The problem is a bunch of entitled, snotty little kids that believe the internet is a fundamental human right, who want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Everything is a right these days.
Here you are making a gross generalization of the problem, with in a nutshell is as follows: 1) a raise in tuition costs, combined with 2) greater difficulty in getting a decent job without a 4-year degree (*point elaborated more at the end of this post)
A college education is not one of those.
Why not? Again, why exactly not? Now, again, I'm not advocating for it to be a free-for-all-right, but I would like to know why people get so cranky about the subject. To be honest, and to qualify my statement (which is already off the tangent) is that it should be a right for qualified individuals. The problem is that there are little barriers of entry to college. There should be quotas, with harder entrance exams and middle-school/high-school scores to back up an application request. Then and only then, those who get in should get get as much help as possible from the government.
Why? Because education (even higher education) is an asset of national interest, like infranstructure and armies. Because that is what most developed countries in the world do (in particular barrier of entries to higher education.)
The same people claiming to "work" for their education are the same ones who racked up $100,000 in loan debt for an English degree and demanding that all student loan debt be forgiven.
Every one. All of them? Are you telling me that what you are describing here is the general case?
Yeah, I went to college. I did night classes over 8 years in the Army, still doing night classes while working full time.
Congratulations. Myself it took me 8 years to get my BS in CS, starting with zero knowlege of English, studying part-time and full-time while also working part-time and full-time flipping burgers and working in computer labs, enough to live (by eating stale muffins), but not enough to pay for college (thank God for Pell Grants and student loans in my senior year and grad school.) So I know (kinda) what you mean. I say kinda because I've never served in the armed forces, so your work is more commendable.
However...
I could stop working and use my GI Bill, like thousands of people do. Their college funding was earned by actually doing something.
What it seems to me is that you are allowing your services to the nation (which we all people with a modicum of decency appreciate) into a holier-than-thou attitude. If people don't do the exact same amount of sacrifice you did, then they are not working for it. That is pretty much how you are summing it up, with one single stroke. If that is not what you mean, your words certainly paint it that way.
I mean, how else to explain the gross generalization that you so readily apply to your countrymen? That is a sad emotion, not a solid argument for the issues at hand.
Seriously, yes, there is the English major with $100K in debt, but are you telling me that such a case represents the majority or all of the people that are now struggling with rising education costs and student loan debt?
(*) There used to be a time when you didn't need a college degree to get a good job. Manufacturing jobs, blue collar jobs were the middle class. That is no more. As recent as,possibly 15 years ago, it was still possible to get a job as a programmer, machinist or master electrician with a AA/AS/AAS degree. Now it is impossible.
Add to that the fact our country does not have a viable vocational education system (like Germany or Japan), and we have hundreds of thousands, millions coming out of HS without viable skills nor direction (other than joining the Armed Forces, which of course it is not a viable alternative for all of them.)
Bullcrap. I know plenty of people who made it through college without a single student loan. There are grants, scholarships, GI Bill, etc.
Those times are gone man. I did most of my undegrad education with Pell Grants and scholarships alone (while working minimum wage jobs to pay the rest), with my senior year (and grad studies) having to use student loans. That was years ago. Now the situation is more difficult, and it is almost impossible to study with a Pell Grant or scholarship alone unless a) you live with your parents or share a room, and b) you live near a university.
If you cannot live with your parents, and you have to move to another city to get access to a 4-year university, forget about it.
Granted that there are people who are stupid enough to get into $100 student loan debt while getting a Creative Writing degree from an expensive university (or a public university away from home) while paying a dorm in college (biggest rip-off ever) and getting a state-of-the-art iMac.
But these aren't representative of the typical college student (just as it isn't typical anymore for a student to pay everything with Pell Grants). What you are saying was true 2-3 decades ago. It is no more (at least for the general case.) It is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
Instead of asking the government to give an education to them,
Why not? Not that I'm advocating for it, but I'm amazed how people get their panties curled up for something so fundamental in a supposedly democratic, developed, rich country.
these people actually work for it and earn it.
Whether you pay it out of pocket, or with student loans, people have to work for it. Did you actually go to school or are you just making some rhetorical shit up?
If you get in via scholarships, you have to work for it to earn it. If you get in via student loans, you also pay for it with interests. You went to college, that is what I'm assuming. So, can't you present better constructed arguments at least?
I don't think there's a hypocrisy there. Why would you fire an employee who lied on their CV, yet does the job well?
As to the 1979 CS degree, is there such a thing? PCs only existed since about 1984's so any degree he had has no relevance at all to modern computing. Who care what he did on PDP11s in Fortran?
It looks like someone's raking through his past trying to discredit him and thus undermine Yahoo. Presumably MS wants to buy the remainder dirt cheap after the Carl Icahn attack failed to kill it totally.
Holy crap, what a stupid dumbass thing to say. Who the hell tell you that CS == programming? Seriously, please turn in your geek card and refrain from participating in CS/software related discussions that involve anything more complex than an if statement or html.
Most likely both, and the later being (to a great degree) a function of the former. Skills do not occur in a vacuum but in a educational context (be it ad hoc or academic).
Do you realize how stupid it makes you look when you try to make a statement by linking to a WIkipedia article?
Because that link to that specific topic is completely devoid of truth. Screw it and deem it unworthy in an elementary-school level generalizing fashion!!(10+1) Web nazis of the world, unite!!!
Would you do something like that face-to-face?
I'm not sure how you could link to a web page face to face. I thought that you needed a computer with internet access to link.
Oh wait, you are trying e-bravado, e-macho posturing. Oh I see, let me reply to you then. I could say yes, but how you would know if I say the truth. I could say no, but why would that matter? After all, the venue of your choice (which happens to be in common to mine for this topic) is the internet. So it is a bit childish (if not stupid) to ask whether a poster will say something face-to-face when you yourself are posting that question on that same venue... and as a AC to boot.
Would you get out your smartphone and look up the article really fast and shove it in their face as a rebuttal?
I might, just to highlight the stupidity of the statement I'm replying to. Why spell it out to a crowd of (supposedly) geeks who at times pride themselves of using tokens of lacedemonian brevity such as RTFA, FTFY, PEBCAK and the like?
Moreover, whether I reply face to face, or whip my smartphone with the wiki article, does it change the applicability of the remark in question?
BTW, don't worry answering the last question. It is purely rhetorical.
Geee, I wonder what those scientists of old (not so old) were thinking when they formulated things like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics at a time when it was impossible test the predictions </more rolling eyes>
Ok, let's try again. Gee I wonder what Heisenberg was thinking when he formulated that principle, he had no way to test it. Moreover, what the scientists preceding this were thinking when they were formulating and building quantum theory?
Yet Another Linux Desktop Takes Over The World Analysis Thread.
Because the Lords of Kobol know the world has a recurrent need to frequently resucitate a no-longer-original nor informative, late-1990's/early 2000's already putrified dead horse just to beat the living shit out of it. Yay!
Seriously, this horse has been beaten down to its elementary particles for the last 10-12 years. And we just recently had a thread just like that. This is like, wow, dejavu of the uninformative kind.
So, we're using the methodolgy that is insufficient to model the earth's atmosphere, to model an object that we cannot test directly, and claim it will help understand the complex systems?
Yeah, let's wait until we have all the variables in place before carrying a modeling experiment </rolls eyes>
the attempt at creating a more complete guess about the nature of a distant planet (full or dwarf), but without a way to test the predictions, this has very little use in refining the models.
Geee, I wonder what those scientists of old (not so old) were thinking when they formulated things like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics at a time when it was impossible test the predictions </more rolling eyes>
A Computer Engineering curriculum is much better than a traditional CS degree for this type of work, so you might look at what texts are being used in high quality CE programs. The Embedded Systems Conferences from UBM are also a good source of training for low level firmware implementation.
Indeed. Now that I'm in my 40's and in a need to switch to a more hardware'y line of work, I'm finding myself in a need to go back to grad school and work towards a CE degree. My advice for people going to school is to work on two separate majors - CS and CE or CS and EE. Or at the very least to work on a double major or a minor on one of the two (or CS and MIS for the business/enterprise inclined). An extra year/year and a half will open so many doors it's not even funny.
Maybe I'm weird, but I got more of a college education outside of college than in it.. For instance, my school dropped their compiler design course due to lack of enrollment, so I bought a textbook and taught myself. I learned physics and linear algebra through MIT OCW (though I admit I didn't retain much of either after 5 years). I got a C in discrete math because the prof refused to give the homework until 5-10 minutes after the bell rang, and I didn't have time to stick around that long, but I practice my knowledge of algorithms by doing Project Euler problems..
I'm not calling college a total wash.. I got my minor in philosophy, so I learned to bullshit pretty well. All the phil students thought i was weird though since the only area of philosophy i found interesting was epistemology. I also learned how to not be a dick, and how to talk to girls. But as far as my major was concerned, I would have been better off with a stack of books and some peace and quiet.
Epistemiology is perhaps the most practical and interesting aspect of philosophy (at least to me). Maybe because of my CS background and practical uses of logic in design and argumentation (making a case for something or against something.)
Why would you even consider getting a CS degree here now?
The curriculum from that university is decent; the pay to be received in the field is equally so, and tuition costs are relatively modest for FL residents. For North FL residents, it might be the best option in terms of location. It should not be the case that people living close to this flagship university having to move out of state or to central/south Florida just to pursue a STEM degree. It should never be the case in any state, to force its residents to pursue an education somewhere else (specially if they live near its flagship university.)
For out-of-state students, I wouldn't go there if I were an out-of-state student... but then again, I wouldn't go to an out-of-state university at all. Unless it were an Ivy Leage university, it would be financially stupid. It always have been financially stupid.
Hell, you Can get into Harvard with B+ averages. It takes a really good SAT and a bit of showing off, but its certainly doable. Very few doors are permanently closed just because you screwed up in High School, I hate the fact that Guidance Counselors and the media in general make adults think they can't get a good education just because they didn't do awesome when they were in high school.
I understand the feeling. Guidance counselors were totally useless for my siblings and I (who end up choosing careers in CS, STEM and Health.) But I can understand them, their inability that is.
The way I see it, college-level guidance counselors are an extension of the HS concept of daycare. We shove droves and droves of youth through HS without methodically and systematically exploring their options in a post-HS life. That is the type of discussion that should occur when nearing the end of Middle School (and that's what is done in many countries.) It should not be occuring when a 17-18 year old kid is out of HS asking himself for the first time "now what?".
Guidance is a years-long process that starts early on. It cannot be pigeonholed into a 30-minute stop-by session with a counselor in college. That is too little and too late, in particular for kids who would have been better off *NOT* going to college. Some of the young people we see nowadays with useless degrees, they would have been much better off if they had just worked a lot and explore what the world had to offer (before committing to 4 years of grief and student loan debt.)
Or they will will have Union sponsored adds, explaining how these budget cuts, will reduce books, or teachers... Not the Second Assistant to the Administrator Assistant to the Assistant Principal. Or cuts to Guidance Counselors who are basically the dumbest people in the world, who cannot figure out basic concepts like filling out a schedule, or the fact that there is are Middle Ground of colleges between Harvard Level schools and The Local Community Colleges.
Well your grade are not straight A, you have only maintained a B+ average grade, You should look into community college, or vocational schooling. As those B+ grade will not get you into Harvard, thus you will not succeed in life.
Bro, the amount of grammatical mistakes seem rather anachronistic (for lack of a better word) when they occur in a message admonishing people for not getting straight As.
I agree with you inasmuch as brainteasers being useless, but I'm 100% with the parent on being fluent in terms of the art.
Trying to decide when to use encapsulation to hide implementation details isn't esoteric -- it's something that should be coming up in design reviews regularly, and in my experience, does. If you aren't thinking about your designs -- and having the vocabulary to recognize patterns and discuss them in higher-level terms is an important part of being able to reason about just about anything[1]... well, it's a relevant concern.
(A similar example applies to databases -- it's one thing, and valuable, to have a feel for what "smells like" good schema design... but if you don't have the vocabulary to talk about schema normalization, you're not the right person to be on a design review for decisions that will be impacting folks writing code for a product for potentially years to come).
[1] -...if you give the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis any kind of weight.
Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Having the vocabulary, and using it right goes a long way to discuss matters of design. Incidentally I remember an incident where I had to work with a CORBA-based system, and I'm trying to communicate with other developers. And I'm telling them about a CORBA sequence (as per the specs), and they wouldn't understand a flying f*ck what I was talking about. Apparently they had developed their own lingo using CORBA terms completely wrong. You can imagine the pandemonium and the quality of their code base.
Another more recent example - I had to deal with a software shop where *supposedly* they were using a MVC architectural design... except 1) the model determined what controller to use, and 2) the controller was embedded in the view classes. Talking about missing the point.
The correct usage of a vocabulary is everything in design. Flunk that and bad juju is bound to happen.
Do you use those words everyday, every time you talk about a program or programming?
In my current and past jobs, we have had regular get togethers to discuss what's up in the software world, including what are currently (and what were at some point in the past) best practices. Also, we do regular code inspections where, if the necessity is evident (and if it is affordable to make), we suggest changes in the code structure along the lines of established principles. We also find it important to be aware of them (by constantly talking about them) because some times technical management is pushing for a hack whose repercutions are not apparent unless you actually brings the pros and cons to the table in a consive manner using an unambiguous language.
Similarly, I regularly attend (typically once a month) a programmers' user group where we have round tables on the issues we face in our jobs, and what is going on in the industry and the state of the art of software engineering.
Most likely you just design and develop without even thinking much about the definitions.
Nope. I actually do think about the definitions whenever they make sense to the business problems I'm trying to solve as well as to non-functional requirements like maintainability and extensibility.
Yes, I don't belabor on whether this class hierarchy obeys the Liskov Substitution Principle, or whether something is-a as opposed to has-a. But I'm keenly aware of what is possibly right and what is possibly wrong when I look at code, my code and others.
Unless you are Sheldon Cooper, there is absolutely no way you can develop software of good quality in large quantities without being aware and actively discussing what is and what is not good software design.
I did not say I don't use those practices in building a OOP, I just don't focus on the definition.
Ok, question for you, and you are not allowed to use google or wikipedia. How do you tell if a class has low cohesion or high cohesion? To tell the difference, you need to know the definition. And I'm not asking you to tell me some abstract and useless definition of what cohesion is (.ie. how well the class is put together.) I'm asking you to precisely measure a class cohesion or lack thereof, where and how a class fails at being cohesive.
Why? Because that is typically the only way to know where and how to refactor an uncohesive class or module. If you can't tell me that, and if a person has never, even empirically done that, I can guarantee you that the resulting code base tends to be a monster hyper-spagetti plate past a certain code size or age.
So, tell me how do you identify a class lack of cohesion and how you use that to fix it? I'm sure you do not need an actual definition</sarcasm>
When I go into an interview I would hope the interviewers want to focus on how I solve problems,
Here is a problem for you: you have a legacy app that needs refactoring because code changes are too expensive to make. How do you go about it? Where do you need polymorphism and why? When composing your solution, where do you use inheritance or delegation? Why? What are the pros and cons?
deals with design questions
Here is another one: Design me a solution for X problem. Then I'll ask you how you justify your design decisions. Do you think you will not have to explain your usage of polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, SOLID principles, and the like? (assuming the interviewer cares about code quality as opposed to simply be content with sh1t that compiles and runs)
, or interact with people
Here is another one: A technical manager is opposed to the idea of refactoring a legacy application, or finds your design too complex (or too simple, it can happen both ways). How do you go about explaining to him/her the merits, pros and co
Also, it's only a net drain on the economy if you assume that no good will come from an educated population.
You have yet to demonstrate that it benefits society. Most "education" at university is useless, because most people in this world are in-fact stupid and incapable of ever achieving any kind of noteworthy accomplishment.
How did you get to "most education at university is useless" from "most people in this world are in-fact stupid... and some more..." ? That only makes sense if most people get a university education, which they don't. Also, how do you support the statement that "most people are stupid and incapable ever achieving any kind of noteworthy accomplishment"? How do you quantify that statement?
As a hard working research scientist myself somehow I relish on negative generalizations like the one quote above
TFTFY.
I am sure as hell glad that the government doesn't rob me of my hard earned money to give it to some loser to study Philosophy or Art History or some other rubbish that can be simply understood by reading a few books on your own time.
But that's because you are assuming that a tax-paid, free college education is available for all. There are things called entrance exams. Some countries have it, some do not. To assume that a tax-paid, free-for-all higher education will inevitable means "robbing" your hard earned money to give it to some insert degree you despise student, it makes me question your ability to construct logical arguments (considering you are a research scientist.)
Pray tell, do you feel robbed that your taxes also pay the same roads people without an education use as well?
See, I felt the opposite and feel he was turning it around on assholes. Asking a brain teaser at an interview is just plain stupid. Unless the job is solving brain teaser or alien languages what value is a question like that? None. It is a job and 99% of the time the job function will be mundane and routine.
Now a good interview would ask about current events, thoughts on direction in the industry of choice or any other manner of questioning that gets into who the person is, what they think about, and will they fit with a group. The next time I get asked what are the principles of Object Oriented Programming are, I may just sum it into one phrase "get the job done well", as to whether I know encapsulation, polymorphism, or the rest of the esoteric terms has no value to my work.
I disagree with the AC who termed the other person a a-hole. However, I disagree with you more - if you think encapsulation and polymorphism are esoteric terms of no value, I fear to ever see your code. You can't get the job done well with OOP without knowing those, unless by "done well" you mean it compiles and runs (which is just half the battle to a job well done.) Also, "get the job done well" is not an attribute specific to OOP. You get the job done well regardless of the paradigm (procedural, modular, or OOP.)
Seriously, do you really believe encapsulation and polymorphism are esoteric terms of no value? If you do, more power to you in the land of OOP hyper-lasagna and procedural hyper-spaghetti spread across un-cohesive classes.
No, he's not. He's being smart about a very dumb thing people do in interviews - asking innane puzzles. They are irritating and seldom relevant to a job (unless you are interviewing with a predominantly algorithmic company.)
Now, there is a difference between puzzles directly related to one's expected academic background - if you have a CS degree, expect to be asked about the Towers of Hanoi or how to implement a recursive Fibonacci function amenable for tail recursion (or at the very least describe in high level the FTP protocol or a binary queue.)
OTH, if your background is in MIS or if the job at hand is systems administration or web development, none of the questions mentioned above should ever come to the table. Why? Because it is irrelevant to one's job and it is typically a dick move designed to show ZOMG I'm teh intelligenx0r/ (or worse, that you have no f* clue.)
Unfortunately the first case is rarely seen, whereas the second case occurs way too often. The later is a waste of time, and typically insulting. So yeah, it's good that the person you were replying to is ready to turn the tables. An interview should occur in an atmosphere of consideration and respect. Throwing a puzzle back (within reason) is a good way to remind the interviewer that you are not a job-desperate monkey available for personal entertainment.
Yes, because a large (massive) government that heavily controls industry is soooo much better for the environment. *cough*China*cough*USSR*cough*.
Yeah because, if one argues about government regulation (or recite the benefits of such that are witnessed by history), then the one and only consequence, in a zero-sum kind of way, is with a totalitarian Communist regime. Like a f* logical inevitability. </rolling eyes at blatant stupidity>
Seriously, where the f* some of you people learn your argumentative skills?
So we shouldn't have saved the ozone layer from CFCs, because nobody was certain about it? Because in science, nothing is ever really certain.
How did you come to that what he wrote (quoted below)?
There's one kind of scientific corruption, which is obvious and easy to see - saying something you don't believe is true. This is easy to avoid. The more insidious form of corruption is to overstate one's degree of certainty in what you do believe to be true: "You don't understand - if I include all of my doubts, outliers and provisos, a non-scientific reader is not going to understand." That's the kind of corruption that, unfortunately, is at play here. Lovelock is calling this out.
You like red herrings a-la strawman, do you? You kinky you.
Isn't it possible to publish in multiple journals?
Not the same paper. The journal will get quite ticked off with you if you try to do that.
Not the same paper. Your research could generate multiple reports/papers off your main research (each hopefully unique***), and these can be published in different journals. However, each paper must be published in only one journal.
*** I say hopefully unique because some academic professors (not all thank God) hash and re-hash the same topics with very little deviation (and ergo very little cumulative value), sending them en-mass to multiple journals and conferences. Think academic spamming - flying shit to walls in a drive-by-shooting example, hoping (or actually counting on the laws of probabilities) that some of them turds will stick.)
You can recognize this when you begin to see an academic source forking papers year after year whose titles can be trivially parsed with a regex: Semantic Representations of Jujubees, Representational Semantics of Jujubees, A Representation of Jujubee Semantics, A Case for Semantic Representation of Jujubees, Worst-Case Scenario on Parsing Semantic Representation of Jujubees, Representing Jujubee Semantics with XML (I mean, you got to put XML on that shit so that it's sexy), OWL Representation of Jujubee Semantics for Web Services.... and so on and so on. I'm not making shit up. I've seen this.
Java is not exactly issue-free as well. For example lack of comparison operator for strings forces a programmer to abandon an intiutive ways of doying things and to always remember to follow the language obscure rules.
Unfortunately for your argument, those issues you discuss have already been handled so thoroughly, and documented so pervasively in the APIs and JLS that they are no longer the subject of questions for a long, long, long time. Whereas, when you work in C++, you better have Scott Meyer's and the C++ spec next to you at all times. As a programmer that has done Java and C++ for a living, I can tell you that the amount of syntactic/semantic minutia you have to track in Java (or plain old C) pales in comparison with C++.
Your example of comparison of Strings is not an accurate description of how Java is to be used. It is very specific in the JSL what "=" is for - to compare primitives, primitives being char, bytes, ints, longs (the typical scalar stuff) and object references. For anything else, you need a comparator function that, as specified in the language specs, imposses a total ordering. The function is specific to the context of usage - it will be an override of Object.equals, or an implementation of Comparable.compareTo, or, if you need pluggable total order functions, one or more implementations of java.util.Comparator.compare. After 17 years of Java being in the while, this has already been settled.
That pales in comparison with C++ rules for ctors, dtors, operator overloading, constness, the accidental passing of non-pods into vararg methods.
Same for unsigned bytes
There is no such thing in Java as an unsigned byte. A Java byte is just a bunch of raw bytes of an opaque nature (much like a CORBA::octet).
and integers.
I don't follow this. What exactly are you referring to when comparing integers?
Same for resource leaks
Give me a Java resource leak over a C++ one. I can instrument bytecode so that I can record a stack trace on an object creation, which would get printed when its finalizer gets invoked, or with JMX or some type of admin console, with little to no change on an application source code. You could so sorta the same in C or C++ with Valgrind, but there is a lot more elbow grease involved when hunting these kind of things on a C/C++ application. Sorry, when it comes to resource management and resource leak tracking, this is one are where managed code beats unmanaged code, bars none.
and forgotten "finally" blocks.
Which are less demonic than C++ catch(...). At least we get the option of having a finally block when programming in Java. In C++ we do not have that at all. Oh my God, that is one of the things I miss the most when working in C++. That, and structured exceptions as first-class types. THAT is the greatest flaw in C++ exception paradigm. I can understand why that was not included, but I honestly believe it has ultimately proved to be a flaw in the language (all languages have flaws, so it is not that I'm picking on C++ just because I'm jerking my programming language fanboi proclivities.)
I trully and honestly I not using exceptions at all in C++. Hell, I prefer working with plain C or simply use C++ a-la C-with-classes.
The old, sparkling shine I used to see in C++ has become a lackluster dim. I've come to the conclusion that C++ is/was the victim of the state of the art compiler and language design of its time. Too much cobbled together using technology and concepts of the day, coupled with a need to remain compatible/easily integratable (sp?) with C code.
I'd rather work with C, or with a managed, modern (or relatively modern) language. That's just me. Obviously YMMV. So in the end is not whether X or Y language is issue free (none is). The question is what exactly you get in return when dealing the total complexity of a language, and what effort does a person has to take to either a) select a subset of that complexity to complete a task or b) comprehend a large chunk of said complexity.
Word. It gives me headaches everytime I have to use a ofstringstream. The QString-styled constructor is such an obvious thing to have. It is little things like this that helps (or encumbers) software development.
Hmmm... just for brief science fiction, suppose that......back in the X=(Triassic|Jurassic|Cretaceous), when dinosaurs roamed the planet
There. Fixed that for you. In the name of humanity, please refrain from writing science-fiction. Otherwise, you'll get hired by Hollywood, bestowing upon us horrors like "A Sound of Thunder" or "2012".
With 14 different meanings in science and technology alone, according to Wikipedia. The point is that one person writes the summary and a huge number of people read it. Not all of them know everything. Just type few extra characters ("System on a Chip" instead of "SoC" the first time you use it) and by spending a few seconds you save others what probably adds up to quite a significant amount of time spent on figuring out what it means. That doesn't directly benefit the writer of the summary, of course, but there needs to be just one other person taking the trouble to type those few extra characters for a term the writer of this summary is not familiar with to more than compensate for the extra time spent.
It's efficient to be clear in what you write and not assume that everyone knows every acronym. What baffles me is how many geeks don't understand such a simple concept.
What baffles me is how many geeks can't do basic research. We are talking about software translation for Christ' sake. It is evident then that translation is either to another language, or compilation towards a specific platform. That right there gives you the context with which to narrow your search.
What is worse is seeing many geeks in/. who don't know what SoC means. What's next? You need an explanation of what CPU means as well? GPU? RAM? ALU? LED? IO?
Not that I really put any credence to geek street creed, but seriously, what the heck. Seriously, I would expect a sophomore CS/CE/EE student (a good one worth its salt, not an HTML dilettante) to know most of these, and to be capable of autonomously acquire knowledge for those he doesn't.
You are just looking for a reason to be upset about your inability to reach immediate information satisfaction, and your unjustified believe that shit needs to be readily digested just for precious snowflake you at every corner you lays eyes upon. That is all.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is a bunch of entitled, snotty little kids that believe the internet is a fundamental human right, who want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Everything is a right these days.
Here you are making a gross generalization of the problem, with in a nutshell is as follows: 1) a raise in tuition costs, combined with 2) greater difficulty in getting a decent job without a 4-year degree (*point elaborated more at the end of this post)
A college education is not one of those.
Why not? Again, why exactly not? Now, again, I'm not advocating for it to be a free-for-all-right, but I would like to know why people get so cranky about the subject. To be honest, and to qualify my statement (which is already off the tangent) is that it should be a right for qualified individuals. The problem is that there are little barriers of entry to college. There should be quotas, with harder entrance exams and middle-school/high-school scores to back up an application request. Then and only then, those who get in should get get as much help as possible from the government.
Why? Because education (even higher education) is an asset of national interest, like infranstructure and armies. Because that is what most developed countries in the world do (in particular barrier of entries to higher education.)
The same people claiming to "work" for their education are the same ones who racked up $100,000 in loan debt for an English degree and demanding that all student loan debt be forgiven.
Every one. All of them? Are you telling me that what you are describing here is the general case?
Yeah, I went to college. I did night classes over 8 years in the Army, still doing night classes while working full time.
Congratulations. Myself it took me 8 years to get my BS in CS, starting with zero knowlege of English, studying part-time and full-time while also working part-time and full-time flipping burgers and working in computer labs, enough to live (by eating stale muffins), but not enough to pay for college (thank God for Pell Grants and student loans in my senior year and grad school.) So I know (kinda) what you mean. I say kinda because I've never served in the armed forces, so your work is more commendable.
However...
I could stop working and use my GI Bill, like thousands of people do. Their college funding was earned by actually doing something.
What it seems to me is that you are allowing your services to the nation (which we all people with a modicum of decency appreciate) into a holier-than-thou attitude. If people don't do the exact same amount of sacrifice you did, then they are not working for it. That is pretty much how you are summing it up, with one single stroke. If that is not what you mean, your words certainly paint it that way.
I mean, how else to explain the gross generalization that you so readily apply to your countrymen? That is a sad emotion, not a solid argument for the issues at hand.
Seriously, yes, there is the English major with $100K in debt, but are you telling me that such a case represents the majority or all of the people that are now struggling with rising education costs and student loan debt? (*) There used to be a time when you didn't need a college degree to get a good job. Manufacturing jobs, blue collar jobs were the middle class. That is no more. As recent as ,possibly 15 years ago, it was still possible to get a job as a programmer, machinist or master electrician with a AA/AS/AAS degree. Now it is impossible.
Add to that the fact our country does not have a viable vocational education system (like Germany or Japan), and we have hundreds of thousands, millions coming out of HS without viable skills nor direction (other than joining the Armed Forces, which of course it is not a viable alternative for all of them.)
Bullcrap. I know plenty of people who made it through college without a single student loan. There are grants, scholarships, GI Bill, etc.
Those times are gone man. I did most of my undegrad education with Pell Grants and scholarships alone (while working minimum wage jobs to pay the rest), with my senior year (and grad studies) having to use student loans. That was years ago. Now the situation is more difficult, and it is almost impossible to study with a Pell Grant or scholarship alone unless a) you live with your parents or share a room, and b) you live near a university.
If you cannot live with your parents, and you have to move to another city to get access to a 4-year university, forget about it.
Granted that there are people who are stupid enough to get into $100 student loan debt while getting a Creative Writing degree from an expensive university (or a public university away from home) while paying a dorm in college (biggest rip-off ever) and getting a state-of-the-art iMac.
But these aren't representative of the typical college student (just as it isn't typical anymore for a student to pay everything with Pell Grants). What you are saying was true 2-3 decades ago. It is no more (at least for the general case.) It is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
Instead of asking the government to give an education to them,
Why not? Not that I'm advocating for it, but I'm amazed how people get their panties curled up for something so fundamental in a supposedly democratic, developed, rich country.
these people actually work for it and earn it.
Whether you pay it out of pocket, or with student loans, people have to work for it. Did you actually go to school or are you just making some rhetorical shit up?
If you get in via scholarships, you have to work for it to earn it. If you get in via student loans, you also pay for it with interests. You went to college, that is what I'm assuming. So, can't you present better constructed arguments at least?
I don't think there's a hypocrisy there. Why would you fire an employee who lied on their CV, yet does the job well?
As to the 1979 CS degree, is there such a thing? PCs only existed since about 1984's so any degree he had has no relevance at all to modern computing. Who care what he did on PDP11s in Fortran?
It looks like someone's raking through his past trying to discredit him and thus undermine Yahoo. Presumably MS wants to buy the remainder dirt cheap after the Carl Icahn attack failed to kill it totally.
Holy crap, what a stupid dumbass thing to say. Who the hell tell you that CS == programming? Seriously, please turn in your geek card and refrain from participating in CS/software related discussions that involve anything more complex than an if statement or html.
Because of the degree or because of your skills?
Most likely both, and the later being (to a great degree) a function of the former. Skills do not occur in a vacuum but in a educational context (be it ad hoc or academic).
Difficult to know.
No. It is not.
Do you realize how stupid it makes you look when you try to make a statement by linking to a WIkipedia article?
Because that link to that specific topic is completely devoid of truth. Screw it and deem it unworthy in an elementary-school level generalizing fashion!!(10+1) Web nazis of the world, unite!!!
Would you do something like that face-to-face?
I'm not sure how you could link to a web page face to face. I thought that you needed a computer with internet access to link.
Oh wait, you are trying e-bravado, e-macho posturing. Oh I see, let me reply to you then. I could say yes, but how you would know if I say the truth. I could say no, but why would that matter? After all, the venue of your choice (which happens to be in common to mine for this topic) is the internet. So it is a bit childish (if not stupid) to ask whether a poster will say something face-to-face when you yourself are posting that question on that same venue... and as a AC to boot.
Would you get out your smartphone and look up the article really fast and shove it in their face as a rebuttal?
I might, just to highlight the stupidity of the statement I'm replying to. Why spell it out to a crowd of (supposedly) geeks who at times pride themselves of using tokens of lacedemonian brevity such as RTFA, FTFY, PEBCAK and the like?
Moreover, whether I reply face to face, or whip my smartphone with the wiki article, does it change the applicability of the remark in question?
BTW, don't worry answering the last question. It is purely rhetorical.
Geee, I wonder what those scientists of old (not so old) were thinking when they formulated things like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics at a time when it was impossible test the predictions </more rolling eyes>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle [wikipedia.org]
Ok, let's try again. Gee I wonder what Heisenberg was thinking when he formulated that principle, he had no way to test it. Moreover, what the scientists preceding this were thinking when they were formulating and building quantum theory?
So, why hasn't Linux on the desktop taken off?
Yet Another Linux Desktop Takes Over The World Analysis Thread.
Because the Lords of Kobol know the world has a recurrent need to frequently resucitate a no-longer-original nor informative, late-1990's/early 2000's already putrified dead horse just to beat the living shit out of it. Yay!
Seriously, this horse has been beaten down to its elementary particles for the last 10-12 years. And we just recently had a thread just like that. This is like, wow, dejavu of the uninformative kind.
So, we're using the methodolgy that is insufficient to model the earth's atmosphere, to model an object that we cannot test directly, and claim it will help understand the complex systems?
Yeah, let's wait until we have all the variables in place before carrying a modeling experiment </rolls eyes>
I applaud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backhanded_compliment
the attempt at creating a more complete guess about the nature of a distant planet (full or dwarf), but without a way to test the predictions, this has very little use in refining the models.
Geee, I wonder what those scientists of old (not so old) were thinking when they formulated things like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics at a time when it was impossible test the predictions </more rolling eyes>
A Computer Engineering curriculum is much better than a traditional CS degree for this type of work, so you might look at what texts are being used in high quality CE programs. The Embedded Systems Conferences from UBM are also a good source of training for low level firmware implementation.
Indeed. Now that I'm in my 40's and in a need to switch to a more hardware'y line of work, I'm finding myself in a need to go back to grad school and work towards a CE degree. My advice for people going to school is to work on two separate majors - CS and CE or CS and EE. Or at the very least to work on a double major or a minor on one of the two (or CS and MIS for the business/enterprise inclined). An extra year/year and a half will open so many doors it's not even funny.
Maybe I'm weird, but I got more of a college education outside of college than in it.. For instance, my school dropped their compiler design course due to lack of enrollment, so I bought a textbook and taught myself. I learned physics and linear algebra through MIT OCW (though I admit I didn't retain much of either after 5 years). I got a C in discrete math because the prof refused to give the homework until 5-10 minutes after the bell rang, and I didn't have time to stick around that long, but I practice my knowledge of algorithms by doing Project Euler problems.. I'm not calling college a total wash.. I got my minor in philosophy, so I learned to bullshit pretty well. All the phil students thought i was weird though since the only area of philosophy i found interesting was epistemology. I also learned how to not be a dick, and how to talk to girls. But as far as my major was concerned, I would have been better off with a stack of books and some peace and quiet.
Epistemiology is perhaps the most practical and interesting aspect of philosophy (at least to me). Maybe because of my CS background and practical uses of logic in design and argumentation (making a case for something or against something.)
Why would you even consider getting a CS degree here now?
The curriculum from that university is decent; the pay to be received in the field is equally so, and tuition costs are relatively modest for FL residents. For North FL residents, it might be the best option in terms of location. It should not be the case that people living close to this flagship university having to move out of state or to central/south Florida just to pursue a STEM degree. It should never be the case in any state, to force its residents to pursue an education somewhere else (specially if they live near its flagship university.)
For out-of-state students, I wouldn't go there if I were an out-of-state student... but then again, I wouldn't go to an out-of-state university at all. Unless it were an Ivy Leage university, it would be financially stupid. It always have been financially stupid.
Hell, you Can get into Harvard with B+ averages. It takes a really good SAT and a bit of showing off, but its certainly doable. Very few doors are permanently closed just because you screwed up in High School, I hate the fact that Guidance Counselors and the media in general make adults think they can't get a good education just because they didn't do awesome when they were in high school.
I understand the feeling. Guidance counselors were totally useless for my siblings and I (who end up choosing careers in CS, STEM and Health.) But I can understand them, their inability that is.
The way I see it, college-level guidance counselors are an extension of the HS concept of daycare. We shove droves and droves of youth through HS without methodically and systematically exploring their options in a post-HS life. That is the type of discussion that should occur when nearing the end of Middle School (and that's what is done in many countries.) It should not be occuring when a 17-18 year old kid is out of HS asking himself for the first time "now what?".
Guidance is a years-long process that starts early on. It cannot be pigeonholed into a 30-minute stop-by session with a counselor in college. That is too little and too late, in particular for kids who would have been better off *NOT* going to college. Some of the young people we see nowadays with useless degrees, they would have been much better off if they had just worked a lot and explore what the world had to offer (before committing to 4 years of grief and student loan debt.)
Or they will will have Union sponsored adds, explaining how these budget cuts, will reduce books, or teachers... Not the Second Assistant to the Administrator Assistant to the Assistant Principal. Or cuts to Guidance Counselors who are basically the dumbest people in the world, who cannot figure out basic concepts like filling out a schedule, or the fact that there is are Middle Ground of colleges between Harvard Level schools and The Local Community Colleges.
Well your grade are not straight A, you have only maintained a B+ average grade, You should look into community college, or vocational schooling. As those B+ grade will not get you into Harvard, thus you will not succeed in life.
Bro, the amount of grammatical mistakes seem rather anachronistic (for lack of a better word) when they occur in a message admonishing people for not getting straight As.
I agree with you inasmuch as brainteasers being useless, but I'm 100% with the parent on being fluent in terms of the art.
Trying to decide when to use encapsulation to hide implementation details isn't esoteric -- it's something that should be coming up in design reviews regularly, and in my experience, does. If you aren't thinking about your designs -- and having the vocabulary to recognize patterns and discuss them in higher-level terms is an important part of being able to reason about just about anything[1]... well, it's a relevant concern.
(A similar example applies to databases -- it's one thing, and valuable, to have a feel for what "smells like" good schema design... but if you don't have the vocabulary to talk about schema normalization, you're not the right person to be on a design review for decisions that will be impacting folks writing code for a product for potentially years to come).
[1] - ...if you give the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis any kind of weight.
Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Having the vocabulary, and using it right goes a long way to discuss matters of design. Incidentally I remember an incident where I had to work with a CORBA-based system, and I'm trying to communicate with other developers. And I'm telling them about a CORBA sequence (as per the specs), and they wouldn't understand a flying f*ck what I was talking about. Apparently they had developed their own lingo using CORBA terms completely wrong. You can imagine the pandemonium and the quality of their code base.
Another more recent example - I had to deal with a software shop where *supposedly* they were using a MVC architectural design... except 1) the model determined what controller to use, and 2) the controller was embedded in the view classes. Talking about missing the point.
The correct usage of a vocabulary is everything in design. Flunk that and bad juju is bound to happen.
Do you use those words everyday, every time you talk about a program or programming?
In my current and past jobs, we have had regular get togethers to discuss what's up in the software world, including what are currently (and what were at some point in the past) best practices. Also, we do regular code inspections where, if the necessity is evident (and if it is affordable to make), we suggest changes in the code structure along the lines of established principles. We also find it important to be aware of them (by constantly talking about them) because some times technical management is pushing for a hack whose repercutions are not apparent unless you actually brings the pros and cons to the table in a consive manner using an unambiguous language.
Similarly, I regularly attend (typically once a month) a programmers' user group where we have round tables on the issues we face in our jobs, and what is going on in the industry and the state of the art of software engineering.
Most likely you just design and develop without even thinking much about the definitions.
Nope. I actually do think about the definitions whenever they make sense to the business problems I'm trying to solve as well as to non-functional requirements like maintainability and extensibility.
Yes, I don't belabor on whether this class hierarchy obeys the Liskov Substitution Principle, or whether something is-a as opposed to has-a. But I'm keenly aware of what is possibly right and what is possibly wrong when I look at code, my code and others.
Unless you are Sheldon Cooper, there is absolutely no way you can develop software of good quality in large quantities without being aware and actively discussing what is and what is not good software design.
I did not say I don't use those practices in building a OOP, I just don't focus on the definition.
Ok, question for you, and you are not allowed to use google or wikipedia. How do you tell if a class has low cohesion or high cohesion? To tell the difference, you need to know the definition. And I'm not asking you to tell me some abstract and useless definition of what cohesion is (.ie. how well the class is put together.) I'm asking you to precisely measure a class cohesion or lack thereof, where and how a class fails at being cohesive.
Why? Because that is typically the only way to know where and how to refactor an uncohesive class or module. If you can't tell me that, and if a person has never, even empirically done that, I can guarantee you that the resulting code base tends to be a monster hyper-spagetti plate past a certain code size or age.
So, tell me how do you identify a class lack of cohesion and how you use that to fix it? I'm sure you do not need an actual definition</sarcasm>
When I go into an interview I would hope the interviewers want to focus on how I solve problems,
Here is a problem for you: you have a legacy app that needs refactoring because code changes are too expensive to make. How do you go about it? Where do you need polymorphism and why? When composing your solution, where do you use inheritance or delegation? Why? What are the pros and cons?
deals with design questions
Here is another one: Design me a solution for X problem. Then I'll ask you how you justify your design decisions. Do you think you will not have to explain your usage of polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, SOLID principles, and the like? (assuming the interviewer cares about code quality as opposed to simply be content with sh1t that compiles and runs)
, or interact with people
Here is another one: A technical manager is opposed to the idea of refactoring a legacy application, or finds your design too complex (or too simple, it can happen both ways). How do you go about explaining to him/her the merits, pros and co
Also, it's only a net drain on the economy if you assume that no good will come from an educated population.
You have yet to demonstrate that it benefits society. Most "education" at university is useless, because most people in this world are in-fact stupid and incapable of ever achieving any kind of noteworthy accomplishment.
How did you get to "most education at university is useless" from "most people in this world are in-fact stupid... and some more..." ? That only makes sense if most people get a university education, which they don't. Also, how do you support the statement that "most people are stupid and incapable ever achieving any kind of noteworthy accomplishment"? How do you quantify that statement?
As a hard working research scientist myself somehow I relish on negative generalizations like the one quote above
TFTFY.
I am sure as hell glad that the government doesn't rob me of my hard earned money to give it to some loser to study Philosophy or Art History or some other rubbish that can be simply understood by reading a few books on your own time.
But that's because you are assuming that a tax-paid, free college education is available for all. There are things called entrance exams. Some countries have it, some do not. To assume that a tax-paid, free-for-all higher education will inevitable means "robbing" your hard earned money to give it to some insert degree you despise student, it makes me question your ability to construct logical arguments (considering you are a research scientist.)
Pray tell, do you feel robbed that your taxes also pay the same roads people without an education use as well?
See, I felt the opposite and feel he was turning it around on assholes. Asking a brain teaser at an interview is just plain stupid. Unless the job is solving brain teaser or alien languages what value is a question like that? None. It is a job and 99% of the time the job function will be mundane and routine.
Now a good interview would ask about current events, thoughts on direction in the industry of choice or any other manner of questioning that gets into who the person is, what they think about, and will they fit with a group. The next time I get asked what are the principles of Object Oriented Programming are, I may just sum it into one phrase "get the job done well", as to whether I know encapsulation, polymorphism, or the rest of the esoteric terms has no value to my work.
I disagree with the AC who termed the other person a a-hole. However, I disagree with you more - if you think encapsulation and polymorphism are esoteric terms of no value, I fear to ever see your code. You can't get the job done well with OOP without knowing those, unless by "done well" you mean it compiles and runs (which is just half the battle to a job well done.) Also, "get the job done well" is not an attribute specific to OOP. You get the job done well regardless of the paradigm (procedural, modular, or OOP.)
Seriously, do you really believe encapsulation and polymorphism are esoteric terms of no value? If you do, more power to you in the land of OOP hyper-lasagna and procedural hyper-spaghetti spread across un-cohesive classes.
You sound like a giant asshole.
No, he's not. He's being smart about a very dumb thing people do in interviews - asking innane puzzles. They are irritating and seldom relevant to a job (unless you are interviewing with a predominantly algorithmic company.)
Now, there is a difference between puzzles directly related to one's expected academic background - if you have a CS degree, expect to be asked about the Towers of Hanoi or how to implement a recursive Fibonacci function amenable for tail recursion (or at the very least describe in high level the FTP protocol or a binary queue.)
OTH, if your background is in MIS or if the job at hand is systems administration or web development, none of the questions mentioned above should ever come to the table. Why? Because it is irrelevant to one's job and it is typically a dick move designed to show ZOMG I'm teh intelligenx0r/ (or worse, that you have no f* clue.)
Unfortunately the first case is rarely seen, whereas the second case occurs way too often. The later is a waste of time, and typically insulting. So yeah, it's good that the person you were replying to is ready to turn the tables. An interview should occur in an atmosphere of consideration and respect. Throwing a puzzle back (within reason) is a good way to remind the interviewer that you are not a job-desperate monkey available for personal entertainment.
Yes, because a large (massive) government that heavily controls industry is soooo much better for the environment. *cough*China*cough*USSR*cough*.
Yeah because, if one argues about government regulation (or recite the benefits of such that are witnessed by history), then the one and only consequence, in a zero-sum kind of way, is with a totalitarian Communist regime. Like a f* logical inevitability. </rolling eyes at blatant stupidity>
Seriously, where the f* some of you people learn your argumentative skills?
So we shouldn't have saved the ozone layer from CFCs, because nobody was certain about it? Because in science, nothing is ever really certain.
How did you come to that what he wrote (quoted below)?
There's one kind of scientific corruption, which is obvious and easy to see - saying something you don't believe is true. This is easy to avoid. The more insidious form of corruption is to overstate one's degree of certainty in what you do believe to be true: "You don't understand - if I include all of my doubts, outliers and provisos, a non-scientific reader is not going to understand." That's the kind of corruption that, unfortunately, is at play here. Lovelock is calling this out.
You like red herrings a-la strawman, do you? You kinky you.
Not the same paper. The journal will get quite ticked off with you if you try to do that.
Not the same paper. Your research could generate multiple reports/papers off your main research (each hopefully unique***), and these can be published in different journals. However, each paper must be published in only one journal.
*** I say hopefully unique because some academic professors (not all thank God) hash and re-hash the same topics with very little deviation (and ergo very little cumulative value), sending them en-mass to multiple journals and conferences. Think academic spamming - flying shit to walls in a drive-by-shooting example, hoping (or actually counting on the laws of probabilities) that some of them turds will stick.)
You can recognize this when you begin to see an academic source forking papers year after year whose titles can be trivially parsed with a regex: Semantic Representations of Jujubees, Representational Semantics of Jujubees, A Representation of Jujubee Semantics, A Case for Semantic Representation of Jujubees, Worst-Case Scenario on Parsing Semantic Representation of Jujubees, Representing Jujubee Semantics with XML (I mean, you got to put XML on that shit so that it's sexy), OWL Representation of Jujubee Semantics for Web Services.... and so on and so on. I'm not making shit up. I've seen this.
Java is not exactly issue-free as well. For example lack of comparison operator for strings forces a programmer to abandon an intiutive ways of doying things and to always remember to follow the language obscure rules.
Unfortunately for your argument, those issues you discuss have already been handled so thoroughly, and documented so pervasively in the APIs and JLS that they are no longer the subject of questions for a long, long, long time. Whereas, when you work in C++, you better have Scott Meyer's and the C++ spec next to you at all times. As a programmer that has done Java and C++ for a living, I can tell you that the amount of syntactic/semantic minutia you have to track in Java (or plain old C) pales in comparison with C++.
Your example of comparison of Strings is not an accurate description of how Java is to be used. It is very specific in the JSL what "=" is for - to compare primitives, primitives being char, bytes, ints, longs (the typical scalar stuff) and object references. For anything else, you need a comparator function that, as specified in the language specs, imposses a total ordering. The function is specific to the context of usage - it will be an override of Object.equals, or an implementation of Comparable.compareTo, or, if you need pluggable total order functions, one or more implementations of java.util.Comparator.compare. After 17 years of Java being in the while, this has already been settled.
That pales in comparison with C++ rules for ctors, dtors, operator overloading, constness, the accidental passing of non-pods into vararg methods.
Same for unsigned bytes
There is no such thing in Java as an unsigned byte. A Java byte is just a bunch of raw bytes of an opaque nature (much like a CORBA::octet).
and integers.
I don't follow this. What exactly are you referring to when comparing integers?
Same for resource leaks
Give me a Java resource leak over a C++ one. I can instrument bytecode so that I can record a stack trace on an object creation, which would get printed when its finalizer gets invoked, or with JMX or some type of admin console, with little to no change on an application source code. You could so sorta the same in C or C++ with Valgrind, but there is a lot more elbow grease involved when hunting these kind of things on a C/C++ application. Sorry, when it comes to resource management and resource leak tracking, this is one are where managed code beats unmanaged code, bars none.
and forgotten "finally" blocks.
Which are less demonic than C++ catch(...). At least we get the option of having a finally block when programming in Java. In C++ we do not have that at all. Oh my God, that is one of the things I miss the most when working in C++. That, and structured exceptions as first-class types. THAT is the greatest flaw in C++ exception paradigm. I can understand why that was not included, but I honestly believe it has ultimately proved to be a flaw in the language (all languages have flaws, so it is not that I'm picking on C++ just because I'm jerking my programming language fanboi proclivities.)
I trully and honestly I not using exceptions at all in C++. Hell, I prefer working with plain C or simply use C++ a-la C-with-classes.
The old, sparkling shine I used to see in C++ has become a lackluster dim. I've come to the conclusion that C++ is/was the victim of the state of the art compiler and language design of its time. Too much cobbled together using technology and concepts of the day, coupled with a need to remain compatible/easily integratable (sp?) with C code.
I'd rather work with C, or with a managed, modern (or relatively modern) language. That's just me. Obviously YMMV. So in the end is not whether X or Y language is issue free (none is). The question is what exactly you get in return when dealing the total complexity of a language, and what effort does a person has to take to either a) select a subset of that complexity to complete a task or b) comprehend a large chunk of said complexity.
Word. It gives me headaches everytime I have to use a ofstringstream. The QString-styled constructor is such an obvious thing to have. It is little things like this that helps (or encumbers) software development.
Hmmm... just for brief science fiction, suppose that... ...back in the X=(Triassic|Jurassic|Cretaceous), when dinosaurs roamed the planet
There. Fixed that for you. In the name of humanity, please refrain from writing science-fiction. Otherwise, you'll get hired by Hollywood, bestowing upon us horrors like "A Sound of Thunder" or "2012".
With 14 different meanings in science and technology alone, according to Wikipedia. The point is that one person writes the summary and a huge number of people read it. Not all of them know everything. Just type few extra characters ("System on a Chip" instead of "SoC" the first time you use it) and by spending a few seconds you save others what probably adds up to quite a significant amount of time spent on figuring out what it means. That doesn't directly benefit the writer of the summary, of course, but there needs to be just one other person taking the trouble to type those few extra characters for a term the writer of this summary is not familiar with to more than compensate for the extra time spent.
It's efficient to be clear in what you write and not assume that everyone knows every acronym. What baffles me is how many geeks don't understand such a simple concept.
What baffles me is how many geeks can't do basic research. We are talking about software translation for Christ' sake. It is evident then that translation is either to another language, or compilation towards a specific platform. That right there gives you the context with which to narrow your search.
What is worse is seeing many geeks in /. who don't know what SoC means. What's next? You need an explanation of what CPU means as well? GPU? RAM? ALU? LED? IO?
Not that I really put any credence to geek street creed, but seriously, what the heck. Seriously, I would expect a sophomore CS/CE/EE student (a good one worth its salt, not an HTML dilettante) to know most of these, and to be capable of autonomously acquire knowledge for those he doesn't.
You are just looking for a reason to be upset about your inability to reach immediate information satisfaction, and your unjustified believe that shit needs to be readily digested just for precious snowflake you at every corner you lays eyes upon. That is all.