Yes, as a senior software engineer with no degree, I can say that certs definitely help. Yes, they don't mean much really, but they make your resume more attractive than the stack of resumes with no degree and no certs.
That depends on the area, doesn't it?
I know there are dozens of Java and Microsoft certifications. I know of one or two testing certs.
But in my areas (C programming, C++ programming, Unix programming) there are none as far as I know.
I hate to burst the bubble of any CS students... We all sit in the same cubicles churning through millions of lines of legacy Java code, filling in our change requests and putting cover sheets on TPS reports.
No, we do not all do that. Some of us went into CS because we actually had an inherent interesting in coding, not because a parent or guidance councilor told us it was a good career path. Because we had an inherent interest in building things. An inherent curiosity regarding puzzles, practical or academic. We appreciated the theory presented in many classes because it better prepared us to design new things. And many of us matching the preceding sit in our cubes designing and developing new things, not maintaining old things.
Mild protest.
I went the same path, and sit in my cubicle maintaining old things.
2/3 of it is boring -- but there's 1/3 which is highly exciting and requires talent, good judgement and all kinds of
problem-solving skills.
Developing new things is *not* what a programmer's work is about.
Developing new things while improving/securing the old things is.
Dealing with the consequences of your mistakes, i.e. handle customer problems, is.
Despite fanatism for a lot of languages, I believe languages catch on when they are easy to understand by others and have an easy to understand syntax or interfaces. Plenty of times you see announcements of new languages which claim experimental or higher level syntax abstractions or constructions that allow the programmer to write less code, or claim to resemble human language more.
Yet in practice, I don't think programmers spend most of their time actually writing the code but thinking what to write, so making an algorithm or behavior as clear as possible should be preferred to writing unnecesarily shorter code that does the same.
Yes, clarity is important. That's why we value higher-level abstractions; why did you dismiss them above?
I agree about "claim to resemble human language", but noone's used that argument for at least 30 years.
C++ - a can of worms which only a language lawyer could love - probably hit the big time because of MS Visual C++ and the MS Foundation Classes. That and the fact that C programmers didn't think they had to learn a whole new language (see earlier comment about cans of worms).
Or maybe C++ became popular because it introduced the object-oriented paradigm while retaining compatibility with C.
Can of worms? You know you don't have to get into template programming and other complex C++ STL guts, right?
Template programming isn't hard. The stuff that's useful 95% of the time is not hard to understand.
The metaphor for me is: mention a real type (like vector<Foo>) or function, and it magically appears an instatiation
of a template, if it's at all possible. The instantiation is like search-and-replace, except with some minimal sanity checks applied.
What you meant to say is that "there are workarounds for the difficulties". Any way you slice it, it is still a PITA...either to deal with it directly or implement the workarounds. I wish they could have come up with a more sane implementation.
"The 60s" your teachers were extolling wasn't the same as "the 60s" during which Bradbury was writing -- chronologically the same, but culturally worlds apart. Bradbury epitomized the generation against which people who were in their 20s in the 1960s were rebelling. He was born in 1920. He was 45 when the first big Vietnam protests started, 47 during the "Summer of Love," 49 at the time of Woodstock: more than old enough to be "The Man." A great writer to be sure, but also very much a product of his time.
The phrase "a product of his time" doesn't literally mean "he was born on the year he was born"; it means he also shared the generally accepted values of his time. Did he really? I don't know much about him, but you provide no good arguments.
You cannot "epitomize" a generation just by being literally part of it.
Me neither, but I never read much of what he wrote.
Ray Bradbury wrote touchy feelie, technologically very light science fiction. As a fan of the hard stuff (Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke et. al. - I prefer SF that requires a working knowledge of vector calculus and differential equations to really appreciate) his stuff always seemd pretty fluffy fare.
Oh, come on! The difference between hard and soft SF is mostly about fluff.
Anyone can write a normal story and add a page of technical mumbo-jumbo to make it seem more scientific. As far as I can tell,
that was what Heinlein did too.
I always summed it up as the science fiction beloved by English teachers everywhere, becuase if you took an English course in the 60s and 70s, and any SF was going to wind up on the reading list, it was inevitable that it would be Bradbury...
That certainly makes it less attractive, but unless you believe Englich teachers are always wrong,
it doesn't really say anything about the value of Bradbury's writings.
I first read it on my own, then was surprised when it showed up in English class a few years later
Funny; I knew it was Bradbury (read it ~30 years ago) but believed it was about Earth after global
warming fucks up the weather, and believed the title was "October Country".
Leonardo da Vinci defended his own lack of formal education by saying "They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words. And [experience] has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases. Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy: on experience, the mistress of their masters."
This is why we are educating our children using "The Da Vinci Road: Observation and the Art of Learning" method, which is based on experience.
So because da Vinci, 700 years ago or whatever, didn't read any books, your children won't, either?
I suspect that method's proponents uses the da Vinci as a cute slogan, but in reality does something more sensible.
[...] the slave trade made Stockholm grow rich and influential, it would eventually become the capital of Sweden as well as Sweden propers largest and most populated city; that never would have happened without the slave trade.
Citation, please?
Never mind censorship and conspiracies to suppress The Truth;
if this wasn't a complete fabrication I think I would have heard about it at least *once*.
I work in one of those places who still maintain large COBOL systems. One of our problems is getting the customers to change. We provide them a modern system, and the customers still prefer to run batch programs and have reports print out. They just refuse to change their process.
Have you tried to give them something which matches their processes, then?
I don't know much about batch processing, but God knows there are plenty
of "modern systems" I wouldn't touch because they don't fit the way I work.
The security concern on Linux isn't malware, it's remote exploits of one of the services that are installed, by default, to be accessible from the Internet.
Which ones do you have in mind?
The only thing which is installed by default when I reinstall Debian is sshd and a mail server in local-only mode.
Additionally, Linux distribution security generally isn't much better than modern Windows. Even small to medium packages tend to pull in everything but the kitchen sink.
Some packages use a lot of libraries. So what?
If this affects security, it *improves* it. It only takes one person to find the bug in libtiff, and one security update to fix all the applications which use it.
Of course, if you stick to packages in Linux, you at least have only one update mechanism.
Yes, and a sane one. At my Windows workplace they use several home-made systems to push out security updates.
They tend to pop up "Reboot now? Y/N" boxes when you least expect it, and misbehave in general.
I use emacs for 99% of my stuff, and I have to say, while it's a great editor, I wish I had IDE-level code browsing abilities (and to a lesser extent, intellisense-style stuff). I'd kill someone for good "go to definition" support. Ctags-style stuff is a shitty substitute, at least on our code base, and I've never really been able to get the fancier stuff to work well. VS isn't perfect there either, but it's still a lot better...
Could you explain this a little more? It seems to me that "go to definition" is a rather basic thing for any IDE and since CTAGS' primary job is exactly that, I don't understand why it would not work so well on your particular code. I mean, all it has to do is understand the difference between a definition and not a definition (i.e. it doesn't need to fully understand the code), so if it is having trouble doing that job it certainly reflects poorly on the tool.
I guess I'm just curious what sort of code or code layout would cause it problems.
(I'm the grandparent who praised Emacs.) Did you ever use TAGS and C++?
It works well for "go to definition" in C, but C doesn't have function overloading.
If your code has a a dozen classes and two class templates which contain foo(), how can TAGS
know which one you mean when you say "go to definition of bar->foo()"?
I agree this sucks. Fortunately decent C++ code is more structured than C, so I can normally
find my way around the code base without TAGS. But it's still embarassing.
I very rarely need a debugger (basically never these days), but I did like DDD when I still needed one.
What code do you write? Its certainly not C, C++ or C# or even Java. I can't think of anyone who can write non-trivial code in those languages without a debugger.
I don't know about C# or Java, but I never use a traditional step-through debugger with C or C++.
I know one or two good programmers who use it heavily, but most don't.
Visual Studio is hardly the only development IDE on Windows. Yes, it is good, but you cannot really say that "free desktop software development dead in Windows 8" just because gasp, MS wants you to buy the new version. Hell, they even still offer Visual Studio 2010 for free!
So if you are crying about this, what about coming up with those open source IDE's?? I understand that they have never matched Visual Studio, but seriously. I even buy good web development IDE's to my OS X, like Coda 2. Stop being a cheap-ass winer and pay for quality tools.
You're missing the point. It's not the IDE that's the problem, but the other things that are part of Visual Studio:
the native C compiler, the native C++ compiler, and I guess stuff to access the Windows APIs.
Perhaps the Windows ports of gcc (mingw or whatever they are called) could be better, but I suppose it's hard to
build a free VS-compatible SDK.
You know what this story actually tells? That even FOSS users don't like their IDE's. They want to use Visual Studio from Microsoft because frankly, it is much better than the open source alternatives.
I can very well imagine that some of them suck worse than VS.
Personally I prefer Emacs. I haven't seen anyone use an IDE more efficiently than what I can do with Emacs and the command-line.
Communicating with people many timezones away is hard when they are great people and horrendously time consuming otherwise
Hell, communicating with people on another floor in the same *building* is hard.
Nothing beats having all the people you need to talk to so close that you can see them from your desk,
have lunch together and so on.
Also, it pains me that they call those fortune tellers Romanian since they're actually gypsies. This is a huge problem for us, the gypsies go in other countries, pull shit like this and worse (stealing, beating people up) and then they say they're Romanian.
They come here in the summers, panhandling.
Actually, what they say is they are persecuted by the majority romanians.
Everyone thinks Romania is a gypsy country or something.
Well, you seem to have a fairly large minority of them.
I'd switch "Windows XP" and "Linux" around in that quote, for two reasons:
1: Some modern distros require 768 MB RAM or more, and almost all of them are 256 MB+, while XP Home Edition is 64 MB required, 128 MB recommended.
Much of this bloat is in the kernel, which even if built fully modular now has so many hooks and semi-optionals that you can't run a normal distro on minimal hardware.
I call bullshit on that. You seem to be saying unused/useless kernel *code* eats up your RAM, but vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64 is 2.4MB on my system. That's compressed, so let's be generous and say 5MB in memory. Then I have some modules loaded: 6MB.
As for total memory used by the kernel, I don't know how to see that. Do you? Note that there's all this buffering going on.
I had to read a Lucky Luke album to my niece (five) last weekend.
She likes Lucky Luke, but I can't imagine why -- if you haven't watched plenty of really old-fashioned western movies,
you'll miss most of the jokes. Most *adults* today haven't seen them.
But I guess I shouldn't complain -- she had the option to choose the Smurfs, and she didn't.
A git repo is (presumably) a "form you can run". Because, you know... "News for nerds", etc.
That's what I thought before I clicked the link. It takes you to a list of dozens or hundreds of repos,
private and public, for different pieces of software. No indication which one, if any, contains this particular release of this software.
That's not how you release something.
std::cout std::hex std::setfill('0') std::setw(8) x std::dec std::endl;
True; setfill, setw et cetera suck.
But iostreams output rocks if you use it with user-defined types rather than integers.
You want Foo to print as hex with 8 digits? You make its output function format it that way.
That way you don't have to repeat that $08x every time you print it.
I see that as a subtle hint: the best way to use C++ is to let the types do the work.
PS. std::endl is not the C++ equivalent of \n. In C++ it's called \n.
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Yes, as a senior software engineer with no degree, I can say that certs definitely help. Yes, they don't mean much really, but they make your resume more attractive than the stack of resumes with no degree and no certs.
That depends on the area, doesn't it? I know there are dozens of Java and Microsoft certifications. I know of one or two testing certs. But in my areas (C programming, C++ programming, Unix programming) there are none as far as I know.
I hate to burst the bubble of any CS students ... We all sit in the same cubicles churning through millions of lines of legacy Java code, filling in our change requests and putting cover sheets on TPS reports.
No, we do not all do that. Some of us went into CS because we actually had an inherent interesting in coding, not because a parent or guidance councilor told us it was a good career path. Because we had an inherent interest in building things. An inherent curiosity regarding puzzles, practical or academic. We appreciated the theory presented in many classes because it better prepared us to design new things. And many of us matching the preceding sit in our cubes designing and developing new things, not maintaining old things.
Mild protest. I went the same path, and sit in my cubicle maintaining old things. 2/3 of it is boring -- but there's 1/3 which is highly exciting and requires talent, good judgement and all kinds of problem-solving skills.
Developing new things is *not* what a programmer's work is about. Developing new things while improving/securing the old things is. Dealing with the consequences of your mistakes, i.e. handle customer problems, is.
Despite fanatism for a lot of languages, I believe languages catch on when they are easy to understand by others and have an easy to understand syntax or interfaces. Plenty of times you see announcements of new languages which claim experimental or higher level syntax abstractions or constructions that allow the programmer to write less code, or claim to resemble human language more. Yet in practice, I don't think programmers spend most of their time actually writing the code but thinking what to write, so making an algorithm or behavior as clear as possible should be preferred to writing unnecesarily shorter code that does the same.
Yes, clarity is important. That's why we value higher-level abstractions; why did you dismiss them above?
I agree about "claim to resemble human language", but noone's used that argument for at least 30 years.
Or maybe C++ became popular because it introduced the object-oriented paradigm while retaining compatibility with C.
Can of worms? You know you don't have to get into template programming and other complex C++ STL guts, right?
Template programming isn't hard. The stuff that's useful 95% of the time is not hard to understand. The metaphor for me is: mention a real type (like vector<Foo>) or function, and it magically appears an instatiation of a template, if it's at all possible. The instantiation is like search-and-replace, except with some minimal sanity checks applied.
What you meant to say is that "there are workarounds for the difficulties". Any way you slice it, it is still a PITA...either to deal with it directly or implement the workarounds. I wish they could have come up with a more sane implementation.
If you see DNS as a workaround ... then, yes.
"The 60s" your teachers were extolling wasn't the same as "the 60s" during which Bradbury was writing -- chronologically the same, but culturally worlds apart. Bradbury epitomized the generation against which people who were in their 20s in the 1960s were rebelling. He was born in 1920. He was 45 when the first big Vietnam protests started, 47 during the "Summer of Love," 49 at the time of Woodstock: more than old enough to be "The Man." A great writer to be sure, but also very much a product of his time.
The phrase "a product of his time" doesn't literally mean "he was born on the year he was born"; it means he also shared the generally accepted values of his time. Did he really? I don't know much about him, but you provide no good arguments. You cannot "epitomize" a generation just by being literally part of it.
Ray Bradbury wrote touchy feelie, technologically very light science fiction. As a fan of the hard stuff (Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke et. al. - I prefer SF that requires a working knowledge of vector calculus and differential equations to really appreciate) his stuff always seemd pretty fluffy fare.
Oh, come on! The difference between hard and soft SF is mostly about fluff. Anyone can write a normal story and add a page of technical mumbo-jumbo to make it seem more scientific. As far as I can tell, that was what Heinlein did too.
I always summed it up as the science fiction beloved by English teachers everywhere, becuase if you took an English course in the 60s and 70s, and any SF was going to wind up on the reading list, it was inevitable that it would be Bradbury...
That certainly makes it less attractive, but unless you believe Englich teachers are always wrong, it doesn't really say anything about the value of Bradbury's writings.
All Summer in a Day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Summer_in_a_Day
I first read it on my own, then was surprised when it showed up in English class a few years later
Funny; I knew it was Bradbury (read it ~30 years ago) but believed it was about Earth after global warming fucks up the weather, and believed the title was "October Country".
...is found in that man's works.
You obviously haven't read Edgar Pangborn or Theodore Sturgeon. What's special about Bradbury is that he wasn't just good; he also escaped the ghetto.
Leonardo da Vinci defended his own lack of formal education by saying "They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words. And [experience] has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases. Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy: on experience, the mistress of their masters."
This is why we are educating our children using "The Da Vinci Road: Observation and the Art of Learning" method, which is based on experience.
So because da Vinci, 700 years ago or whatever, didn't read any books, your children won't, either? I suspect that method's proponents uses the da Vinci as a cute slogan, but in reality does something more sensible.
[...] the slave trade made Stockholm grow rich and influential, it would eventually become the capital of Sweden as well as Sweden propers largest and most populated city; that never would have happened without the slave trade.
Citation, please? Never mind censorship and conspiracies to suppress The Truth; if this wasn't a complete fabrication I think I would have heard about it at least *once*.
I work in one of those places who still maintain large COBOL systems. One of our problems is getting the customers to change. We provide them a modern system, and the customers still prefer to run batch programs and have reports print out. They just refuse to change their process.
Have you tried to give them something which matches their processes, then? I don't know much about batch processing, but God knows there are plenty of "modern systems" I wouldn't touch because they don't fit the way I work.
The security concern on Linux isn't malware, it's remote exploits of one of the services that are installed, by default, to be accessible from the Internet.
Which ones do you have in mind? The only thing which is installed by default when I reinstall Debian is sshd and a mail server in local-only mode.
Additionally, Linux distribution security generally isn't much better than modern Windows. Even small to medium packages tend to pull in everything but the kitchen sink.
Some packages use a lot of libraries. So what? If this affects security, it *improves* it. It only takes one person to find the bug in libtiff, and one security update to fix all the applications which use it.
Of course, if you stick to packages in Linux, you at least have only one update mechanism.
Yes, and a sane one. At my Windows workplace they use several home-made systems to push out security updates. They tend to pop up "Reboot now? Y/N" boxes when you least expect it, and misbehave in general.
I use emacs for 99% of my stuff, and I have to say, while it's a great editor, I wish I had IDE-level code browsing abilities (and to a lesser extent, intellisense-style stuff). I'd kill someone for good "go to definition" support. Ctags-style stuff is a shitty substitute, at least on our code base, and I've never really been able to get the fancier stuff to work well. VS isn't perfect there either, but it's still a lot better...
Could you explain this a little more? It seems to me that "go to definition" is a rather basic thing for any IDE and since CTAGS' primary job is exactly that, I don't understand why it would not work so well on your particular code. I mean, all it has to do is understand the difference between a definition and not a definition (i.e. it doesn't need to fully understand the code), so if it is having trouble doing that job it certainly reflects poorly on the tool.
I guess I'm just curious what sort of code or code layout would cause it problems.
(I'm the grandparent who praised Emacs.) Did you ever use TAGS and C++? It works well for "go to definition" in C, but C doesn't have function overloading. If your code has a a dozen classes and two class templates which contain foo(), how can TAGS know which one you mean when you say "go to definition of bar->foo()"?
I agree this sucks. Fortunately decent C++ code is more structured than C, so I can normally find my way around the code base without TAGS. But it's still embarassing.
I very rarely need a debugger (basically never these days), but I did like DDD when I still needed one.
What code do you write? Its certainly not C, C++ or C# or even Java. I can't think of anyone who can write non-trivial code in those languages without a debugger.
I don't know about C# or Java, but I never use a traditional step-through debugger with C or C++. I know one or two good programmers who use it heavily, but most don't.
Visual Studio is hardly the only development IDE on Windows. Yes, it is good, but you cannot really say that "free desktop software development dead in Windows 8" just because gasp, MS wants you to buy the new version. Hell, they even still offer Visual Studio 2010 for free! So if you are crying about this, what about coming up with those open source IDE's?? I understand that they have never matched Visual Studio, but seriously. I even buy good web development IDE's to my OS X, like Coda 2. Stop being a cheap-ass winer and pay for quality tools.
You're missing the point. It's not the IDE that's the problem, but the other things that are part of Visual Studio: the native C compiler, the native C++ compiler, and I guess stuff to access the Windows APIs. Perhaps the Windows ports of gcc (mingw or whatever they are called) could be better, but I suppose it's hard to build a free VS-compatible SDK.
You know what this story actually tells? That even FOSS users don't like their IDE's. They want to use Visual Studio from Microsoft because frankly, it is much better than the open source alternatives.
I can very well imagine that some of them suck worse than VS. Personally I prefer Emacs. I haven't seen anyone use an IDE more efficiently than what I can do with Emacs and the command-line.
Communicating with people many timezones away is hard when they are great people and horrendously time consuming otherwise
Hell, communicating with people on another floor in the same *building* is hard. Nothing beats having all the people you need to talk to so close that you can see them from your desk, have lunch together and so on.
Best for enterprise work: Java
Where "enterprise" is defined as: places where they like to do everything in Java,
Seriously, I roughly understood the other categories, but not this one.
Also, it pains me that they call those fortune tellers Romanian since they're actually gypsies. This is a huge problem for us, the gypsies go in other countries, pull shit like this and worse (stealing, beating people up) and then they say they're Romanian.
They come here in the summers, panhandling. Actually, what they say is they are persecuted by the majority romanians.
Everyone thinks Romania is a gypsy country or something.
Well, you seem to have a fairly large minority of them.
I'd switch "Windows XP" and "Linux" around in that quote, for two reasons:
1: Some modern distros require 768 MB RAM or more, and almost all of them are 256 MB+, while XP Home Edition is 64 MB required, 128 MB recommended. Much of this bloat is in the kernel, which even if built fully modular now has so many hooks and semi-optionals that you can't run a normal distro on minimal hardware.
I call bullshit on that. You seem to be saying unused/useless kernel *code* eats up your RAM, but vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64 is 2.4MB on my system. That's compressed, so let's be generous and say 5MB in memory. Then I have some modules loaded: 6MB.
As for total memory used by the kernel, I don't know how to see that. Do you? Note that there's all this buffering going on.
... Lucky Luke ...
I had to read a Lucky Luke album to my niece (five) last weekend. She likes Lucky Luke, but I can't imagine why -- if you haven't watched plenty of really old-fashioned western movies, you'll miss most of the jokes. Most *adults* today haven't seen them.
But I guess I shouldn't complain -- she had the option to choose the Smurfs, and she didn't.
You may want to look at some classic child cartoons:
Surely Asterix and Gaston are mostly for grownups, and is Bamse available outside the Nordic countries?
My all-time favorite is Rasmus Klump -- good-natured, action-packed and imaginative. But those albums have been out of print for thirty years in .se ...
A git repo is (presumably) a "form you can run". Because, you know... "News for nerds", etc.
That's what I thought before I clicked the link. It takes you to a list of dozens or hundreds of repos, private and public, for different pieces of software. No indication which one, if any, contains this particular release of this software. That's not how you release something.
Because
printf("0x%08xn", x)
is way more verbose and confusing than
std::cout std::hex std::setfill('0') std::setw(8) x std::dec std::endl;
True; setfill, setw et cetera suck. But iostreams output rocks if you use it with user-defined types rather than integers. You want Foo to print as hex with 8 digits? You make its output function format it that way. That way you don't have to repeat that $08x every time you print it. I see that as a subtle hint: the best way to use C++ is to let the types do the work.
PS. std::endl is not the C++ equivalent of \n. In C++ it's called \n.