseball games is probably pretty small, no? I mean most of us here couldn't care less about (baseball|football|) games.
You don't have to wait. You can get 0% interest* on anything you want. I bet you'd change your tune if one of your cars dropped a transmission or required any other major service.
Well, since I'm not working (and haven't for some months) and my wife works temp, if one of the cars dies she'll get the working one and I'll be taking the bus. 0% interest is nice, but I still can't afford the payments at this point.
I don't know where you've been living, but cars don't get 'fixed' anymore, they get 'replaced' with cheap imports
I don't know where you live, but nobody where I live can afford even a 'cheap' import since we're all waiting for the economy to come out of recession... (Oh, wait, I forgot the economy came out of recession over a year ago according to that group of economists.)
I'm driving an '87 model car (actually bought it new in '87 and have had no reason to replace it). And my wife drives a '94 model car.
Hopefully, the good that will come of this is Unionization of American Engineers.
But that will just cause the corporations to outsource all the more.
No, what we should be doing in encouraging Indian engineers to unionize so that their wages rise to a level that is closer to ours.
"You know, your counterparts in America make 10x what you do, you really need to join the union!"
Identify what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else (or at least, anyone who is willing to work for your salary)
And what exactly might that be? Just saw an article on EETimes the other day where India is now targetting embedded development, so they're not ignoring the niche areas either.