Send them to any "intro" class at the nearest community college. There is no faster way for them to find out what's available and where they stand in terms of skill and interest.
Ha, ha, ha!
I can just see trying to tell a 12 year old, that he has to take a college class to learn to program. That's really going to spark his/her interest!
Actually, given this scenario of enabling a kid to learn programming, I'd absolutely point them at Java.
I tried this once. I wanted to show my 11 year old son how to code in Java. So I tried to show him how to write a simple program to solve a homework problem - solving a simple equation.
The first step was to read two decimal numbers from the console. When I got lost among the various stream classes, I gave up. I could figure this out, but how would I explain it to an 11 year old? And not bore him to death?
True, but you're forgetting that back in the 60's and 70's, GHz-based transmissions were pretty much unheard of at 30,000 feet so various electronic packages aren't shielded adequately.
But you don't have to worry about this while at 30,000 feet. Up there airplanes are separated by miles.
It's near the ground, while landing in bad weather that the navigational systems interference could cause a disaster.
Mind you, if the weather is nice and the pilots can see out the window, you don't need those silly instruments.
That's also were I read my first Matrix-like story, roughly 20 years ago. Tichy meets a guy who emulates people's lifes with boxes full of tapes that are the different paths they can chose. He descibes the people's lives. Of course one of them is a guy who emulates peoples lifes etc.
Yea! That was one of the first Lem stories I read when I was 12 (which was a long looooong time ago...). I've read everything he wrote since then...
Not to offend anyone, but I've never really gotten the whole obsession with Ender's game. (I've only read the first book in the series). It seemed like a pretty good story to me, but it's not like you put it down after reading it and think "that story completely changed the way I see the world."
You should try reading "Speaker for the Dead". It's a quite different book and I think touches much deeper subjects, that a lot of SF just ignores.
But if you are looking for more deeper science fiction novels I suggest pretty much anything by Stanislav Lem (even "Solaris"). If you feel ambitious start with "Fiasco".
The songwriter has the right to choose how his or her work is distributed and for what cost if any.
Wrong! The songwriter doesn't have a "right". A songwriter is granted a temporary monopoly on distribution of copies in exchange for publishing the work.
I managed to squeeze an almost 20 year career out of coding, and have had a great time. I'm at the end of that path now, however. Time to get on a new one that has solid employment and advancement opportunities for people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond.
You gave up after 20 years! I've been coding for over 25 and still going strong. I have no plans to stop:-)
My first programs were in FORTRAN, for the moment I'm doing Java, and I'm hoping for Lisp in another 10 years...
Well, you can make them stay in the office longer. However, the number of hours you stay in the office is not a good measure of productivity. Just like countings lines of code.
If you spend a week writing and debugging 2000 lines of code, and I spend half an hour downloading an open source lib from the net that does the same thing and more and solves the same problem, who is more productive?
But that's been held illegal before. Napster ran a search engine and was destroyed over it. It's because, without getting into the nitty gritty of contributory and vicarious infringement, you're helping other people infringe.
Not quite the same. Napster provided an index of only MP3 files and means for people to connect and talk to each other to swap files.
These guys were running an indexing program that searched all the shared drives on the local network and produced an index of the files.
Now if many people had MP3 files on their shared drives, then others could find them and copy using software from MS (:-)).
People can still search other shared drives on the network, without the index. Word of mouth works nearly as well..
Not that Napster was sooo horrible to the record companies. It probably encouraged CD sales, just like radio does (except these days radio sucks big time).
Of course the RIAA only sent the message to people who were actually breaking the law. Why would they send it to those who weren't? If they had, you would have bitched about it anyway, probably more so.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha, ha, ha!
I can just see trying to tell a 12 year old, that he has to take a college class to learn to program. That's really going to spark his/her interest!
I tried this once. I wanted to show my 11 year old son how to code in Java. So I tried to show him how to write a simple program to solve a homework problem - solving a simple equation.
The first step was to read two decimal numbers from the console. When I got lost among the various stream classes, I gave up. I could figure this out, but how would I explain it to an 11 year old? And not bore him to death?
I thought that above 29,000 vertical separation is 2000 feet. But I'm not an IFR rated pilot.
But you don't have to worry about this while at 30,000 feet. Up there airplanes are separated by miles.
It's near the ground, while landing in bad weather that the navigational systems interference could cause a disaster.
Mind you, if the weather is nice and the pilots can see out the window, you don't need those silly instruments.
Yea! That was one of the first Lem stories I read when I was 12 (which was a long looooong time ago...). I've read everything he wrote since then...
You should try reading "Speaker for the Dead". It's a quite different book and I think touches much deeper subjects, that a lot of SF just ignores.
But if you are looking for more deeper science fiction novels I suggest pretty much anything by Stanislav Lem (even "Solaris"). If you feel ambitious start with "Fiasco".
Look up options pricing for example...
You have to like programming computers - which is bit different than just liking computers.
If you want to work programming in any investment bank, you better learn a lot more math than just three semesters of calculus.
But only, if you want to make real money..
Hey, let's find some DASD-ee. You know IEFBR14 was my favorite mainframe program. Stick that in your partitioned data set!
On the other hand under MVS you have dynamic linking (sort of like Java) :-)
Hmmmm.... you mean like etree.org
Well, they maybe fast but less likely to be correct. But then correctness is soooo overrated.
Hi, Walt.. ;-)
I was just trying to point out that copyright is not a "right" like free speech, but a grant from the public.
Wrong! The songwriter doesn't have a "right". A songwriter is granted a temporary monopoly on distribution of copies in exchange for publishing the work.
The songwriter has a right not to publish...
Yeah, I've been reading this book on and off. It's hard to read a book on a language when you don't have time to code in it.
I also go back to "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"...
Maybe 200 lines of Python.. ;-)
It's an itch I haven't had to scratch.
* Why don't more Fortune 500 companies run MySQL instead of Oracle?
Come back and ask this question two years from now.
You gave up after 20 years! I've been coding for over 25 and still going strong. I have no plans to stop :-)
My first programs were in FORTRAN, for the moment I'm doing Java, and I'm hoping for Lisp in another 10 years...
Well, you can make them stay in the office longer. However, the number of hours you stay in the office is not a good measure of productivity. Just like countings lines of code.
If you spend a week writing and debugging 2000 lines of code, and I spend half an hour downloading an open source lib from the net that does the same thing and more and solves the same problem, who is more productive?
http://www.intellij.com/idea/
Not quite the same. Napster provided an index of only MP3 files and means for people to connect and talk to each other to swap files.
These guys were running an indexing program that searched all the shared drives on the local network and produced an index of the files.
Now if many people had MP3 files on their shared drives, then others could find them and copy using software from MS (:-)).
People can still search other shared drives on the network, without the index. Word of mouth works nearly as well..
Not that Napster was sooo horrible to the record companies. It probably encouraged CD sales, just like radio does (except these days radio sucks big time).
Actually, one of these guys was running a search engine. Since when is that illegal!?
I'd love to see someone create a system that actually allowed true borrowing of other people's music/movies
You may have heard of this - it's called a library.
And how did they know these people broke the law?