I agree, the primary attribute for a programmer who will have real longevity is the guy who is learning right till the day he retires.
I make it a point to not let the kids get a lick in on me. I learn the new languages, I use the new libraries, and I rub their noses in it that they didn't find it first and bring it to me.
In my experience many "old" coders are lazy and focused on retirement -- which is why they aren't interested in the young guy's ideas -- not because the way Dad did it back in '82 is necessarily better.
You know who the leaders are among the older coders and you don't need a flashing neon arrow pointing to them to know they know their shit. They either naturally fall into positions of respect or were forced into architect/manager positions by now.
If you can't work with others, can't learn new tricks, and haven't learned to be open to constructive input -- regardless of its source -- then you probably aren't half the programmer you think you are. This is why we have the "how do i keep employed as an older coder" articles on here every 3-5 months -- because old coders lose their ability to adapt.
It would have to invert control, generally asyncIO requires callbacks. Then once you get into that realm you have to worry about the stack and automatic variables not being scope in the callback. It wouldnt be simple.
The benefits of using functional languages is realized in terms of program safety and a lack of defects -- not necessarily performance. I think we are all aware of the fact that there are plenty of programmers out there who care very little about introducing a few bugs for the sake of speed and looking clever.
But even if you just use immutable data and message passing as IPC under a procedural language you are headed in the right direction. It's really a mindset and even the procedural programming folks don't really have many excuses for not doing what the functional languages make natural.
A compiler may be able to thread your program, but it will be a long time before it understands your intent well enough to do it well. Also I can think of many situations under which such functionality may not even be a good idea at all. I would assume such a system would use a pool of threads to avoid constant thread construction overhead and if you get a few IO-busy actions threaded out in an ignorant fashion I think you will find your program blocking a lot more, and producing a lot less throughput than it should.
Also, the OP blithely stated that functional programming isn't happening -- yet features of the functional paradigm, like anonymous functions, have made their way into nearly every language of consequence and many new languages proudly tout functional programming features (see f#, scala, rust, clojure, and go). Perhaps pure functional programming is moving pretty slow, but it's features are not.
You conflate the two issues and it weakens your point. Your position fears that premature publication will engender an idiotic public to harbor poor conclusions -- as if you could somehow make the public smart by ensuring that the conversation is guarded by gatekeepers.
The world you insist on, where everything assumption uttered is peer-reviewed and our best possible information, does not exist.
I think peer review is a good thing, and I also think that a peer-reviewed paper has a leg up on a non-peer-reviewed paper.
That being said, peer review does not make something scientific, nor does it make something factual or non-factual.
Peer review is there so that those of us without the time or intellect to understand a paper can make a choice as to whether or not we wish to accept the premises within. It's, in any practical sense, an argument from authority, as we have no idea what procedures, experimentation, number crunching, or hypothesizing these reviewers are doing to validate these documents. The fact is that the bar for acceptance differs from publication to publication.
We simply see that they choose to publish something or they don't and assume we can trust their decision. This is a sociological effect, not a scientific one.
Moderately efficient textbook formats and basic LRM caching is all the technology you would need to serve textbooks to PCs.
What they are really saying is that they are replacing textbooks with stuff like Khan Academy and Wikipedia (which are fine sites btw), and the kids need the bandwidth to browse the web all day.
I can't believe these people get press for doing web searches with the names of programming languages and counting hits. We all just lost the game for even wasting our time considering it.
There are good reasons to not treat science as truth which are not based in faith or some other meta-cognitive bias. To blindly say that because it's science, it's trustworthy is as ignorant as saying it's the tool of the devil. Here are a couple very reputable books that give very compelling reasons as to why:
Now I'm not saying that conservatives necessarily understand the points made in these books, but that doesn't change the fact that modern views help on science, especially by the average person who is not a scientist, are ridiculous. There is nothing irrational about not letting people bash you over the head with theories that will be proven wrong and forgotten in a matter of decades.
Now you may personally hold a healthy attitude towards science and not blindly follow it, but be assured there are many people who have no idea what they are talking about running around spouting scientific theory as matter-of-fact certain truth.
Thinking back to my childhood, if my dad came home and said I can either do job A and have this much money and be miserable, or do job B have less and come home happy every night -- i would have told him to take job B every time and twice on Sunday. I'm not saying quit, Im saying push yourself out of your comfort zone. Either way I hope you can pull a switch off.
Programming for fun's sake is a matter of intellectual creativity. Also, programming, drawing, and the like are generally singular activities, so I would suspect that children who tend to do these things to be slight introverted. Also these activities usually produce something substantial, something that parents and peers can see and recognize, so I would also expect these kids to have some drive for recognition -- you know a need for the "oh, isn't he clever/talented" response.
It's probably not rational to expect kids without these properties to take to programming the way someone with these properties might. Simply put, kids who have the disposition for it, will probably do it if it's made available.
It's kind of like asking how to get a passive, nonathletic child to go out for the football team.
"People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before."
Corrected to:
"People should be just as worried that we have no idea what's going on, yet blunder through the press like we do."
It's not denying global warming to deny the people doing the science. These guys are consistently wrong and there are obviously emergent properties to the worlds global weather system that are far out of their reach. Enough of the propaganda based on reductive fallacies.
I don't think you could even apply these categories and classifications yourself, let alone tell someone else how to. You may call someone a "5% coder" and I may say they are more like 50%. All of this is subjective, you can't deal with people this way.
"Average person", as you're using it, is a meaningless concept. Average intelligence? Average creativity? Average aptitude? Average aesthetic ability? Average what? Does this mythical average person only ever possess average quantities of each? And who decides what average is?
Obviously, the people trying don't find themselves so mediocre that they don't want to try.
I'm not trying to troll you here, but there is nothing realistic about your perspective. Take a look at a Gaussian distribution -- that is the reality. The "average" outnumber the "special" people by orders of magnitude and will, without exception, have to do occupy the jobs you state they should never do.
I'm sorry, but it's perfectly possible to learn enough to write fine code in a year, even in a self-directed manner (since you are free to study current material it may actually be beneficial to do so) -- the limiting factors are experience, aptitude, and desire -- not a degree.
I've seen far too many people come in the door with a nice degree and an entitlement attitude, just to watch them sit in a corner and flounder about. What makes it worse is that they are often unaware of their ineptitude, and having that degree in common with other successful engineers, they tend to make poor assumptions about their place in the scheme of things.
Now many of those who work hard and spend the $$ to get a fancy piece of paper often have those important attributes I cited, but we should avoid mistaking cause and effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, the primary attribute for a programmer who will have real longevity is the guy who is learning right till the day he retires.
I make it a point to not let the kids get a lick in on me. I learn the new languages, I use the new libraries, and I rub their noses in it that they didn't find it first and bring it to me.
In my experience many "old" coders are lazy and focused on retirement -- which is why they aren't interested in the young guy's ideas -- not because the way Dad did it back in '82 is necessarily better.
You know who the leaders are among the older coders and you don't need a flashing neon arrow pointing to them to know they know their shit. They either naturally fall into positions of respect or were forced into architect/manager positions by now.
If you can't work with others, can't learn new tricks, and haven't learned to be open to constructive input -- regardless of its source -- then you probably aren't half the programmer you think you are. This is why we have the "how do i keep employed as an older coder" articles on here every 3-5 months -- because old coders lose their ability to adapt.
It would have to invert control, generally asyncIO requires callbacks. Then once you get into that realm you have to worry about the stack and automatic variables not being scope in the callback. It wouldnt be simple.
The benefits of using functional languages is realized in terms of program safety and a lack of defects -- not necessarily performance. I think we are all aware of the fact that there are plenty of programmers out there who care very little about introducing a few bugs for the sake of speed and looking clever.
But even if you just use immutable data and message passing as IPC under a procedural language you are headed in the right direction. It's really a mindset and even the procedural programming folks don't really have many excuses for not doing what the functional languages make natural.
A compiler may be able to thread your program, but it will be a long time before it understands your intent well enough to do it well. Also I can think of many situations under which such functionality may not even be a good idea at all. I would assume such a system would use a pool of threads to avoid constant thread construction overhead and if you get a few IO-busy actions threaded out in an ignorant fashion I think you will find your program blocking a lot more, and producing a lot less throughput than it should.
Also, the OP blithely stated that functional programming isn't happening -- yet features of the functional paradigm, like anonymous functions, have made their way into nearly every language of consequence and many new languages proudly tout functional programming features (see f#, scala, rust, clojure, and go). Perhaps pure functional programming is moving pretty slow, but it's features are not.
Science is *true or false* when its done.
Science is *fit for publication* after review.
You conflate the two issues and it weakens your point. Your position fears that premature publication will engender an idiotic public to harbor poor conclusions -- as if you could somehow make the public smart by ensuring that the conversation is guarded by gatekeepers.
The world you insist on, where everything assumption uttered is peer-reviewed and our best possible information, does not exist.
Grow up and calm down.
I think peer review is a good thing, and I also think that a peer-reviewed paper has a leg up on a non-peer-reviewed paper.
That being said, peer review does not make something scientific, nor does it make something factual or non-factual.
Peer review is there so that those of us without the time or intellect to understand a paper can make a choice as to whether or not we wish to accept the premises within. It's, in any practical sense, an argument from authority, as we have no idea what procedures, experimentation, number crunching, or hypothesizing these reviewers are doing to validate these documents. The fact is that the bar for acceptance differs from publication to publication.
We simply see that they choose to publish something or they don't and assume we can trust their decision. This is a sociological effect, not a scientific one.
Sorry, peer review doesn't make something factual or non-factual.
Maybe the thing you're trying to stop is natures measure to control the problem.
Moderately efficient textbook formats and basic LRM caching is all the technology you would need to serve textbooks to PCs.
What they are really saying is that they are replacing textbooks with stuff like Khan Academy and Wikipedia (which are fine sites btw), and the kids need the bandwidth to browse the web all day.
Well at minimum, we know Java isn't open or free in the sense that the OSS generation would use those terms.
I can't believe these people get press for doing web searches with the names of programming languages and counting hits. We all just lost the game for even wasting our time considering it.
You will see sciences ugly side eventually, and, if your successful, you will see it often. Put your big boy pants on and suck it up.
There are good reasons to not treat science as truth which are not based in faith or some other meta-cognitive bias. To blindly say that because it's science, it's trustworthy is as ignorant as saying it's the tool of the devil. Here are a couple very reputable books that give very compelling reasons as to why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
Now I'm not saying that conservatives necessarily understand the points made in these books, but that doesn't change the fact that modern views help on science, especially by the average person who is not a scientist, are ridiculous. There is nothing irrational about not letting people bash you over the head with theories that will be proven wrong and forgotten in a matter of decades.
Now you may personally hold a healthy attitude towards science and not blindly follow it, but be assured there are many people who have no idea what they are talking about running around spouting scientific theory as matter-of-fact certain truth.
Poorly worded title, I don't see any laws, theories, or other predictive content.. just some analysis.
Thinking back to my childhood, if my dad came home and said I can either do job A and have this much money and be miserable, or do job B have less and come home happy every night -- i would have told him to take job B every time and twice on Sunday. I'm not saying quit, Im saying push yourself out of your comfort zone. Either way I hope you can pull a switch off.
You're not dead yet. The only thing stopping you from moving on from your dead-end job is fear.
I don't think there is any career that should be encouraged to everyone. If I was made to name one, Computer Science would not be it.
Programming for fun's sake is a matter of intellectual creativity. Also, programming, drawing, and the like are generally singular activities, so I would suspect that children who tend to do these things to be slight introverted. Also these activities usually produce something substantial, something that parents and peers can see and recognize, so I would also expect these kids to have some drive for recognition -- you know a need for the "oh, isn't he clever/talented" response.
It's probably not rational to expect kids without these properties to take to programming the way someone with these properties might. Simply put, kids who have the disposition for it, will probably do it if it's made available.
It's kind of like asking how to get a passive, nonathletic child to go out for the football team.
From the article:
"People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before."
Corrected to:
"People should be just as worried that we have no idea what's going on, yet blunder through the press like we do."
It's not denying global warming to deny the people doing the science. These guys are consistently wrong and there are obviously emergent properties to the worlds global weather system that are far out of their reach. Enough of the propaganda based on reductive fallacies.
Of course they can't comment, even if they were going to nail him to a cross, they would remain silent on the matter.
The real question is did Dodd (and other current and past legislators) get the message or do we need to ring the bell again...
I don't think you could even apply these categories and classifications yourself, let alone tell someone else how to. You may call someone a "5% coder" and I may say they are more like 50%. All of this is subjective, you can't deal with people this way.
I agree totally. Knowing a little programming can only help.
"Average person", as you're using it, is a meaningless concept. Average intelligence? Average creativity? Average aptitude? Average aesthetic ability? Average what? Does this mythical average person only ever possess average quantities of each? And who decides what average is?
Obviously, the people trying don't find themselves so mediocre that they don't want to try.
I'm not trying to troll you here, but there is nothing realistic about your perspective. Take a look at a Gaussian distribution -- that is the reality. The "average" outnumber the "special" people by orders of magnitude and will, without exception, have to do occupy the jobs you state they should never do.
I'm sorry, but it's perfectly possible to learn enough to write fine code in a year, even in a self-directed manner (since you are free to study current material it may actually be beneficial to do so) -- the limiting factors are experience, aptitude, and desire -- not a degree.
I've seen far too many people come in the door with a nice degree and an entitlement attitude, just to watch them sit in a corner and flounder about. What makes it worse is that they are often unaware of their ineptitude, and having that degree in common with other successful engineers, they tend to make poor assumptions about their place in the scheme of things.
Now many of those who work hard and spend the $$ to get a fancy piece of paper often have those important attributes I cited, but we should avoid mistaking cause and effect.