The best reason for avoiding assembly is that it's almost never the fastest way to get the programming done, and with a good C compiler it may not be the fastest way for the program to run, either. Assembly is great for bootstrapping a compiler or OS and inside tight loops. It can be handy if your hardware has an advanced feature not yet exposed through a library for a higher-level language. Not everything needs it, though.
Even C or C++ is often not the fastest way to get a project done. Sometimes there's a pretty big runtime penalty for using something that enables faster development, though.
There are lots of cases out there of Lua, Python, or some other language being used to wrap around a small core of C or C++ with maybe the most time-critical parts in assembly. Sometimes a higher-level language is the right tool for the situation, but sometimes not.
In the Midwest it's common for a city or town to draw from the nearby major rivers like the Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Des Moines, and Ohio then treat that water for the tap. Then they take the sewage, separate out the solids, treat the liquids, and release that downstream.
I'm not sure I'd bitch so much about drinking what my own city or county was purifying on both ends. In the Midwest people are drinking what's been treated for drinking by their city, town, county, or water district but which was treated as wastewater by whoever was upstream. In the spring, sometimes the sewage treatment plants upstream flood. (A few cities and towns even continue to get fines from the EPA for their stormwater and sewage drains combined, so that flash flooding brings sewage up into their own streets.)
It's worked for decades elsewhere to re-treat wastewater as drinking water. California's supposed to be the progressive leader on this sort of thing. It's time they caught up.
I think you're conflating "talent" and "higher level of complex intellectual ability", AKA "intelligence". Logic, syntax, and calling conventions can be taught. Some of the things that make a programmer vastly more efficient are specific portions of intelligence: pattern recognition, long-term memory, holding a large working set in short-term memory, juxtaposition of one situation against another, and ability to abstract generalities.
This sounds an awful lot like one part of the group has been promoted to this level of schooling without strong fundamentals important to CS. There's little reason to believe there are people who just "get it" vs. people who don't. There's plenty of reason to believe that some of them have a background that prepared them to understand the material while some haven't.
Is this a talent issue, though, or a failure in the foundations of earlier math classes upon which calculus is building? Sure, if somebody never grasps the basics of programming you're not going to want them to program your pacemaker. I don't think anyone is arguing that.
This isn't because there's a natural U-curve. It's a resource restriction, maximizing the talent chosen for further instruction because far more people were accepted into the program than the school ever intended on having graduate from that program. It's not a "rock stars" vs. "useless programmers" distinction. It's that there's a limited number of seats in the 200 levels, so you may as well thin the herd by throwing something hard but useful out as an obstacle.
The camps here are "worthy of further investment" and "we're sorry but you didn't make the cut". Not everyone who makes the cut is at the very top, and not everyone who missed the cut couldn't have been taught the whole curriculum. There's just a need for the school to focus its resources, and the cutoff is arbitrary for external real-world reasons.
Quality online courses and tutoring services may actually help with this sort of either/or selection. No school is likely to want to graduate the 0.2 X programmer, but most would be happy to graduate a good deal many more 1.5 X to 4.5 X folks along with their 6 X to 9 X developers.
Rails fell off a bridge. Rails is a framework, though. Ruby's still useful without it. It's no more useful than Perl, Python, Clojure, or Javascript, but it's useful. Some quite useful things that aren't blogs are written in it. Puppet's one example.
I think in the context of the thread AC meant "good UI library that ties in well to the CLR". Sure, there's Qt, Wx, Gtk, SDL, Tk, etc etc. But how well do those tie into C# and let you run on Windows, Linux, and other platforms with Mono?
It's not important to know a bunch of languages deeply. I think it's important to learn two or three languages fairly deeply and a few more at a shallower level.
One doesn't really know the right tool for the job until there's some experience with multiple tools. The more different the other languages are from you main language, the better one can judge the best tool. There are lots of different types of languages, and knowing a few types, their advantages, and their disadvantages can be really helpful.
An Algol family language, particularly from the Modula/Pascal/Ada/Object Pascal family or the C/C++/ObjectiveC/Java/D family, is a good choice for getting practical work done. Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Rust, Go, Lua, Erlang, or something else fairly popular and a little more separated from those other Algol-derived languages but not terribly so is not a bad second choice. It's good to be familiar with something from the functional camp: Lisp/Scheme/Arc/NewLisp or ML/SML of NJ/CAML/OCAML or maybe Haskell. Stack-based languages like Forth or Factor can be handy to learn, or something else in postfix like Postscript. Something actor-based or dataflow-based can open some lines of thought. Assembly isn't used directly much anymore, but nobody ever became a worse programmer from understanding it.
People hearing "may I submit you?" are not getting job offers. They are getting recruitment contact. It takes several more steps than that to actually be offered a job in most cases.
EXOS is in Caddo Mills, which is literally down the road from Heath where Carmack lives. It's running without his participation but it's claiming the successes of Armadillo on its web site. They are in old Armadillo facilities.
I think no matter what, there's a lot of Carmack's influence left there. I wouldn't be surprised if he kicks in some funding.
Well, they sure as hell shouldn't be for government-enforced monopolies and escape from market forces considering they're supposed to favor letting the markets work things out.
I thought Libertarians wanted few, small, sensible regulations. I thought they were for small government, small businesses, market pressures, and local control. Unfortunately Rand Paul thinks that these government-enabled monopolies remaining government-enabled monopolies is a good thing. That means that either the Libertarian platform is completely different from how it's been pitched to me or he's a full of shit big-business statist.
There are lots of sources for non-DRM music. Not so much for movies, unless you fancy VHS. There's been a mix in the thread of people talking about music and people talking about movies, sometimes in the same posts.
There are other DRM-based movie stores that aren't Apple. There are also other DRM-based stores for music. There are also non-DRM-based stores for music. IIRC, some iTunes stuff is even non-DRM.
There's no one single answer, but there are lots of options. Unfortunately none of those options are perfect for movies.
There are other stores that sell music and movies legally. If you bought from Apple or anyone else something that's controlled by DRM your goods are subject to that DRM. If you bought someone else's DRM-encumbered stuff, it's not at all impacted by this. If you bought non-DRM stuff, it's not impacted by this. If you upgrade to a halfway recent OS, you're not impacted by this.
"Or from which store should one have lawfully purchased movies instead?"
^^^^^ That part of the fucking question right there. ^^^^^
There are other stores that sell music and movies legally. If you bought from Apple or anyone else something that's controlled by DRM your goods are subject to that DRM. If you bought someone else's DRM-encumbered stuff, it's not at all impacted by this. If you bought non-DRM stuff, it's not impacted by this. If you upgrade to a halfway recent OS, you're not impacted by this.
If you have the money to throw at a huge library of DRM-encumbered stuff, spend $80 on Windows 7 for goodness sake.
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Assembly can call C libraries on most systems. Then again, so can Perl, Python, and Scheme.
The best reason for avoiding assembly is that it's almost never the fastest way to get the programming done, and with a good C compiler it may not be the fastest way for the program to run, either. Assembly is great for bootstrapping a compiler or OS and inside tight loops. It can be handy if your hardware has an advanced feature not yet exposed through a library for a higher-level language. Not everything needs it, though.
Even C or C++ is often not the fastest way to get a project done. Sometimes there's a pretty big runtime penalty for using something that enables faster development, though.
There are lots of cases out there of Lua, Python, or some other language being used to wrap around a small core of C or C++ with maybe the most time-critical parts in assembly. Sometimes a higher-level language is the right tool for the situation, but sometimes not.
In the Midwest it's common for a city or town to draw from the nearby major rivers like the Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Des Moines, and Ohio then treat that water for the tap. Then they take the sewage, separate out the solids, treat the liquids, and release that downstream.
I'm not sure I'd bitch so much about drinking what my own city or county was purifying on both ends. In the Midwest people are drinking what's been treated for drinking by their city, town, county, or water district but which was treated as wastewater by whoever was upstream. In the spring, sometimes the sewage treatment plants upstream flood. (A few cities and towns even continue to get fines from the EPA for their stormwater and sewage drains combined, so that flash flooding brings sewage up into their own streets.)
It's worked for decades elsewhere to re-treat wastewater as drinking water. California's supposed to be the progressive leader on this sort of thing. It's time they caught up.
This is what the attackers want. They want to erode the freedoms of Western secular societies. The Charlie Hebdo attackers have won.
Couldn't it be that those few are just very far to the right of a normal bell curve or a power curve rather than on an inverted bell?
I think you're conflating "talent" and "higher level of complex intellectual ability", AKA "intelligence". Logic, syntax, and calling conventions can be taught. Some of the things that make a programmer vastly more efficient are specific portions of intelligence: pattern recognition, long-term memory, holding a large working set in short-term memory, juxtaposition of one situation against another, and ability to abstract generalities.
This sounds an awful lot like one part of the group has been promoted to this level of schooling without strong fundamentals important to CS. There's little reason to believe there are people who just "get it" vs. people who don't. There's plenty of reason to believe that some of them have a background that prepared them to understand the material while some haven't.
As a hybrid solution, take shares quarterly along with your pay, and no BS about having to stay there through a layoff to get them vested.
Is this a talent issue, though, or a failure in the foundations of earlier math classes upon which calculus is building? Sure, if somebody never grasps the basics of programming you're not going to want them to program your pacemaker. I don't think anyone is arguing that.
This isn't because there's a natural U-curve. It's a resource restriction, maximizing the talent chosen for further instruction because far more people were accepted into the program than the school ever intended on having graduate from that program. It's not a "rock stars" vs. "useless programmers" distinction. It's that there's a limited number of seats in the 200 levels, so you may as well thin the herd by throwing something hard but useful out as an obstacle.
The camps here are "worthy of further investment" and "we're sorry but you didn't make the cut". Not everyone who makes the cut is at the very top, and not everyone who missed the cut couldn't have been taught the whole curriculum. There's just a need for the school to focus its resources, and the cutoff is arbitrary for external real-world reasons.
Quality online courses and tutoring services may actually help with this sort of either/or selection. No school is likely to want to graduate the 0.2 X programmer, but most would be happy to graduate a good deal many more 1.5 X to 4.5 X folks along with their 6 X to 9 X developers.
Programming is a lot like music. The best composers know which songs are worthy of having phrases stolen.
Rails fell off a bridge. Rails is a framework, though. Ruby's still useful without it. It's no more useful than Perl, Python, Clojure, or Javascript, but it's useful. Some quite useful things that aren't blogs are written in it. Puppet's one example.
I think in the context of the thread AC meant "good UI library that ties in well to the CLR". Sure, there's Qt, Wx, Gtk, SDL, Tk, etc etc. But how well do those tie into C# and let you run on Windows, Linux, and other platforms with Mono?
I agree, but I'd like to expand a bit.
It's not important to know a bunch of languages deeply. I think it's important to learn two or three languages fairly deeply and a few more at a shallower level.
One doesn't really know the right tool for the job until there's some experience with multiple tools. The more different the other languages are from you main language, the better one can judge the best tool. There are lots of different types of languages, and knowing a few types, their advantages, and their disadvantages can be really helpful.
An Algol family language, particularly from the Modula/Pascal/Ada/Object Pascal family or the C/C++/ObjectiveC/Java/D family, is a good choice for getting practical work done. Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Rust, Go, Lua, Erlang, or something else fairly popular and a little more separated from those other Algol-derived languages but not terribly so is not a bad second choice. It's good to be familiar with something from the functional camp: Lisp/Scheme/Arc/NewLisp or ML/SML of NJ/CAML/OCAML or maybe Haskell. Stack-based languages like Forth or Factor can be handy to learn, or something else in postfix like Postscript. Something actor-based or dataflow-based can open some lines of thought. Assembly isn't used directly much anymore, but nobody ever became a worse programmer from understanding it.
Also "M".
People hearing "may I submit you?" are not getting job offers. They are getting recruitment contact. It takes several more steps than that to actually be offered a job in most cases.
EXOS is in Caddo Mills, which is literally down the road from Heath where Carmack lives. It's running without his participation but it's claiming the successes of Armadillo on its web site. They are in old Armadillo facilities.
I think no matter what, there's a lot of Carmack's influence left there. I wouldn't be surprised if he kicks in some funding.
Well, they sure as hell shouldn't be for government-enforced monopolies and escape from market forces considering they're supposed to favor letting the markets work things out.
John Carmack is "only" a multi-millionaire but there is Armadillo Aerospace. Carmack always could do more with fewer resources.
I thought Libertarians wanted few, small, sensible regulations. I thought they were for small government, small businesses, market pressures, and local control. Unfortunately Rand Paul thinks that these government-enabled monopolies remaining government-enabled monopolies is a good thing. That means that either the Libertarian platform is completely different from how it's been pitched to me or he's a full of shit big-business statist.
There are lots of sources for non-DRM music. Not so much for movies, unless you fancy VHS. There's been a mix in the thread of people talking about music and people talking about movies, sometimes in the same posts.
There are other DRM-based movie stores that aren't Apple. There are also other DRM-based stores for music. There are also non-DRM-based stores for music. IIRC, some iTunes stuff is even non-DRM.
There's no one single answer, but there are lots of options. Unfortunately none of those options are perfect for movies.
Where did I say "there's a DRM-free movie store"?
Let me quote to you what you quoted of mine:
There are other stores that sell music and movies legally. If you bought from Apple or anyone else something that's controlled by DRM your goods are subject to that DRM. If you bought someone else's DRM-encumbered stuff, it's not at all impacted by this. If you bought non-DRM stuff, it's not impacted by this. If you upgrade to a halfway recent OS, you're not impacted by this.
Some eBooks from Googe Play Books are DRM free. Some from Nook are. Better World Books will scan and recycle a paper book and send you the PDF.
"Or from which store should one have lawfully purchased movies instead?"
^^^^^ That part of the fucking question right there. ^^^^^
There are other stores that sell music and movies legally. If you bought from Apple or anyone else something that's controlled by DRM your goods are subject to that DRM. If you bought someone else's DRM-encumbered stuff, it's not at all impacted by this. If you bought non-DRM stuff, it's not impacted by this. If you upgrade to a halfway recent OS, you're not impacted by this.
If you have the money to throw at a huge library of DRM-encumbered stuff, spend $80 on Windows 7 for goodness sake.
You can buy music places that let you listen to it without DRM. EMusic. Bandcamp. Megatunes. Oddly enough, FYE if you don't mind physical media.