You're saying X billion of people and thousands of years of tradition cannot be wrong.
But of course it can be. History has demonstrated this countless times.
I don't believe in any God as described in most western religions, and I'm pretty much anti-religion (though not anti-deist). Yet still I can happily debate with people on theology and religion related philosophy, just as an intellectual stimulation, like playing a logic game. I don't accuse people of mental illness because that ruins the game, but it doesn't mean I don't think that way.
You also wouldn't see famous people's accusations of such widely published because that discredits the religious folks.
Learning to read one after you learned the other is relatively trivial.
The hard part is really to learn to read either one. As somebody who have fond memories of nights of painstaking hard work in primary school just to memorize the characters, I say it's not going to be a fun process.
The GP is a nice troll, but he does have his points.
Chinese is my native and "first language" (though I'd argue English is my preferred language for reading and writing), but I still think that learning Chinese is really fscking difficult, for a lot of reasons that includes his list and more.
The 50 number is simply wrong, but the others things (even if somewhat rude and racy) aren't that far off from the truth.
I guess most people that you know who are "fluent" in Chinese (without any cultural or ethnic ties) may be fluent in speaking and listening only. Learning the characters (for reading and writing) takes a painstaking few years, and actually a lot of ethnic Chinese raised in a non-Chinese using place don't even bother to learn it, but they can "fluently" speak the language.
Japanese is quite a different language (as far as I can tell, I don't speak it), and you can often get by without learning a lot of Kanji. The number of Chinese characters you need to learn is probably at least a few times more than Japanese Kanji before you can use the language meaningfully.
So you're turning down an offer based purely on speculation and gossip?
I know Apple hating is becoming the new trend, but seriously, almost all your claims are baseless with publicly available information -- or do you know something we (or I) don't know about?
Come on, you seriously think only in Communist China do people lipsync on stage?
And what's wrong with digital fireworks? Do you think realistic computer rendered animations are bad too? Or do you believe that every single bit of the movies you watch are "real"?
Gosh you guys (you and the moderators who modded this up) are dense.
> or anything that remotely resists MacDonalds and Starbucks Actually, MacDonalds and Starbucks could be found almost everywhere in major cities in China. No resistance there.
Though, FYI, they seem to be more fixated on KFC. For some reason the KFC knockoffs (or simply using the name in an unrelated business, eg. "KFC Motors"), is ubiquitous.
I'm not saying Google is doing anything wrong, but let's *assume* that Google is doing shady things (like "stealing trade secrets" as alleged by Paypal) to harm their competitors, shouldn't those competitors be allowed to bitch and moan too?
It doesn't always have to be you (or the customer) who's harmed before they can be rightfully accused of any wrongdoing.
Q)Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road? A)to To other side. get the Q)Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road? A)other to side. To the get
I can imagine still using C or some variants of C in 30 years. After all, it survived for more than 30 years, it should be able to survive 30 more.
In these 30 years, how many times will you expect me to apply automata theory?
And "practical" subjects do not have to be crappy trade school stuff. For one, if they could somehow hammer into students' heads how to tell "good code" from "bad code", common tricks to avoid code duplication, various dead ends in software design, how not to overarchitecture a project, etc... those would be very useful "practical" skills that likely would serve them for a very long time.
Of course, don't ask me how to design a curriculum to achieve that.
Perhaps you come from a slightly different background, where you do all the dull work. There are different worlds out there.
It's testing, documenting, retesting, standards compliance and more documentation and testing.
I'm a software engineer by trade, and I most certainly don't spend most of my time testing. I spend time designing and implementing software -- usually correctly. We certainly test our stuff, but having programmers do the testing is really a bad idea. I hope where you work, the QA team are not the same people who developed the system, right? It's like asking a company to do its own auditing.
Just look at the difference between an amateur/hobbyist piece of open-source stuff and professional quality work
"Amateur open source stuff" like Linux, and "Professional quality work" like Windows? Yeah right.
if anything, people who have taught themselves programming should be excluded from CS courses. All professionals have heard (and some believe) the old saying: ""It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." Except now, yo can replace BASIC with pretty much any language.
I had at least 5 years of programming experience before university. By your standards, I must be doomed beyond redemption. Perhaps I really am.
Perhaps you're the kind who insists having a complete spec for a login screen, then a hundred unit tests for the password validation routines, 10 pages of documentation of what constitutes a valid user name, UML diagrams for all the classes (two hundred of them, including AbstractUsernameValidatorFactory), then you start writing the code.
Of course, this takes your team three months to do it, while my brain damaged soul completes it in two days. "What about testing?" -- well, every engineer in my team is expected to be able to write a login page without serious bugs.
And I didn't even major in CS, nor any IT related discipline.
And after reading your objections to the orchestra analogy, I think I agree more with the analogy.
You said:
There is no room, in professional music, for someone who is not very good, or just learning, or who lacks experience. The musicians who play in orchestras at anything approaching a high level have a degree of musical ability that I find absolutely astounding; the difference between a very good hobbyist musician and a professional or semi-professional is like night and day. That ability is normally the result of spending 30 hours or more a week, every week, practising or learning under the tuition of an excellent player for 15 or more years. And the competition is such that that is effectively the minimum level of ability required to play in a good orchestra. Many of the musicians will be far better and far more experienced than that.
Replace "music" with "software development", "musicians" with "programmers" and you'll still be correct. Let's try:
There is no room, in professional software development, for someone who is not very good, or just learning, or who lacks experience Of course this just begs the question what is "professional" software development -- but ask anyone who managed a software project that didn't fail, I think all of them will say they key to success is finding the best developers.
The programmers who work on software projects at anything approaching a high level have a degree of ability that I find absolutely astounding I'm sure most non-techies will find us absolutely astounding when we stare at apparently gibberish and understand it.
the difference between a hobbyist programmer and a professional or semi-professional is like night and day I think this is well settled. Of course, I do count "hobbyists" such as Linus Torvalds as professionals.
That ability is normally the result of spending 30 hours or more a week, every week, practising or learning... for 15 or more years Programmers normally don't take apprentices, but most good professional programmers have quite a few years of experience -- just perhaps not as much as 15.
And the competition is such that that is effectively the minimum level of ability required to work in a good software company. Many of the musicians will be far better and far more experienced than that. We all know how hard the interview questions are for the big name software companies, particularly the one starting with G.
----- With regards to your other points:
In contrast, programming is a career in which a person can grow on-the-job not only from "excellent" to "phenomenal" but from "not particularly good, but promising", to "good", and then on to "excellent" and "phenomenal" after another 10 or 20 years
Perhaps I don't know as many programmers as you do, but I have *never* seen a programmer improve substantially after a few years on the job. Sure, they will become more experienced and knowledgeable, but from "not particularly good" to "execellent" or "phenomenal"? Doubtful. Perhaps you really haven't seen the good programmers. As I've mentioned, they are like night and day when compared with the mediocre.
There are plenty of roles for people who can code slowly but proficiently
Absolutely. But if you look at the rants by people in the software industry, none of them complain about how *slow* people code --- most of them complain loudly about how *crap* the code is. If only the "less talented" CS students were only slow.
in functional languages. Suppose he really used an hour and five analogies (which I presume involved an analogy with mathematical functions), I can't see the perfect fit.
I too, never got functional programming. Most real world problems that I'm interested in are too I/O intensive, and when I come across problems that are well solved by functional languages, I can still use python/ruby/etc as a poor but acceptable substitute.
It is rare to find an article that attempts to analyze legal issues on OSS licenses that is even more horrifying than the worst comments from people pretending to be lawyers on Slashdot.
I don't tend to complain about article quality on slashdot, but this one is pretty extreme. The whole article is basically some random dude making himself look like an idiot by being clueless about OSS licenses and then pretends to be a lawyer. At least on Slashdot, people do know OSI approved licenses do not require source to be provided with the binary.
Slashdot Mirror
The world outside America is imaginary and therefore does not exist.
What actual examples are you speaking of?
Where are the haters?
If some hot new product had a flaw that affects a large portion of its users, and slashdot reports it, there are Google haters now?
Even TFA was more pro-google than anti-google:
Google+ is already fantastic product
So where are the haters? If anything, slashdot users are (IMHO) overwhelmingly pro-Google.
You're saying X billion of people and thousands of years of tradition cannot be wrong.
But of course it can be. History has demonstrated this countless times.
I don't believe in any God as described in most western religions, and I'm pretty much anti-religion (though not anti-deist). Yet still I can happily debate with people on theology and religion related philosophy, just as an intellectual stimulation, like playing a logic game. I don't accuse people of mental illness because that ruins the game, but it doesn't mean I don't think that way.
You also wouldn't see famous people's accusations of such widely published because that discredits the religious folks.
Well, my anecdote here: I can read a Japanese newspaper and understand roughly what the topic is about.
And I know almost no Japanese.
But then maybe if I were forced to interpret it in detail, I'd probably sound hilarious too......
Learning to read one after you learned the other is relatively trivial.
The hard part is really to learn to read either one. As somebody who have fond memories of nights of painstaking hard work in primary school just to memorize the characters, I say it's not going to be a fun process.
The GP is a nice troll, but he does have his points.
Chinese is my native and "first language" (though I'd argue English is my preferred language for reading and writing), but I still think that learning Chinese is really fscking difficult, for a lot of reasons that includes his list and more.
The 50 number is simply wrong, but the others things (even if somewhat rude and racy) aren't that far off from the truth.
I guess most people that you know who are "fluent" in Chinese (without any cultural or ethnic ties) may be fluent in speaking and listening only. Learning the characters (for reading and writing) takes a painstaking few years, and actually a lot of ethnic Chinese raised in a non-Chinese using place don't even bother to learn it, but they can "fluently" speak the language.
Japanese is quite a different language (as far as I can tell, I don't speak it), and you can often get by without learning a lot of Kanji. The number of Chinese characters you need to learn is probably at least a few times more than Japanese Kanji before you can use the language meaningfully.
"Traditional" Chinese usually means the non-simplified characters that Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc uses.
So you're turning down an offer based purely on speculation and gossip?
I know Apple hating is becoming the new trend, but seriously, almost all your claims are baseless with publicly available information -- or do you know something we (or I) don't know about?
Come on, you seriously think only in Communist China do people lipsync on stage?
And what's wrong with digital fireworks? Do you think realistic computer rendered animations are bad too? Or do you believe that every single bit of the movies you watch are "real"?
Gosh you guys (you and the moderators who modded this up) are dense.
You can rule your phone completely with Android.
Hah. I really have no interest in being welcomed as my phone's new overlord.....
They don't block English sites as much.
> or anything that remotely resists MacDonalds and Starbucks
Actually, MacDonalds and Starbucks could be found almost everywhere in major cities in China. No resistance there.
Though, FYI, they seem to be more fixated on KFC. For some reason the KFC knockoffs (or simply using the name in an unrelated business, eg. "KFC Motors"), is ubiquitous.
Heh, you think you're clever now?
Suppose those activists actually do something good for a change and terrorize big pharma, patent trolls, "IP right lobbyists", and politicians.
Wouldn't it be better than attacking scientific research?
I'm not saying Google is doing anything wrong, but let's *assume* that Google is doing shady things (like "stealing trade secrets" as alleged by Paypal) to harm their competitors, shouldn't those competitors be allowed to bitch and moan too?
It doesn't always have to be you (or the customer) who's harmed before they can be rightfully accused of any wrongdoing.
Q)Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A)to To other side. get the
Q)Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A)other to side. To the get
eh.
" Why would I want to to kill Mr. Jones? " is not an admission of murder. It's more like denial.
I'm not a lawyer, but if your argument holds, you're going to be a great one.
Interesting how a *phone* would advertise a "feature" that only allows you to (voice) chat on the same platform... :)
Man, you work for bosses like this? No wonder they think they can get away with such abuse.
I can imagine still using C or some variants of C in 30 years. After all, it survived for more than 30 years, it should be able to survive 30 more.
In these 30 years, how many times will you expect me to apply automata theory?
And "practical" subjects do not have to be crappy trade school stuff. For one, if they could somehow hammer into students' heads how to tell "good code" from "bad code", common tricks to avoid code duplication, various dead ends in software design, how not to overarchitecture a project, etc... those would be very useful "practical" skills that likely would serve them for a very long time.
Of course, don't ask me how to design a curriculum to achieve that.
Perhaps you come from a slightly different background, where you do all the dull work. There are different worlds out there.
It's testing, documenting, retesting, standards compliance and more documentation and testing.
I'm a software engineer by trade, and I most certainly don't spend most of my time testing. I spend time designing and implementing software -- usually correctly. We certainly test our stuff, but having programmers do the testing is really a bad idea. I hope where you work, the QA team are not the same people who developed the system, right? It's like asking a company to do its own auditing.
Just look at the difference between an amateur/hobbyist piece of open-source stuff and professional quality work
"Amateur open source stuff" like Linux, and "Professional quality work" like Windows? Yeah right.
if anything, people who have taught themselves programming should be excluded from CS courses. All professionals have heard (and some believe) the old saying: ""It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." Except now, yo can replace BASIC with pretty much any language.
I had at least 5 years of programming experience before university. By your standards, I must be doomed beyond redemption. Perhaps I really am.
Perhaps you're the kind who insists having a complete spec for a login screen, then a hundred unit tests for the password validation routines, 10 pages of documentation of what constitutes a valid user name, UML diagrams for all the classes (two hundred of them, including AbstractUsernameValidatorFactory), then you start writing the code.
Of course, this takes your team three months to do it, while my brain damaged soul completes it in two days. "What about testing?" -- well, every engineer in my team is expected to be able to write a login page without serious bugs.
And I didn't even major in CS, nor any IT related discipline.
FYI, I just discovered that paper a few weeks ago.
http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf
As for the GP's claim that:
we were headed for a two-tier society, comprised of people who used computers and people who programmed computers
I can only say, it's really a three-tier society. The people who *programs other people*, the people who programs computers, and the rest.
I write software for a living, but these days I'm actually much more interested in "programming people".
And after reading your objections to the orchestra analogy, I think I agree more with the analogy.
You said:
There is no room, in professional music, for someone who is not very good, or just learning, or who lacks experience. The musicians who play in orchestras at anything approaching a high level have a degree of musical ability that I find absolutely astounding; the difference between a very good hobbyist musician and a professional or semi-professional is like night and day. That ability is normally the result of spending 30 hours or more a week, every week, practising or learning under the tuition of an excellent player for 15 or more years. And the competition is such that that is effectively the minimum level of ability required to play in a good orchestra. Many of the musicians will be far better and far more experienced than that.
Replace "music" with "software development", "musicians" with "programmers" and you'll still be correct. Let's try:
There is no room, in professional software development, for someone who is not very good, or just learning, or who lacks experience
Of course this just begs the question what is "professional" software development -- but ask anyone who managed a software project that didn't fail, I think all of them will say they key to success is finding the best developers.
The programmers who work on software projects at anything approaching a high level have a degree of ability that I find absolutely astounding
I'm sure most non-techies will find us absolutely astounding when we stare at apparently gibberish and understand it.
the difference between a hobbyist programmer and a professional or semi-professional is like night and day
I think this is well settled. Of course, I do count "hobbyists" such as Linus Torvalds as professionals.
That ability is normally the result of spending 30 hours or more a week, every week, practising or learning ... for 15 or more years
Programmers normally don't take apprentices, but most good professional programmers have quite a few years of experience -- just perhaps not as much as 15.
And the competition is such that that is effectively the minimum level of ability required to work in a good software company. Many of the musicians will be far better and far more experienced than that.
We all know how hard the interview questions are for the big name software companies, particularly the one starting with G.
-----
With regards to your other points:
In contrast, programming is a career in which a person can grow on-the-job not only from "excellent" to "phenomenal" but from "not particularly good, but promising", to "good", and then on to "excellent" and "phenomenal" after another 10 or 20 years
Perhaps I don't know as many programmers as you do, but I have *never* seen a programmer improve substantially after a few years on the job. Sure, they will become more experienced and knowledgeable, but from "not particularly good" to "execellent" or "phenomenal"? Doubtful. Perhaps you really haven't seen the good programmers. As I've mentioned, they are like night and day when compared with the mediocre.
There are plenty of roles for people who can code slowly but proficiently
Absolutely. But if you look at the rants by people in the software industry, none of them complain about how *slow* people code --- most of them complain loudly about how *crap* the code is. If only the "less talented" CS students were only slow.
That thing posted by OP is equivalent to
f(x,y) = x * y
in functional languages. Suppose he really used an hour and five analogies (which I presume involved an analogy with mathematical functions), I can't see the perfect fit.
I too, never got functional programming. Most real world problems that I'm interested in are too I/O intensive, and when I come across problems that are well solved by functional languages, I can still use python/ruby/etc as a poor but acceptable substitute.
It is rare to find an article that attempts to analyze legal issues on OSS licenses that is even more horrifying than the worst comments from people pretending to be lawyers on Slashdot.
I don't tend to complain about article quality on slashdot, but this one is pretty extreme. The whole article is basically some random dude making himself look like an idiot by being clueless about OSS licenses and then pretends to be a lawyer. At least on Slashdot, people do know OSI approved licenses do not require source to be provided with the binary.
AND, as others have already noticed, it's a dupe!
Duh. There aren't any competitors to Walmart inside Walmart.
I quote again, in case you've conveniently forgotten the context:
...except I am always free to shop at a Walmart competitor.
That option does not exist in Apple's brave new world.
Walmart only makes it harder for competitors to survive. It doesn't BAN them outright.