Well put. You just got a friend (Not that you care, but I figured I might as well have one friend on slashdot...)
I am salf taught as well, and it scared me to find out one of the guys in another programming group has a Masters in CS. He is slow at coding and writes poor code.
It's amazing, the majority of guy in my group are self taught and our customers (internal to the company) love us. We go out of the way to make sure that our systems do what they need to do, when they need to do it. The other group all have degrees, all are certified and write systems that routinely crash, are slow and bloated and take FOREVOR to be released.
I do know that not every case is like this. There are good people with degrees and bad people without degrees.
Hey I am all for the little guys winning or atleast being good enough that the big guys quit making shit.
I would love nothing better (Well besides two hot brunettes) then to be able to tell oracle to shove it. They throw you over the barrel and rape you, and as long as management wants oracle you have to take it.
People will always by oracle because "No one ever got fired for choosing Oracle". If something goes wrong, you always have someone to blame. With open source, your job is more on the line because you have to take responsability.
We were using MySQL and it was working fine but somewhere along the line some Oracle salesman convinced someone that Oracle was better and we switched. I have seen some minor good things,but not as assload of $ worth.
Its not like the government is prosecuting him or anything. I think it is totally within there rights to take back the money. It is a little bit cheap, but he shouldn't have spent it until he had it... (I don't want to see his credit card bills)
I should have clarified. I don't think OO is the silver bullet that solves all problems. However, atleast in the software I write, I tend to load one group of data into an object, then call $someObject->getX(). If I called getX() from an include file, it would not know what version of X to get. You could however use getX($id) to fetch the data.
Bottom line, it all comes down to what works for you and how you learn to think. I was struggling with using OO at my new job (They encouraged OO but there was still plenty of procedural) when all of a sudden I had an epiphany (sp?). Now when I think of software (And sadly even real life things) I think of the as interconnected, self contained objects.
This is a debate that will never be settled though and thats part of the fun of talking about it:-)
Using classes and objects makes a project alot easier to maintain. It is nice to know that every time data X is show on the page, it is provided by $someObject->getX()
Unless each bit of data is always only shown once in a system, there is a place for classes and object.
I haven't used this and I won't use it since management decided ALL developement will be in Java but this project looks interesting. It is called SRM and basically it is a daemon that runs and keeps objects in memory.
In a company that has a serious Bioinformatics department, they should have someone who has both computer experience and science experience leading it who won't only pick people with PhDs.
I work for a genetic research company and was do not have a degree of any sort. I was hired because my past work experience demonstrated I could program. I knew almost nothing about the science, but when a project is assigned to me, a scientist will explain to me the information I need to know. A programmer doesn't need to understand everything about science to program systems to support it just like a game programmer doesn't have to be a pro basketball player to program a sports game. It just takes an open mind, and willingness to listen to what your customers (in this case scientists) need.
My mistake. Management in my group refered to this as pair programming and I assumed that it was a form of pair programming. Shows what you get for trusting management, eh?
My team tried out Extreme Programming/Pair Programming (yes, I know there is a different and I guess ours was more Pair then Extreme but anyways) and we had mixed results. The best team was when one of the programmers was very good at design, documentation and managing how the pieces fit together while the other programmer was good at the 'bits'. Coding an individual section based on what the first programmer told him. That team worked wonderful and churned out alot of work because thier strengths were complimentary.
However, another team just had to programmers who sucked at managing the process, design and documentation and both just tended to write out code. This led to conflict both in how the code worked (each coded a section without thinking how it would work with the other section) and between the two programmers.
We are back to individual programming now, just with freqent code reviews. Also we love to go through CVS checking for bad habits and bash whoever did it (Sucks when you point out a issue and then realize you are responsible for it though).
Summary: I think it all depends on the type of programmers and what they are good at on if any methodology works.
My experience is different. At my company, all the palm users leave there palms sitting at there desks, occasionally using it to take notes while the pocketPC users carry thier devices around constantly makeing notes and scheduling meetings.
I am currently just learning java so I could be way off base on this, but I see several ways to do things, including some old, should be deprecated ways.
I don't believe the language should force an engineer to behave though, I believe engineers should be able to choose the best path.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I never said I was good at spelling... ;-)
Well put. You just got a friend (Not that you care, but I figured I might as well have one friend on slashdot...)
I am salf taught as well, and it scared me to find out one of the guys in another programming group has a Masters in CS. He is slow at coding and writes poor code.
It's amazing, the majority of guy in my group are self taught and our customers (internal to the company) love us. We go out of the way to make sure that our systems do what they need to do, when they need to do it. The other group all have degrees, all are certified and write systems that routinely crash, are slow and bloated and take FOREVOR to be released.
I do know that not every case is like this. There are good people with degrees and bad people without degrees.
Maybe I am just bitter...
Actually priests have a legal obligation to report to the police if someone confesses something illegal.
I am not sure where I heard that....
Hey I am all for the little guys winning or atleast being good enough that the big guys quit making shit.
I would love nothing better (Well besides two hot brunettes) then to be able to tell oracle to shove it. They throw you over the barrel and rape you, and as long as management wants oracle you have to take it.
In the long term maybe, but in the short term the big vendors still win.
People will always by oracle because "No one ever got fired for choosing Oracle". If something goes wrong, you always have someone to blame. With open source, your job is more on the line because you have to take responsability.
We were using MySQL and it was working fine but somewhere along the line some Oracle salesman convinced someone that Oracle was better and we switched. I have seen some minor good things,but not as assload of $ worth.
Its not like the government is prosecuting him or anything. I think it is totally within there rights to take back the money. It is a little bit cheap, but he shouldn't have spent it until he had it... (I don't want to see his credit card bills)
I should have clarified. I don't think OO is the silver bullet that solves all problems. However, atleast in the software I write, I tend to load one group of data into an object, then call $someObject->getX(). If I called getX() from an include file, it would not know what version of X to get. You could however use getX($id) to fetch the data.
:-)
Bottom line, it all comes down to what works for you and how you learn to think. I was struggling with using OO at my new job (They encouraged OO but there was still plenty of procedural) when all of a sudden I had an epiphany (sp?). Now when I think of software (And sadly even real life things) I think of the as interconnected, self contained objects.
This is a debate that will never be settled though and thats part of the fun of talking about it
Using classes and objects makes a project alot easier to maintain. It is nice to know that every time data X is show on the page, it is provided by $someObject->getX()
Unless each bit of data is always only shown once in a system, there is a place for classes and object.
I haven't used this and I won't use it since management decided ALL developement will be in Java but this project looks interesting. It is called SRM and basically it is a daemon that runs and keeps objects in memory.
Are you a troll or would you care to point out all the security holes?
Thats only if the whole bag of chips is "defective". Not because you only wanted to eat half of them.
AGREED! They should not make XXL spandex outfits... Or for that matter XXL T-shirts that say stuff like "Hottie" cause, it is a damn lie....
What are you going to be using the language for? That is a key deciding factor.
There is a paper on the ZEND engine 2.0 (which will power PHP5)
PDF: http://www.zend.com/engine2/ZendEngine-2.0.pdf
I would put the google HTML version of it, but it seems to be buggered.
Its time for another PHP vs. J2EE vs. .NET vs. PERL vs. everything flame war...
In a company that has a serious Bioinformatics department, they should have someone who has both computer experience and science experience leading it who won't only pick people with PhDs.
I work for a genetic research company and was do not have a degree of any sort. I was hired because my past work experience demonstrated I could program. I knew almost nothing about the science, but when a project is assigned to me, a scientist will explain to me the information I need to know. A programmer doesn't need to understand everything about science to program systems to support it just like a game programmer doesn't have to be a pro basketball player to program a sports game. It just takes an open mind, and willingness to listen to what your customers (in this case scientists) need.
Call your credit card company. Most CC companies believe you, over the merchant.
My mistake. Management in my group refered to this as pair programming and I assumed that it was a form of pair programming. Shows what you get for trusting management, eh?
My team tried out Extreme Programming/Pair Programming (yes, I know there is a different and I guess ours was more Pair then Extreme but anyways) and we had mixed results.
The best team was when one of the programmers was very good at design, documentation and managing how the pieces fit together while the other programmer was good at the 'bits'. Coding an individual section based on what the first programmer told him. That team worked wonderful and churned out alot of work because thier strengths were complimentary.
However, another team just had to programmers who sucked at managing the process, design and documentation and both just tended to write out code. This led to conflict both in how the code worked (each coded a section without thinking how it would work with the other section) and between the two programmers.
We are back to individual programming now, just with freqent code reviews. Also we love to go through CVS checking for bad habits and bash whoever did it (Sucks when you point out a issue and then realize you are responsible for it though).
Summary: I think it all depends on the type of programmers and what they are good at on if any methodology works.
My experience is different. At my company, all the palm users leave there palms sitting at there desks, occasionally using it to take notes while the pocketPC users carry thier devices around constantly makeing notes and scheduling meetings.
Everyones experience is different I guess.
I am currently just learning java so I could be way off base on this, but I see several ways to do things, including some old, should be deprecated ways.
I don't believe the language should force an engineer to behave though, I believe engineers should be able to choose the best path.
I found ASP more difficult to learn the PHP, though I have to say since I learned PHP first and ASP second, I could be biased.
I also disagree that most websites will not use ASP for a webpage. Too many sites I see use ASP for everything and they pay a heavy price.
My experience with ChiliSoft ASP was that it really really sucked.... Of course that was a while back so it might have improved by now.
Not saying that Freon was good for you, but it wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be.