First, programming is fun for a certain sort of person: someone who likes somewhat solitary intellectual puzzles. I do crosswords and sudoku when I have time to burn. It's fun. I like picking through posts online and seeing if they hold up to logic. And I like programming. There's a sort of person who doesn't like somewhat solitary intellectual pursuits. That kind of person won't enjoy programming.
Second, I understand why the top programmers, or quasi-technical managers who are told by their top programmers, think programming is so easy. It's because they're so good at it, and they're projecting. I have a computer science degree and I've been programming for a number of years in a number of languages in a variety of environments. I'm an average programmer but I've been doing it for a number of years and I'm interested in the craft and reading about it and I know a lot of concepts. But each of those concepts has a tree of concepts beneath it, which can have trees of concepts below that. From an end-user programmer's perspective, it's not rocket science but it's a lot of stuff required to really grok the programming universe. Some people grok earlier in their career and some later, but until you grok - it's two different levels of programming quality.
Sit down at the goddamned table and figure out how the hell HUMANITY is going to survive another 1000 years without blowing each other the fuck up over this fucking COMPETITION of yours.
The economy - of any country - is a competition for resources. Take the most homogeneous, socialist northernmost Scandinavian country - Norway or Sweden - and it's still a competition for resources. Take a heterogeneous country that's only relatively recently been hewn from the frontier, like the US and it is most assuredly a competition for resources. Even with disinterested technocrats (which is a fantasy construct, like unicorns - all humans have preferences and desires) allocating resources, people are still going to compete to accrue more resources.
And if within any country it is a competition, you may rest assured externally it is more so of a competition.
It doesn't need to be violent. There can be accepted rules of the game, like baseball or football. But, like, don't like it, doesn't matter. It is what it is.
China and Russia are strategic competitors. We should strive to have good relations with both, enhance partnership at points of shared interest, but also realize they are competitors. And for cryin' out loud, we should not be outsourcing a vast amount of our manufacturing base and knowledge to a strategic competitor. Enhancing economic partnership, certainly. Giving up our manufacturing base to one or the other is madness.
The pundits tell us we're a smart advanced country, manufacturing is beneath us. However, countries like China, Japan, and Germany, with national IQs equal to or greater than ours, cultivate manufacturing. So there's that.
And even the graphical stuff like Scratch and the Lego Mindstorms language, you still gotta understand the actions that the device or the program can do, and then translate the graphical symbols into strings (like physical strings of yarn) of commands which will then make the device/program do what you want.
The real question being asked here is, "How do you make a programming language easier and more idiot-proof?" Right off the bat, there is just no substitute for ability + experience. You need both (or if not experience, a whole lot of ability).
Remember, the thing a programming language does is translate human-readable text into processor instructions - one's and zeros.
How to do that more easily and have the program robustly do exactly what you want? Object oriented is brilliant IMO, for example. Forcing you to make classes (a way to group code), and create complex methods (functions), and just instantiate the object (the mere act of doing so running multiple functions, and being able to call with one line a function that does a whole bunch of stuff.
First there was assembly, line by line interaction with the processor. Then Basic, then function-oriented programs which groups functionality into functions, then object-oriented programming (grouping functionality into classes and their methods), and object-based programming (e.g. JavaScript - everything is an object, except primitives).
What is all this leading to? Trying to take the average human's mental concepts and turn them into machine code in an easier and more error-proof fashion.
Deep stuff for a Slashdot thread. We'd need the likes of Claude Shannon and Bjarne Stroustrup to really bite into this.
People are still going to need to learn the language of the computer, even if/when it could understand natural language ("I wanna add this list of numbers together, divide it by the number of numbers" versus "I want the average of this list of numbers". "And then I want to display it in a flashing red box.").
Christ, what a maintenance nightmare. Ease of generation of machine code versus maintainability? "Why was this asshole doing all this bit shifting in this function?"
Well, hopefully I framed the real question a bit better, got no idea of what the next evolutionary step would be.
To get a real feel for the sudden growth since 2000, note that the first two data points span a couple of decades. The rest of the points are year by year:
The article says an 812% increase since 1978. They could have easily cut down the start point to the year 2000 and still produced a startling, and more meaningful result.
Also, focusing on writing modular and generic code. Modular meaning minimal dependencies, and generic meaning it can handle multiple situations, not just the one initially envisioned. Being able to write modular and generic code is definitely professional IMO.
Fixing someone else's code is a great way to learn how to write code. Not the algorithm, but the commenting and readability and maintainability.
Other things to make novices more professional:
1) Try and stick to "best practices". Things like "DRY" - don't repeat yourself (don't copy code). Helps maintainability dramatically.
2) Get an idea of patterns.
3) Joining groups like the Linux Foundation or ACM or other professional groups.
4) Reading some of the books called out in other posts in this thread.
Being professional to me means being able to write functional, readable and maintainable code. You get better at the functional part from experience. You can get pretty far I think with readable and maintainable code right much earlier in the career.
"In the year 2081, amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, radios inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.
One April, 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron, an intelligent and athletic teenager, is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, by the government. They are barely aware of the tragedy, as Hazel has "average" intelligence (a euphemism for stupidity), and George has a handicap radio installed by the government to regulate his above-average intelligence.
Hazel and George watch ballet on television. They comment on the dancers, who are weighed down to counteract their gracefulness and masked to hide their attractiveness. George's thoughts are continually interrupted by the different noises emitted by his handicap radio, which piques Hazel's curiosity and imagination regarding handicaps. Noticing his exhaustion, Hazel urges George to lie down and rest his "handicap bag", 47 pounds (21 kg) of weights locked around George's neck. She suggests taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but George resists, aware of the illegality of such an action...."
Companies need more forward thinking leaders, but when CEO's get golden parachutes while driving companies into bankruptcy, it doesn't happen.
It's called 'corporate looting' or 'bankrupty for profit'. The (nobel laureate - or at least it equivalent in economics) husband of the current Federal Reserve (US central bank) chief co-authored a paper about it.(PDF)
She's worth 10's if not 100's of millions of dollars and yet she's still working. This is just a salary bargaining ploy nonsense. That's why the article doesn't make any sense.
Only the poorly educated say 'learnt' in the US (it's 'learned') here, but using a 't' for past tense is a legitimate British grammar construct. I've seen terms like this in respected British publications. More here.
I do like contrarians, as they force me to examine my position, which I appreciate. As the saying goes, "If you don't understand your opponent's position, then you do not truly understand your own."
For Carrie Fisher, she was a central character, Princess Leia, in George Lucas' 1977 epic hit, "Star Wars", which redefined cinematography and the cinema. Thus, she became a part of cinema history. Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, C3PO, R2D2 and Vader are all part of cinema's pantheon. Because it all came together for a brief shining moment in that movie, which went on to influence the cinema till this day.
That's why she was a noteworthy figure. And she nailed the role. She may not have done much nearly as noteworthy since, but being part of an epic is very hard to follow up.
In order to stop [universally agreed bad thing], we must control/penalize [thing associated with it].
In order to stop [school shootings] we must control/penalize [video games] In order to stop [school shootings] we must control/penalize [guns]
In order to stop [human trafficking] we must control/penalize [porn] In order to stop [human trafficking] we must control/penalize [prostitution] In order to stop [human trafficking] we must control/penalize [strip clubs]
In order to stop [obesity] we must control/penalize [certain foods] In order to stop [obesity] we must control/penalize [lack of exercise]
In order to stop [impaired driving] we must control/penalize [alcohol] In order to stop [impaired driving] we must control/penalize [marijuana]
In order to stop [car crash deaths] we must control/penalize [driving] In order to stop [car crash deaths] we must control/penalize [pedestrians] In order to stop [car crash deaths] we must control/penalize [roadborne transport of fuel]
The problem being that China has been viewing the long game for decades and the longer people let them play by some of their key rules,
Keynes said, "In the long run we are all dead." Keynes is seen as the Moses of modern economic thought. This mentality explains quite a bit about US economic and business policy.
In my brief 40 years as an American, I was born into a world where we were supposed to be scared of Russians. To being told that the Russians weren't a threat. To being told that the Islamists that the CIA funded to fight the Russians were the threat. To now being told that the Russians and the disciples of those we trained to fight the Russians are a threat.
"We have always been at war with Eastasia." -- George Orwell, "1984"
Slashdot Mirror
First, programming is fun for a certain sort of person: someone who likes somewhat solitary intellectual puzzles. I do crosswords and sudoku when I have time to burn. It's fun. I like picking through posts online and seeing if they hold up to logic. And I like programming. There's a sort of person who doesn't like somewhat solitary intellectual pursuits. That kind of person won't enjoy programming.
Second, I understand why the top programmers, or quasi-technical managers who are told by their top programmers, think programming is so easy. It's because they're so good at it, and they're projecting. I have a computer science degree and I've been programming for a number of years in a number of languages in a variety of environments. I'm an average programmer but I've been doing it for a number of years and I'm interested in the craft and reading about it and I know a lot of concepts. But each of those concepts has a tree of concepts beneath it, which can have trees of concepts below that. From an end-user programmer's perspective, it's not rocket science but it's a lot of stuff required to really grok the programming universe. Some people grok earlier in their career and some later, but until you grok - it's two different levels of programming quality.
The economy - of any country - is a competition for resources. Take the most homogeneous, socialist northernmost Scandinavian country - Norway or Sweden - and it's still a competition for resources. Take a heterogeneous country that's only relatively recently been hewn from the frontier, like the US and it is most assuredly a competition for resources. Even with disinterested technocrats (which is a fantasy construct, like unicorns - all humans have preferences and desires) allocating resources, people are still going to compete to accrue more resources.
And if within any country it is a competition, you may rest assured externally it is more so of a competition.
It doesn't need to be violent. There can be accepted rules of the game, like baseball or football. But, like, don't like it, doesn't matter. It is what it is.
China and Russia are strategic competitors. We should strive to have good relations with both, enhance partnership at points of shared interest, but also realize they are competitors. And for cryin' out loud, we should not be outsourcing a vast amount of our manufacturing base and knowledge to a strategic competitor. Enhancing economic partnership, certainly. Giving up our manufacturing base to one or the other is madness.
The pundits tell us we're a smart advanced country, manufacturing is beneath us. However, countries like China, Japan, and Germany, with national IQs equal to or greater than ours, cultivate manufacturing. So there's that.
And even the graphical stuff like Scratch and the Lego Mindstorms language, you still gotta understand the actions that the device or the program can do, and then translate the graphical symbols into strings (like physical strings of yarn) of commands which will then make the device/program do what you want.
The real question being asked here is, "How do you make a programming language easier and more idiot-proof?" Right off the bat, there is just no substitute for ability + experience. You need both (or if not experience, a whole lot of ability).
Remember, the thing a programming language does is translate human-readable text into processor instructions - one's and zeros.
How to do that more easily and have the program robustly do exactly what you want? Object oriented is brilliant IMO, for example. Forcing you to make classes (a way to group code), and create complex methods (functions), and just instantiate the object (the mere act of doing so running multiple functions, and being able to call with one line a function that does a whole bunch of stuff.
First there was assembly, line by line interaction with the processor. Then Basic, then function-oriented programs which groups functionality into functions, then object-oriented programming (grouping functionality into classes and their methods), and object-based programming (e.g. JavaScript - everything is an object, except primitives).
What is all this leading to? Trying to take the average human's mental concepts and turn them into machine code in an easier and more error-proof fashion.
Deep stuff for a Slashdot thread. We'd need the likes of Claude Shannon and Bjarne Stroustrup to really bite into this.
People are still going to need to learn the language of the computer, even if/when it could understand natural language ("I wanna add this list of numbers together, divide it by the number of numbers" versus "I want the average of this list of numbers". "And then I want to display it in a flashing red box.").
Christ, what a maintenance nightmare. Ease of generation of machine code versus maintainability? "Why was this asshole doing all this bit shifting in this function?"
Well, hopefully I framed the real question a bit better, got no idea of what the next evolutionary step would be.
It's time for university "non-profit" status to be re-examined, as everything they do is designed to maximize revenue.
To get a real feel for the sudden growth since 2000, note that the first two data points span a couple of decades. The rest of the points are year by year:
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
The article says an 812% increase since 1978. They could have easily cut down the start point to the year 2000 and still produced a startling, and more meaningful result.
This site: http://foldoc.org/
Here's a wiki entry about it.
"What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 1:9
Goes twice for technology.
Also, focusing on writing modular and generic code. Modular meaning minimal dependencies, and generic meaning it can handle multiple situations, not just the one initially envisioned. Being able to write modular and generic code is definitely professional IMO.
Fixing someone else's code is a great way to learn how to write code. Not the algorithm, but the commenting and readability and maintainability.
Other things to make novices more professional:
1) Try and stick to "best practices". Things like "DRY" - don't repeat yourself (don't copy code). Helps maintainability dramatically.
2) Get an idea of patterns.
3) Joining groups like the Linux Foundation or ACM or other professional groups.
4) Reading some of the books called out in other posts in this thread.
Being professional to me means being able to write functional, readable and maintainable code. You get better at the functional part from experience. You can get pretty far I think with readable and maintainable code right much earlier in the career.
From "Harrison Bergeron", by Kurt Vonnegut:
"In the year 2081, amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, radios inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.
One April, 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron, an intelligent and athletic teenager, is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, by the government. They are barely aware of the tragedy, as Hazel has "average" intelligence (a euphemism for stupidity), and George has a handicap radio installed by the government to regulate his above-average intelligence.
Hazel and George watch ballet on television. They comment on the dancers, who are weighed down to counteract their gracefulness and masked to hide their attractiveness. George's thoughts are continually interrupted by the different noises emitted by his handicap radio, which piques Hazel's curiosity and imagination regarding handicaps. Noticing his exhaustion, Hazel urges George to lie down and rest his "handicap bag", 47 pounds (21 kg) of weights locked around George's neck. She suggests taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but George resists, aware of the illegality of such an action...."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
It's called 'corporate looting' or 'bankrupty for profit'. The (nobel laureate - or at least it equivalent in economics) husband of the current Federal Reserve (US central bank) chief co-authored a paper about it.(PDF)
Let's be honest: guns are an inexpensive handheld point-and-click device designed to kill things.
If an atomic/molecular/yet-unguessed-at structure can be held in stasis for 10K-to-50K years, and then (re) animated, what exactly is life?
The two most basic indicators of life are a) replication of itself and b) information gathering via DNA or some other mechanism.
The common result of life is an overall increase in entropy, although it decreases for subsystems.
But what exactly is it? When can we make it in the lab from scratch?
Ruth Porat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Google to Pay New CFO Ruth Porat More Than $70 Million": https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
She's worth 10's if not 100's of millions of dollars and yet she's still working. This is just a salary bargaining ploy nonsense. That's why the article doesn't make any sense.
Only the poorly educated say 'learnt' in the US (it's 'learned') here, but using a 't' for past tense is a legitimate British grammar construct. I've seen terms like this in respected British publications. More here.
It's like the Toyota HiLux (Tacoma), which seems to be the most popular gun truck of the world's war zones ("the vehicular equivalent of the AK-47").
I do like contrarians, as they force me to examine my position, which I appreciate. As the saying goes, "If you don't understand your opponent's position, then you do not truly understand your own."
For Carrie Fisher, she was a central character, Princess Leia, in George Lucas' 1977 epic hit, "Star Wars", which redefined cinematography and the cinema. Thus, she became a part of cinema history. Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, C3PO, R2D2 and Vader are all part of cinema's pantheon. Because it all came together for a brief shining moment in that movie, which went on to influence the cinema till this day.
That's why she was a noteworthy figure. And she nailed the role. She may not have done much nearly as noteworthy since, but being part of an epic is very hard to follow up.
"We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." -- Ben Franklin, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 1776.
They get the benefits of American infrastructure and foreign labor costs. Why wouldn't a company do this?
In order to stop [universally agreed bad thing], we must control/penalize [thing associated with it].
In order to stop [school shootings] we must control/penalize [video games]
In order to stop [school shootings] we must control/penalize [guns]
In order to stop [human trafficking] we must control/penalize [porn]
In order to stop [human trafficking] we must control/penalize [prostitution]
In order to stop [human trafficking] we must control/penalize [strip clubs]
In order to stop [obesity] we must control/penalize [certain foods]
In order to stop [obesity] we must control/penalize [lack of exercise]
In order to stop [impaired driving] we must control/penalize [alcohol]
In order to stop [impaired driving] we must control/penalize [marijuana]
In order to stop [car crash deaths] we must control/penalize [driving]
In order to stop [car crash deaths] we must control/penalize [pedestrians]
In order to stop [car crash deaths] we must control/penalize [roadborne transport of fuel]
Keynes said, "In the long run we are all dead." Keynes is seen as the Moses of modern economic thought. This mentality explains quite a bit about US economic and business policy.
About events without a political implication? Local, established media is best.
About events with political implications? It requires consulting multiple sources, with the MSM as one of those sources.
"We have always been at war with Eastasia." -- George Orwell, "1984"
Only after the election, after months of telling us Clinton had a lock on the election, NOW the MSM is suddenly howling about "fake news."
Methinks they doth protest too much.