Many banks use multiple server platforms
on
JBoss Founder Interview
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· Score: 2, Informative
I work at one of the largest vendors of software for banks, and diversity of server platforms is a fact of life for our clients. Many banks are quite happy to continue using applications that were written 20 years ago, in RPG, for the IBM AS/400 platform. And it makes sense; those applications work quite well, and they represent millions of lines of code, which can't be thrown away just because RPG isn't a modern language.
Many of those same banks also have applications running on all sorts of Unix systems. And of course, Windows is widely used for front-office applications. Oh, and they all use different RDBMSs, too.
If you think it's easy to write, say, C++ applications that are portable across all those environments, I suspect that you've never really tried.
We've written our in-house middleware in Java; we develop on Windows desktop machines (alas!), and the code works out of the box on AS/400, Solaris and Linux, as well as with every RDBMS we've come across. It's an easy sell to our customers, many of whom have strict requirements about which operating systems they're willing to use for which projects. And we haven't spent any time porting our software.
I came to the United States about ten years ago. I was 15 at the time, and wasn't particularly fond of the idea of leaving all my friends behind, etc. My parents came here with hopes for a better life. My father was a electrician, had been working at a large company in Europe for about 20 years, but he felt he had a better oportunity here. My mother was a daycare teacher, and thought that coming here would be good for me and my siblings.
You've answered your own question. You did well in life because you got a good start: your parents were well-educated and supportive. If they had been illiterate, I doubt that you would have fared as well. Poverty breeds poverty.
There are about one million Americans who work full-time, but are still homeless. Moreover, there 1.2 billion people in the world who live on less than $1 a day. I find this unacceptable. Since I earn far more than most, I think it's right that I should give a large portion of my income to help those who are less well-off.
Unregulated speculation, particularly on the global currency markets, makes it impossible for poorer countries to maintain any sort of economic stability. Money floods in, transforming the economic landscape, then floods out just as quickly, leaving devastation in its wake. Hence the currency crisis in Southeast Asia in 1997, which caused widespread poverty. A minuscule tax on currency speculation would provide much-needed stability, and incidentally produce enough revenue to end world poverty. See http://attac.org.
There are few, if any, large corporations that aren't just as evil as Nike and Philip Morris. You can't vote with your dollars, because there's no real choice among corporations, just as you can't vote in the ballot booth, because there's no real choice among political parties.
As a software developer, I find the idea of software patents
abhorrent, for several reasons.
The global information infrastructure depends on the use of
open standards. Patents might have made sense in the days when
products from one vendor did not interact with products from another
vendor. However, computer programmes are increasingly interdependent.
For example, TCP/IP, the network protocol on which the Internet is
based, is in the public domain. If its authors had patented it, we
can be sure that the Internet would not exist today.
As software patents proliferate, it becomes increasingly
difficult, if not impossible, for most software companies to determine
whether any given piece of code that they are developing infringes on
one of the multitude of software patents in existence. The legal
risks of writing any computer programme could well become prohibitive.
This factor alone could cause innovation in the software industry to
grind to a halt.
Software patents cause the industry to waste time and effort. In some
cases, when a patent covers an algorithm which everyone desperately
needs, the industry as a whole works around the problem by creating
non-patented alternatives. This is what happened to the encryption
algorithm, RSA. (As a result, RSA has not renewed its patent, which
expired this year.) This process wastes time and money. Moreover,
the result is that the patent does not benefit its owner.
However, it is possible that a patent may be issued for an algorithm
that is universally needed, and for which no alternative can be
devised. In this case, we can expect several harmful effects. Large
companies, which can afford to pay the licence fees, will flourish at
the expense of smaller ones. Fewer applications will be developed
using the algorithm in question, and they will cost more; it will
therefore provide less benefit to society. Not only the software
industry, but the world as a whole, will be held to ransom. That is
precisely the sort of monopoly power that no company should have.
It is folly to think that software patents could be beneficial to the
industry or to society at large. They can only result in hopeless
legal quagmires, and in the stagnation of the software industry.
That's what digital signatures are for. It wouldn't be difficult to make a system that would digitally sign each card, and only accept cards bearing its own signature. The source-code for the system would still be open-source; the only secret would be the system's private signature key.
And while I'm at it, the NYC metrocard system is poorly designed from a mechanical point of view. It takes a considerable amount of practice to get the cards to swipe properly at the turnstile. Old folks seem to have quite a lot of trouble with it. Obviously this is because it's hard to make a system that works well with cards swiped at variable speeds. Why didn't they go with a system that sucks the card in one slot and spits it out another slot, like in London and Paris? Whatever one can say about the deficiencies of the latter two transport systems, their turnstiles work every time.
When a British Lord (and former editor of the right-wing newspaper The Times) writes, in an act of fervent wishful thinking, that nation-states are going to wither away, thus liberating `the individual', it is worth asking yourself exactly which individual or individuals he is referring to. Of course, he is referring to people like himself, who happen to be fantastically wealthy. Their needs would then be taken care of by the all-powerful corporations, many of which are already larger and more powerful than some nation-states. Clearly, it is in the corporations' interests to take good care of the rich. But what about everyone else?
With no legal rights or protections, those without large amounts of cash would be returned to the hell of early industrial society, working 16-hour days in factories from the age of 10, with no medical care. When they grew too old or sick to work, they would be left to die. Human rights would disappear. This is in fact what happens today in many countries, which do not have strong governments to provide the kind of protections that most Slashdot readers enjoy.
Think factories are going to disappear because we're leaving the Industrial Age and entering the Information Age? Try living for a while without using anything that was produced or transported using industrial techniques. You'll have to grow all your own food (without tractors or other farm equipment), produce all your own clothing by hand, live in housing that you built yourself, drink unprocessed water, with no sewer system, computers, or factory-made transportation. Oh, and you can forget about modern medicine.
People like Lord Rees-Mogg want the state to be dismantled in order to get rid of nuisances like environmental laws, health and safety laws, child labour laws, and of course taxes. Those of us who can't afford to pay for private health care, let alone private water and sewer systems, and who would like some assurances that we are eating safe food, might disagree.
The scandal of BSE (`mad cow disease') in the UK, a direct result of Margaret Thatcher's deregulation of the agriculture industry, is just a small indication of what can happen, even in wealthy countries, when corporations are allowed to do as they please.
This sort of babbling about the Information Age is simply thinly veiled propaganda, intended to persuade ordinary citizens to give still more power to multinational corporations. --
Think of the Bible, or the Collected Works of Shakespeare. These continue to exist not because they were recorded perfectly on a perfect medium, but because people found them worthwhile enough to continue them.
Often, hugely important texts have been preserved by chance, despite people's indifference, sometimes even desipte people's efforts to destroy those texts.
Bach's magnificent sonatas and partitas for solo violin were found among some papers that were destined to be used for wrapping butter.
Because Tristan and Isolde was considered, in the Middle Ages, to be a morally and politically dangerous story, only one manuscript has survived of the original version, and it's very incomplete.
The texts that we now have from ancient Greece were preserved by Byzantine scribes who recopied them over and over as the copies decayed. It just so happened that in the 15th century (if I remember correctly), some Byzantine scholars went to Italy, and brought a selection of masterpieces with them. Soon afterward, the Byzantine empire was destroyed, and all its ancient Greek manuscripts were lost; the only ones left were the ones that the scholars had happened to bring with them to Italy. And those are the ones we have, the ones from which the Western world has learned Ancient Greek, which had been forgotten in the intervening period. --
The problem isn't individual bias, it's corporate bias. Mergers have concentrated ownership of most of the world's mainstream newspapers and TV networks in the hands of a very small number of huge companies, all of which have exactly the same biases.
I expect the media to have biases; that in itself is acceptable, as long as those biases are apparent, and as long as different news organizations have different biases. Then I have some chance of triangulating to find the truth. This is very hard to do in the U.S. because the media take great pains to present stories in a deceptively bland, neutral-sounding language, apparently devoid of any opinions.
In France, for example, the situation is a bit different, because most newspapers are written in a highly opinionated style, usually containing a mixture of sarcasm and idealistic indignation. Different newspapers have substantially different and easily recognisable political biases.
Democracy can't work unless there are there are real alternatives to choose from. This requires sharp differences between political parties, and between opinions expressed in the mainstream media. The U.S. urgently needs alternative media organizations that can express dissenting views to a large audience, and alternative political parties to represent those views.
The homogenisation of American politics is a direct result of paranoia created by the government during the Cold War; anything resembling dissent was condemned as anti-American. A whole generation has grown up with its head buried in the sands of mass entertainment, afraid to think or talk about basic political issues. The media are happy to oblige. --
TV can exist without advertising
on
Live or Memorex?
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· Score: 1
TV can be funded quite effectively by taxes. The quality of state-funded television in Europe (e.g. on the Arte channel, which runs no commercials) is immensely higher than that of commercial television.
At the very least, in France, even the commercial stations don't interrupt programs with ads; all the ads run between programs. --
I had a similar experience with Apple ][ BASIC, 6502 assembler, etc. I think the key benefit was that it was possible for a 12-year-old to understand a whole computer, down to the machine language level, to know where everything was in memory and how the whole system fit together. The screen was just an area of memory, you could twiddle with bytes in the hex monitor (or in BASIC) and see the dots change. When I was about 14 I wrote a 70-column character generator in assembler, and assembled it by hand into hex codes. Nothing could have given me a clearer sense of how the machine worked. I don't think programming in Visual Basic could give someone that sensation. In my professional life as a programmer, I meet many programmers who waste time on ridiculous ideas, and are unable to optimize their code, because they lack this fundamental understanding of how computers work.
When the Mac first came out, I loved the GUI, but it was a shock and a disappointment to realize that there was no straightforward way to explore the internals. At the same time, the internals were a lot more complicated; the early Mac programming manual was something like 10 volumes.
I'm wondering whether 12-year-olds today are learning Linux internals, or if that's just too much to ask of even a very smart 12-year-old. If not, maybe Apple should start manufacturing the Apple ][ again, so that young people can learn low-level programming on a manageable scale. --
The main problem boils down to this: the Perl program print x; compiles and runs without an error message. The equivalent program in Python, Java, C, or C++ produces a compiler error. I have a hunch that a lot of programmers have torn out a lot of their hair while debugging Perl programs because of this. --
Do you really think that if Linux wasn't based almost entirely on pre-existings standards, and a well-known defacto standard called Unix...
Java is largely based on pre-existing standards, too. It's full of common design patterns. The libraries are designed to wrap common OS APIs without too much trouble, so you have Socket, DatagramSocket, etc. Most of the cultural background in Java comes from Unix and C++. This was surely done on purpose; they must have wanted it to look familiar to a lot of programmers. --
I've seen many people say that there isn't enough info to create a complete implementation of Java. Even if they did, could they do anything with it without being sued?
IBM did it. Now, if we can just get them to open-source their Java implementation the way they've open-sourced their XML parsers (under the Apache license). --
As I posted on a related thread, Java is very widely used by large corporations (e.g. most Wall St. firms) for high-end server apps. This is why a lot of application servers these days are written in Java. --
I was pleased to read that KOffice would be scriptable in Python. Then I was disappointed to find some documentation on the KOffice site which seemed to indicate that something called KScript would be used instead. Is this true? If so, why? --
Let's look at the license again: If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.
In other words, if you distribute Linux by mailing it to people, then you have to mail them the source code, too. If you distribute it by letting them download it, then it's OK just to let them download the source code from your FTP site. --
If the QPL and the GPL are incompatible, then KDE should have this problem, too. What gives? Could someone with legal knowledge please answer this question? --
You'd be amazed at the sorts of things one can learn about someone by observing their innocuous actions. For example, a supermarket may offer its customers a discount card, allowing it to track the purchases of individual customers. A database query can then find, for example, all the people who bought a bottle of champagne and a box of condoms, in a supermarket that was not their regular supermarket... --
...a vast majority of them were also engineers or scientists by discipline. They were all educated as such, and followed that ethic.
Actually, according to a New York Times article I read recently, many of them had degrees in the humanities, primarily in languages.
But I think it's reasonable to say that the degree I have makes me better at my job than someone who did not go through the motions and fundamentals of how it should be done in the first place.
The fact that you were intelligent, motivated, and disciplined enough to learn how it should be done is what makes you a better programmer, not the fact that you have a diploma.
Unless of course, you're claiming that programming is so trivially easy that anyone can do it, and do it well, through self-study alone.
I think programming is so difficult that if CS departments only gave diplomas to students who really learned to do it well, hardly any students would graduate. However, learning can happen anywhere; there's nothing special about classrooms or university computer centers. I've managed to earn the respect of my colleagues for my design and coding skills (e.g. in the development of a Java application server), even though my degrees are in fields other than CS. The important things are to use good textbooks, to have good mentors, to imitate good code, and not to settle for anything less than clean, elegant programs.
Moreover, as I said, I haven't been impressed with the knowledge or skills of quite a few CS graduates that I've worked with. I suspect that many of them simply don't care whether they're mediocre. Try asking the average CS graduate what "multiple inheritance" means; you get a lot of blank stares.
Also, there are advantages to having done advanced work in fields other than CS; if nothing else, it makes you more interesting to be around. I'd personally rather work with someone who can joke about Shakespeare, or who speaks several languages, than with someone who only knows programming.
I have worked with many programmers who had CS degrees, and were highly paid by major corporations, and yet were startlingly incompetent. It wasn't just that they lacked a basic understanding of data structures and algorithms, or that they were ignorant of object-oriented programming. Or even that they were often bewildered (frightened, actually) by the idea of automating tasks as opposed to typing the same thing over and over. There are some people who will invariably propose the most inefficient, shortsighted, error-prone, kludgy solution to any problem. I'm sure many of us have had to repair code written by this sort of person. A CS degree doesn't seem to safeguard against this.
In the early days of computer programming, there was no such thing as a CS degree; all programmers were self-taught. This didn't stop them from writing brilliant programs, and solving many of the major problems in computer science. --
mainstream media unbiased? yeah, right
on
Wired on Slashdot
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· Score: 1
Are they talking about, say, the trained professional journalists at the New York Times, whose pro-big-business, pro-financial-markets, pro-military bias is... well, kind of hard to miss? (See Noam Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent.)
There wasn't enough social interaction in programming.
I'm a guy, and there isn't enough social interaction for me in programming, either.
I think people develop their intellectual skills only as much as they need to in order to satisfy their emotional needs. It's almost always a last resort. I was a social outcast when I was a kid, and got into literature and computers to compensate for a lack of human interaction. It seems to me that girls are much less likely to be in this position. There's so much demand for the company of girls, just because they're girls, that most girls are likely to find plenty to keep them busy (parties, etc.) without having to resort to developing their minds. --
I don't think this is correct. As I understand it, the new QString class in Qt stores a string as either 0, 1, or 2 arrays, meaning that it dynamically adds width to the characters as needed.
As for UTF-8, I think it's a good idea to store files in that format, but for internal processing, it can't be as fast as wide characters: each character in UTF-8 occupies between one and six bytes; I would imagine that this would make character counting quite slow, because you'd have to iterate through the whole string.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at one of the largest vendors of software for banks, and diversity of server platforms is a fact of life for our clients. Many banks are quite happy to continue using applications that were written 20 years ago, in RPG, for the IBM AS/400 platform. And it makes sense; those applications work quite well, and they represent millions of lines of code, which can't be thrown away just because RPG isn't a modern language.
Many of those same banks also have applications running on all sorts of Unix systems. And of course, Windows is widely used for front-office applications. Oh, and they all use different RDBMSs, too.
If you think it's easy to write, say, C++ applications that are portable across all those environments, I suspect that you've never really tried.
We've written our in-house middleware in Java; we develop on Windows desktop machines (alas!), and the code works out of the box on AS/400, Solaris and Linux, as well as with every RDBMS we've come across. It's an easy sell to our customers, many of whom have strict requirements about which operating systems they're willing to use for which projects. And we haven't spent any time porting our software.
You've answered your own question. You did well in life because you got a good start: your parents were well-educated and supportive. If they had been illiterate, I doubt that you would have fared as well. Poverty breeds poverty.
There are about one million Americans who work full-time, but are still homeless. Moreover, there 1.2 billion people in the world who live on less than $1 a day. I find this unacceptable. Since I earn far more than most, I think it's right that I should give a large portion of my income to help those who are less well-off.
For more about global poverty, see this.
For the causes of poverty, see this.
Then read this or this or this to find out more about what can be done.
--
Unregulated speculation, particularly on the global currency markets, makes it impossible for poorer countries to maintain any sort of economic stability. Money floods in, transforming the economic landscape, then floods out just as quickly, leaving devastation in its wake. Hence the currency crisis in Southeast Asia in 1997, which caused widespread poverty. A minuscule tax on currency speculation would provide much-needed stability, and incidentally produce enough revenue to end world poverty. See http://attac.org.
--
There are few, if any, large corporations that aren't just as evil as Nike and Philip Morris. You can't vote with your dollars, because there's no real choice among corporations, just as you can't vote in the ballot booth, because there's no real choice among political parties.
--
To the barricades! :-)
I just sent this off to the Commission:
As a software developer, I find the idea of software patents
abhorrent, for several reasons.
The global information infrastructure depends on the use of
open standards. Patents might have made sense in the days when
products from one vendor did not interact with products from another
vendor. However, computer programmes are increasingly interdependent.
For example, TCP/IP, the network protocol on which the Internet is
based, is in the public domain. If its authors had patented it, we
can be sure that the Internet would not exist today.
As software patents proliferate, it becomes increasingly
difficult, if not impossible, for most software companies to determine
whether any given piece of code that they are developing infringes on
one of the multitude of software patents in existence. The legal
risks of writing any computer programme could well become prohibitive.
This factor alone could cause innovation in the software industry to
grind to a halt.
Software patents cause the industry to waste time and effort. In some
cases, when a patent covers an algorithm which everyone desperately
needs, the industry as a whole works around the problem by creating
non-patented alternatives. This is what happened to the encryption
algorithm, RSA. (As a result, RSA has not renewed its patent, which
expired this year.) This process wastes time and money. Moreover,
the result is that the patent does not benefit its owner.
However, it is possible that a patent may be issued for an algorithm
that is universally needed, and for which no alternative can be
devised. In this case, we can expect several harmful effects. Large
companies, which can afford to pay the licence fees, will flourish at
the expense of smaller ones. Fewer applications will be developed
using the algorithm in question, and they will cost more; it will
therefore provide less benefit to society. Not only the software
industry, but the world as a whole, will be held to ransom. That is
precisely the sort of monopoly power that no company should have.
It is folly to think that software patents could be beneficial to the
industry or to society at large. They can only result in hopeless
legal quagmires, and in the stagnation of the software industry.
--
That's what digital signatures are for. It wouldn't be difficult to make a system that would digitally sign each card, and only accept cards bearing its own signature. The source-code for the system would still be open-source; the only secret would be the system's private signature key.
And while I'm at it, the NYC metrocard system is poorly designed from a mechanical point of view. It takes a considerable amount of practice to get the cards to swipe properly at the turnstile. Old folks seem to have quite a lot of trouble with it. Obviously this is because it's hard to make a system that works well with cards swiped at variable speeds. Why didn't they go with a system that sucks the card in one slot and spits it out another slot, like in London and Paris? Whatever one can say about the deficiencies of the latter two transport systems, their turnstiles work every time.
Ben
--
With no legal rights or protections, those without large amounts of cash would be returned to the hell of early industrial society, working 16-hour days in factories from the age of 10, with no medical care. When they grew too old or sick to work, they would be left to die. Human rights would disappear. This is in fact what happens today in many countries, which do not have strong governments to provide the kind of protections that most Slashdot readers enjoy.
Think factories are going to disappear because we're leaving the Industrial Age and entering the Information Age? Try living for a while without using anything that was produced or transported using industrial techniques. You'll have to grow all your own food (without tractors or other farm equipment), produce all your own clothing by hand, live in housing that you built yourself, drink unprocessed water, with no sewer system, computers, or factory-made transportation. Oh, and you can forget about modern medicine.
People like Lord Rees-Mogg want the state to be dismantled in order to get rid of nuisances like environmental laws, health and safety laws, child labour laws, and of course taxes. Those of us who can't afford to pay for private health care, let alone private water and sewer systems, and who would like some assurances that we are eating safe food, might disagree.
The scandal of BSE (`mad cow disease') in the UK, a direct result of Margaret Thatcher's deregulation of the agriculture industry, is just a small indication of what can happen, even in wealthy countries, when corporations are allowed to do as they please.
This sort of babbling about the Information Age is simply thinly veiled propaganda, intended to persuade ordinary citizens to give still more power to multinational corporations.
--
Often, hugely important texts have been preserved by chance, despite people's indifference, sometimes even desipte people's efforts to destroy those texts.
Bach's magnificent sonatas and partitas for solo violin were found among some papers that were destined to be used for wrapping butter.
Because Tristan and Isolde was considered, in the Middle Ages, to be a morally and politically dangerous story, only one manuscript has survived of the original version, and it's very incomplete.
The texts that we now have from ancient Greece were preserved by Byzantine scribes who recopied them over and over as the copies decayed. It just so happened that in the 15th century (if I remember correctly), some Byzantine scholars went to Italy, and brought a selection of masterpieces with them. Soon afterward, the Byzantine empire was destroyed, and all its ancient Greek manuscripts were lost; the only ones left were the ones that the scholars had happened to bring with them to Italy. And those are the ones we have, the ones from which the Western world has learned Ancient Greek, which had been forgotten in the intervening period.
--
The problem isn't individual bias, it's corporate bias. Mergers have concentrated ownership of most of the world's mainstream newspapers and TV networks in the hands of a very small number of huge companies, all of which have exactly the same biases.
I expect the media to have biases; that in itself is acceptable, as long as those biases are apparent, and as long as different news organizations have different biases. Then I have some chance of triangulating to find the truth. This is very hard to do in the U.S. because the media take great pains to present stories in a deceptively bland, neutral-sounding language, apparently devoid of any opinions.
In France, for example, the situation is a bit different, because most newspapers are written in a highly opinionated style, usually containing a mixture of sarcasm and idealistic indignation. Different newspapers have substantially different and easily recognisable political biases.
Democracy can't work unless there are there are real alternatives to choose from. This requires sharp differences between political parties, and between opinions expressed in the mainstream media. The U.S. urgently needs alternative media organizations that can express dissenting views to a large audience, and alternative political parties to represent those views.
The homogenisation of American politics is a direct result of paranoia created by the government during the Cold War; anything resembling dissent was condemned as anti-American. A whole generation has grown up with its head buried in the sands of mass entertainment, afraid to think or talk about basic political issues. The media are happy to oblige.
--
At the very least, in France, even the commercial stations don't interrupt programs with ads; all the ads run between programs.
--
When the Mac first came out, I loved the GUI, but it was a shock and a disappointment to realize that there was no straightforward way to explore the internals. At the same time, the internals were a lot more complicated; the early Mac programming manual was something like 10 volumes.
I'm wondering whether 12-year-olds today are learning Linux internals, or if that's just too much to ask of even a very smart 12-year-old. If not, maybe Apple should start manufacturing the Apple ][ again, so that young people can learn low-level programming on a manageable scale.
--
The main problem boils down to this: the Perl program print x; compiles and runs without an error message. The equivalent program in Python, Java, C, or C++ produces a compiler error. I have a hunch that a lot of programmers have torn out a lot of their hair while debugging Perl programs because of this.
--
Java is largely based on pre-existing standards, too. It's full of common design patterns. The libraries are designed to wrap common OS APIs without too much trouble, so you have Socket, DatagramSocket, etc. Most of the cultural background in Java comes from Unix and C++. This was surely done on purpose; they must have wanted it to look familiar to a lot of programmers.
--
IBM did it. Now, if we can just get them to open-source their Java implementation the way they've open-sourced their XML parsers (under the Apache license).
--
As I posted on a related thread, Java is very widely used by large corporations (e.g. most Wall St. firms) for high-end server apps. This is why a lot of application servers these days are written in Java.
--
I was pleased to read that KOffice would be scriptable in Python. Then I was disappointed to find some documentation on the KOffice site which seemed to indicate that something called KScript would be used instead. Is this true? If so, why?
--
In other words, if you distribute Linux by mailing it to people, then you have to mail them the source code, too. If you distribute it by letting them download it, then it's OK just to let them download the source code from your FTP site.
--
It seems to me that supporting Cygnus, which does a lot of open-source development, is a good way to help Linux.
--
If the QPL and the GPL are incompatible, then KDE should have this problem, too. What gives? Could someone with legal knowledge please answer this question?
--
You'd be amazed at the sorts of things one can learn about someone by observing their innocuous actions. For example, a supermarket may offer its customers a discount card, allowing it to track the purchases of individual customers. A database query can then find, for example, all the people who bought a bottle of champagne and a box of condoms, in a supermarket that was not their regular supermarket...
--
Actually, according to a New York Times article I read recently, many of them had degrees in the humanities, primarily in languages.
But I think it's reasonable to say that the degree I have makes me better at my job than someone who did not go through the motions and fundamentals of how it should be done in the first place.
The fact that you were intelligent, motivated, and disciplined enough to learn how it should be done is what makes you a better programmer, not the fact that you have a diploma.
Unless of course, you're claiming that programming is so trivially easy that anyone can do it, and do it well, through self-study alone.
I think programming is so difficult that if CS departments only gave diplomas to students who really learned to do it well, hardly any students would graduate. However, learning can happen anywhere; there's nothing special about classrooms or university computer centers. I've managed to earn the respect of my colleagues for my design and coding skills (e.g. in the development of a Java application server), even though my degrees are in fields other than CS. The important things are to use good textbooks, to have good mentors, to imitate good code, and not to settle for anything less than clean, elegant programs.
Moreover, as I said, I haven't been impressed with the knowledge or skills of quite a few CS graduates that I've worked with. I suspect that many of them simply don't care whether they're mediocre. Try asking the average CS graduate what "multiple inheritance" means; you get a lot of blank stares.
Also, there are advantages to having done advanced work in fields other than CS; if nothing else, it makes you more interesting to be around. I'd personally rather work with someone who can joke about Shakespeare, or who speaks several languages, than with someone who only knows programming.
--
In the early days of computer programming, there was no such thing as a CS degree; all programmers were self-taught. This didn't stop them from writing brilliant programs, and solving many of the major problems in computer science.
--
Are they talking about, say, the trained professional journalists at the New York Times, whose pro-big-business, pro-financial-markets, pro-military bias is... well, kind of hard to miss? (See Noam Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent.)
--
I'm a guy, and there isn't enough social interaction for me in programming, either.
I think people develop their intellectual skills only as much as they need to in order to satisfy their emotional needs. It's almost always a last resort. I was a social outcast when I was a kid, and got into literature and computers to compensate for a lack of human interaction. It seems to me that girls are much less likely to be in this position. There's so much demand for the company of girls, just because they're girls, that most girls are likely to find plenty to keep them busy (parties, etc.) without having to resort to developing their minds.
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As for UTF-8, I think it's a good idea to store files in that format, but for internal processing, it can't be as fast as wide characters: each character in UTF-8 occupies between one and six bytes; I would imagine that this would make character counting quite slow, because you'd have to iterate through the whole string.
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