I was about to launch into cries of "idiot", "troll", and "crazy man", but two lines into your post I totally realized what was going on. That's pretty amazing stuff! And a bit spooky too when you're reading away at normal speed and know exactly what it says.
It does, however, highlight the importance of context and knowledge, since Cmabrigde could be read as anything if we didn't all know about Cambridge.
As a Perl-head myself, I wondered where this statement comes from. To me, it seems, a lot of people on smaller projects and at the "lower end" are ditching Perl for PHP. In terms of pure number, I'd imagine PHP is growing a lot more than Perl.
I don't believe Sun will die. Claiming they will would be like claiming "IBM is going to die" in 1990. It might have seemed like an intelligent thing to say, but too many background issues ensured it didn't happen.
In fact, Sun and IBM might become a whole lot more similar in the years to come.
Currently they're both companies that have a lot of proprietary mid/high-end server and mainframe equipment out in the field with specialized engineers ready to maintain them. They both have a very large internal focus on research and information management (Sun has its own 'SunLibrary', Google for more information), and both are renowned for developing new technologies which are then "stolen" or "borrowed" by other companies.
Sun and IBM also do a lot of research and provide a lot to disciplines that run alongside their product line. For example, Sun did a lot of work with usability (that's where Jakob Nielsen came from), whereas IBM has done a lot of work on information retrieval and search engines (Google for 'ibm web fountain').
Even if Sun's main market dries up, replaced by Apple XServes and Linux clusters, this will be no more devastating to them as IBM losing out in the x86 market in the late 80's and early 90's.
Sun has a lot of brainpower, a lot of money, and partnerships (Oracle is the latest) to ensure that they'll continue for many years as a research and technology company, if not as a "consumer facing" company.
Congratulations! I've usually steered clear of checking out programming "challenges" because they usually seem to be focused on producing the most unreadable or obscure code to confuse the judges.
While you can learn things from obfuscated code, I think these practical challenges are a lot better for the programming community as a whole.
Finding optimal paths around race tracks and obstacles presents a number of challenges which when solved in multiple totally different ways, helps give us new theories and data which we can use to develop new algorithms and theories for use in the real world.
Can anyone recommend any other programming challenges which focus on developing new algorithms which may be useful in other disciplines?
The only example I can think of is the many "robot" fighting challenges, where you write a program for a robot, and it has to destroy the other robots within the battlefield using its own "wits" and no human input. You might remember PC-ROBOTS from the early 90's if you're a real geek ^v^
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I was about to launch into cries of "idiot", "troll", and "crazy man", but two lines into your post I totally realized what was going on. That's pretty amazing stuff! And a bit spooky too when you're reading away at normal speed and know exactly what it says.
It does, however, highlight the importance of context and knowledge, since Cmabrigde could be read as anything if we didn't all know about Cambridge.
and more and more sites are turning to Perl
As a Perl-head myself, I wondered where this statement comes from. To me, it seems, a lot of people on smaller projects and at the "lower end" are ditching Perl for PHP. In terms of pure number, I'd imagine PHP is growing a lot more than Perl.
I don't believe Sun will die. Claiming they will would be like claiming "IBM is going to die" in 1990. It might have seemed like an intelligent thing to say, but too many background issues ensured it didn't happen.
In fact, Sun and IBM might become a whole lot more similar in the years to come.
Currently they're both companies that have a lot of proprietary mid/high-end server and mainframe equipment out in the field with specialized engineers ready to maintain them. They both have a very large internal focus on research and information management (Sun has its own 'SunLibrary', Google for more information), and both are renowned for developing new technologies which are then "stolen" or "borrowed" by other companies.
Sun and IBM also do a lot of research and provide a lot to disciplines that run alongside their product line. For example, Sun did a lot of work with usability (that's where Jakob Nielsen came from), whereas IBM has done a lot of work on information retrieval and search engines (Google for 'ibm web fountain').
Even if Sun's main market dries up, replaced by Apple XServes and Linux clusters, this will be no more devastating to them as IBM losing out in the x86 market in the late 80's and early 90's.
Sun has a lot of brainpower, a lot of money, and partnerships (Oracle is the latest) to ensure that they'll continue for many years as a research and technology company, if not as a "consumer facing" company.
Congratulations! I've usually steered clear of checking out programming "challenges" because they usually seem to be focused on producing the most unreadable or obscure code to confuse the judges.
While you can learn things from obfuscated code, I think these practical challenges are a lot better for the programming community as a whole.
Finding optimal paths around race tracks and obstacles presents a number of challenges which when solved in multiple totally different ways, helps give us new theories and data which we can use to develop new algorithms and theories for use in the real world.
Can anyone recommend any other programming challenges which focus on developing new algorithms which may be useful in other disciplines?
The only example I can think of is the many "robot" fighting challenges, where you write a program for a robot, and it has to destroy the other robots within the battlefield using its own "wits" and no human input. You might remember PC-ROBOTS from the early 90's if you're a real geek ^v^