Android, you mean. WebOS wouldn't qualify on the easy API part - in their attempt to make a rich client OS with web stack technologies, they failed, as the senior architects behind it practically admitted.
Personally I prefer writing clients in the Android APIs versus anything in the web world. Javascript is a nightmare to ship anything significant in. That's why so much of it is generated from another, better language these days.
WebOS-style UI
Well, you like what you like. I personally found WebOS's UI to be uninspiring, but certainly neither Android nor iOS are the be-all end-all either.
Not needing to be tied into an account like Google/Android...
Android does not tie you to an account. Even stock Android lets you skip that and then you just don't get the services that rely on it. A perfectly good choice, although those services are both free/ad-supported and quite awesome. Then you have the Android variants including the community-developed ones. so if you don't like being offered the option to put account credentials into the phone on first use, it can be removed.
Only in the Bush era could a treasury-looting boondoggle this bad actually go all the way to implementation.
These machines can be defeated by any illiterate petty criminal. Hello... body cavities?
Every actually respectable expert is on record against them, from Bruce Schneier to El Al's former head of security.
This is not just garden variety incompetence. The program was so wildly and thoroughly stupid that it goes beyond negligence into prima facie malicious intent. The bigs from the vendors and the feds on the procurement side should see prison on the grounds of corruption alone. It's no different than selling the army a billion dollars worth of non-working guns or vehicles to pocket the profits. God willing, someday we'll watch the trials on CSpan.
That's leaving aside the laugh-till-you-cry repugnant aspects of what they actually did - which is, let's not sugar coat it, take nude photographs of thousands and thousands of children.
Only in the Bush era could a treasury-looting boondoggle this bad actually go all the way to implementation.
These machines can be defeated by any illiterate petty criminal. Hello... body cavities?
Every actually respectable expert is on record against them, from Bruce Schneier to El Al's former head of security.
This is not just garden variety incompetence. The program was so wildly and thoroughly stupid that it goes beyond negligence into prima facie malicious intent. The bigs from the vendors and the feds on the procurement side should see prison on the grounds of corruption alone. It's no different than selling the army a billion dollars worth of non-working guns or vehicles to pocket the profits. God willing, someday we'll watch the trials on CSpan.
That's leaving aside the laugh-till-you-cry repugnant aspects of what they actually did - which is, let's not sugar coat it, take nude photographs of thousands and thousands of children.
Like Palm, these people squandered a multi-year lead. They had a lock on a wonderful customer base and supplied the dominant smartphone-precursor device to the world, and failed to follow up on through an inability to execute. What happened to the original scrappy, farsighted RIM, that created the Blackberry platform to begin with? Gone - eaten up in the ugly process of becoming a large incumbent business. Now they live on inertia, and their management can't execute their way out of a paper bag. An old story, and a common one.
It has been obvious for many months that RIM was a dead letter - not just behind in the race but lapped many times by multiple competitors. I mean, the Playbook? Really? If you weren't short RIM, sue your broker.
These distinctions, while quite valid in their context, are irrelevant to the creators of alternative platforms that take a holistic approach to developer productivity and capability. Android is a platform that is composed of languages, APIs and tools that work extremely well together as a coherent whole, benefiting from synergies that can only occur as each part is made to fit with the others. HTML5 is a sloppy mess that is half attempts at incremental evolution by pragmatists who want to offer rich client features to an already deployed web browser audience, and half accident.
700k+ smartphone OS devices sell in a day. They are already bleeding over into non-mobile form factors. Developers care about two things: what can I do and how easily can I do it? If the browser teams don't get their act together, in a few years the best answers to those questions will not involve Javascript or the DOM if the majority of users see the web browser as just another app they don't use much anymore, because it's slower, uglier, less reliable, and more complicated to use than another app, that they can find in their menu of apps, or install from a marketplace of apps.
WebOS interestingly was an attempt to leapfrog the standards bodies and build a viable platform with Javascript/HTML/CSS. It failed, so it's up to the remaining players now if they want to keep trying.
OK, I get it. Javascript is the best client scripting language around, and you know better than Google. And "doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does" is uniquely easier in Javascript. I could give you a free education in the relative merits of Javascript versus language X, Y, or Z, but really, you're starting from too far behind intellectually for a slashdot post to help you. Not to mention, recapping a decade worth of widely known debate in the language design community is a waste of time if you won't believe it from me anyway, right? And what are the odds, if you didn't believe it from all the quarters of the internet it was already coming from? Such as, oh I don't know, just for instance, the authors of the largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications?
Other languages are out there to be explored - you may find them interesting or you may hate them. But if you pick favorites more easily than you pick up new platforms, you could find yourself out in the cold when your favorites become obsolete. I leave you with that - good luck.
It is worse. Quite a bit worse than emerging alternatives. So much worse that the web could become gradually marginalized as a rich client platform if it isn't replaced. But don't take my word for it. Google has said so as well, and they know a thing or two about client-side scripting. PHP was originally quite simple in implementation, but it was purpose designed from the very beginning for its primary use to this day - a scripting and template language for dynamic website development. MySQL was directly intended for data storage - which is still all we use it for. Apache - a web server. OK, subversion tried to use it as part of their network layer, and look how that ended.:) Linux - an OS kernel with a Unix heritage. Android and iOS have been cleverly and purposefully designed to be rich client platforms - they already do more than what HTML5 hopes to achieve, and better. Companies are not making mobile web sites - they are making mobile apps, and these platforms are growing quickly enough that "mobile" is going to be a term that dates you after the end of the traditional desktop OS, when these new platforms become so ubiquitous as to erode the distinction.
Javascript and HTML clearly and obviously did not have the current rich client feature set in mind at their creation. That evolved over the many, many years. Worse, Javascript is just not the best scripting language to begin with. Even without being doctrinaire about whether certain kinds of dynamism have stood the test of time as good elements of language design, among similar scripting languages, there are just better alternatives than Netscape's mid-90's little sideline improvisation. The entire first era of Javascript involved implementations so poor, unstable, and limited that they were barely adequate to implement image rollovers. Even the most basic features that led to "Ajax" - anything resembling network IO - came years later and were pioneered by a different team at a different company - Microsoft. And it took even a few more years before anyone had the audacity to use it for i.e. Google Maps - in no small part because of how poor the platform was, and how different it was from the original intent of the creators.
Javascript is something of an accidental success. As with many languages before it, its users valiantly cope with its flaws and do their best to dress up the squalor they live in, but it's not funny for Google anymore. They have to develop, maintain, and test one of the largest JavaScript codebases in the world, and the it's-the-90's-and-I'm-high-on-cocaine-at-4am-and-it's-due-tomorrow scripting language design philosophy is not helping them. In fact the story of the last few years has been the quiet proving out of the "extra keystrokes for correctness" paradigm, from simple assertions (including "type assertions" aka good old fashioned strong typing) to unit tests to highly complex integration tests of harrowing complexity.
If I understand correctly, Google already writes much of their JavaScript in an intermediate language that adds certain features. They have long needed a compile step anyway for compression/"obfuscation" and I suspect it was a natural outgrowth of that. This appears to be another step in the evolution of that development pipeline.
There are many interesting developments brewing in the browser these days. I wish the browser guys luck, because I think have just a little longer to get their act together before the world gradually changes out from under them, and a purpose-designed, clever, far more powerful platform, such as Android or iOS, might actually start to change the web browser's position in the computing ecosystem. A modern scripting language is only part of the price of admission to staying relevant as a platform.
It starts with a few companies who "only" want to collect $5, or $10, or $35 per Android device. I suppose we can all nod our heads and agree that the mighty should be able to throw their weight around. It feels right. Who cares about the details - we're sure Linux must have stolen something. Otherwise how could it be so great? And so cheap?
But nothing stops the flow of new complaints. Do you know how many software patents there are? How many new applications per day? How many are obvious, trivial, or overly broad? Soon it will be a dozen companies collecting a Linux tax - forget merely on Android - and then it will be 30. A gold rush will ensue - get on the list of people who have to be paid off. Name your own price - the world's high tech giants will have to pay up! But, oh dear. iOS will suddenly have the exact same problem. Do you know how many patents they violate? So will Windows Phone. So will Blackberry. So will those little "learn to read" kiddie computers they sell in Toys R Us. So will everyone.
When it finally becomes more than just a few pariahs and evil actors in the tech industry who try to enforce their patents, it ends with every product having dozens and then hundreds of lawyers showing up to tax them. The only question is, how much economic damage will we do to ourselves before we finally take the obvious step and abolish software patents - which were never even allowed in the first place in Europe, India, and China. This economically pernicious barratry is so obviously stupid that it makes the US an object ridicule abroad.
The tacit policy of allowing software to be patentable reduces competition, stifles innovation, breaks healthy markets, and diverts money to billion-dollar portfolio buys instead of jobs. The only thing it reliably accomplishes is enriching lawyers - the least economically productive activity imaginable.
But sure, argue both sides. Have as many kids as you want. I couldn't guess their odds of living to 70, but I am willing to bet that this is that "magic" generation, and they will see suffering and mass death unprecedented in all of human history.
I pretend nothing. Obama can end the TSA noodz business anytime and score political points in the process. He doesn't so we are forced to do the math; which goes roughly, anyone not ending it looks either corrupt or stupid, and I like to hope our politicians are at least getting paid to pretend it all accomplishes something.
I am especially tired of people defending Bush - one of history's most indefensible American presidents. I'm tired of false equivalences and emotional desires for parity. Just because we're all human and no one's perfect and it's so darn hard to just call a spade a spade doesn't mean we throw up our hands and imply they're all in some sense equal, or that Bush didn't box way above his weight in the catastrophic fuckup championship. Yet it's hard not to feel there isn't something more pathetic about Obama just for how stingily he doles out actual liberalism versus the amount of scorn he receives for being liberal. With Bush, god damned if you didn't get exactly what you paid for. With Obama, if he was white and running for office in the 80's they would have called him a Republican. Except if Reagan had tortured and run a military tribunal for, say, Noriega.
Then again I would have said "for instance" Obama wouldn't do anything as actively stupid as voluntarily starting another war in the middle east, and then the idiot went into Libya ass first. I give up.
Can you answer a simple question: did Bush's people cook up this body scanner regime or not?
If you think I give Obama a pass on this, you're wrong - I just don't know which is worse, thinking of an idea this stupid, or not ending it on your first year in office. Also - are you against bashing our presidents? Or do you think dissent and criticism (current and historical) is unproductive or unpatriotic, like the Chinese?
It was all fun and games when it was graft and bribery on a multibillion spend to put millimeter wave scanners in a few security lines. It was obviously stupid because the devices can be fooled by concealing things in body cavities. In a sane world, the criminal justice system would put the Bush-era TSA people who planned this scheme on the stand, where they'd say "well, we thought it was a good idea at the time;" any high-school educated jury wouldn't believe a word of it, and would hand out prison sentences for the various criminals involved in the federal security bureaucracy and device vendors. Security apparatus steals tax money, news at 11, complete with body scans of preteen girls.
But in these crazy times, in for a penny, in for a pound. Instead of just letting people opt-out of being scanned (no reason not to, since the devices are only reaching a few percent of travelers anyway, and even an illiterate petty criminal can explain why they're worthless for stopping terrorism), they're trying to push the issue with the also ineffective but highly titillating federally-funded full body massage.
Perhaps it's an experiment designed to determine just how debased the American people have become - how ignorant of their own rights and heritage. In which case, well played.
With all the ways I don't seem to see eye to eye with the Tea Party and the Texas government these days, it's a genuine pleasure to find some common ground, and say, I take my hat off to them.
Few of us have the luxury of seeing many schools to compare. All of the problems in my original post were observed first-hand. That's every single specific one, with no exaggeration or hyperbole. And tuition inflation is obviously a matter of public record. So you have a different anecdote. I'm sure it's true, but who's "right"? The only useful thing in between would be a survey, statistic, or etc. and in lieu of that the answer can't be "silence!" Rather, we just each give our experience and our opinion about it.
As an informal survey, this forum itself isn't so bad; after days, you seem to be in a minority of commenters who appear to have the thesis that the average CS undergrad education isn't so expensive, or bad, or bad as a deal. Most here don't seem to feel the way you do on the subject. That's probably telling you something right there.
I will give you this: CS programs are taught badly, and undergrad is wildly expensive - but the two problems do not always meet. There are definitely cheap government-funded schools left in the US - that is, if you are paying the insider tuition rates. Keep in mind - there are fewer of these deals every year (also a matter of public record), as all levels of U.S. government are going broke, and American voters have largely seemed to prefer politicians whose solution is tax cuts for the very wealthy, and cutting every public expenditure but defense.
you assert that this is the norm for the entire U.S.
Yes, I do.
Pretty much any university has this thing called office hours where one can talk to the professor on a one and one basis.
And pretty much any university won't fire a tenured prof for hiding from his students and organizing his grads to cover his office.
The CS curriculum is geared toward theoretical concepts rather than practical knowledge applicable to the industry.
One of the smaller problems with it, but yes.
Look, if you're a believer that paying a mid-tier school $200k for a CS Bachelor's degree is a good deal for you or anyone, that means you probably don't have a finance background, and I have a great mortgage backed security to sell you.
I have looked at job listings over the years on Monster.com, Hotjobs and Craigslist. Many have said "Bachelors in Computer Science" required.
I knew someone would say this. I also knew they would not give a percentage of software developer job postings that require a degree; a hint, it's not 100%. In fact I doubt it's 50%. And what's funnier is that even when they say it matters, it usually doesn't.
Yes, there are some non-technical hiring managers (mostly HR professionals) who are taught to put the degree requirement on every job posting they send out, just as a reflex. Try applying to those jobs anyway. If you have experience, they will not even notice or care that you lack a degree. We put it at the bottom of the resume for a reason - and most people don't read that far. If you do not have much experience, that's your problem and no degree, unless it's from a top 10 school, and preferably with honors, will fix it for you. Those hiring for junior positions know best of all how little age or a bachelor's degree matters versus the ability to demonstrate skill. Take your laptop to the park every day and code something cool, son. For bonus points, release it to the world in addition to your future employer.
Most importantly, what you don't do is give some sociopaths at a lower-tier school a $200k IOU for pretending to teach you "computer science." Not if you want to be a developer, anyway.
I was hired as a first year undergrad - so obviously whatever training I would eventually receive didn't matter to my employers. In fact, I was asked to drop out and come full-time repeatedly over the years before I graduated. No one cared if I finished and in fact, they argued that it wouldn't make any difference in my future career. I didn't believe them at the time.
The majority of places I've worked, over many years now, never cared about degree. The large majority. And I never pay attention to degree when hiring, unless someone has i.e. a Masters or PhD in something completely unrelated to CS. Then I take a little note, because you don't tend to switch careers unless you're passionate about what you're switching to.
And if you think Google cares about the degree, ask that "HR girl" how many pre-bachelor's positions they fill every year. They pay $6k/month even for 18 year old summer labor from the top schools, along with Microsoft, IBM, and all the bigs.
First of all, congratulations on having, by all appearances, crafted an outstanding career!
Philosophically, who could disagree with anything you've said. You are responsible, in the end, for your own success. Those who fail will suffer. This is the way of the world. But, before you go, consider an analogy.
"People going to restaurants and getting food poisoning are a bunch of suckers. Eating dinner without knowing the details of sourcing, preparation, proper management of staff and facilities, and ensuring that they are applied in your kitchen, let alone conducting a survey of other patrons to see how often they got sick from eating there? Suckers I tell you! Of course if you lazily skip these steps you will get poisoned. I haven't gotten sick yet, because I was lucky... I mean, skilled enough to guess... I mean choose the correct restaurants based on my natural ability to know who will make a tasty meal without poisoning me."
The answer, of course, isn't for each restaurant to "self regulate" and each diner to become an expert in restauranteur best practices and each conduct their own kitchen inspection. It's to have an FDA and a Health Department. Follow the rules and uphold the standards, or you can't be a restaurant. It's well established, elementary economics- er, I mean, it's well known liberal propaganda that big gubmint enforcing food safety produces vastly better results and stimulates the entire food services economy, as fewer people cook at home rather than take on the effort and risk of being their own Health Department.
The situation is exactly the same with schools and the various accreditation authorities (who are all utterly abdicating at this very moment). With one exception: the education system's customer is a student, who without the luck of a skilled parent, must by definition navigate the purchasing process at a disadvantage. When your product is an undergraduate degree, there is very little reason to believe the majority of your customers will be informed ones. Rather, your customers are a bunch of yokels who rely on things like the Princeton Review's rankings; the type of people who probably put their 401k's in Enron stock and buy Option ARMs.
Hence the scale of the scam now underway across the US, as the last act of the Reeds and Kenyons and South Dakota States of the world is to sell out their heritage for a few more years of existence as a degree mill, leaving a legacy of thousands of victims with the worst class of debt in the U.S. and little hope of relief, ever.
Ah, the H1-B. Purpose-designed to destroy the US skilled labor market, by ending the centuries-old "give me your skilled, your intelligent, your yearning to be economically productive" liberal immigration policies that made this nation great, and replacing them with a regime that allows smart foreigners to come to the US for education and a few years of on the job experience, then forces many who would gladly stay in the West to return to their currency-debased homelands, where they compete more effectively for the same work, at pennies on the dollar.
You can thank the brass at IBM, Oracle, CA and a few other leading tech companies for this ingenious economic ass fucking. We used to brain drain the world. Now it's yet another group of American senior managers shitting where they sleep, since the only thing that makes the U.S. any different from a chillier northern region of Mexico is the economic and social policies they're happy to undermine for a decade or two of quick bucks.
My point is that the "pedagogical technique" of 80-90% of US undergrad programs is worthless, for preparing people to code to a spec or any other purpose. CS classes are not alone in it. Arguing over the CS1 curricula is arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The whole system is fucked. As you say, the top schools are the only places left with value, and it's not as if the CS programs run like medical schools at MIT, Berkeley, RPI, CMU, etc. Yet all these schools generally cost the same (notwithstanding in-state tuition). As the victimization of young people by the non-top schools (200k in debt for 20k of value) is fully realized, many if not most of those schools will collapse, and we'll complete our journey back to the 19th century, where a few elite universities will cater to the children of the aristocracy, who are already lucky in having had a functional but expensive private primary and secondary education.
Cramming 150 kids into a lecture hall with a "mathematician" who wasn't smart enough for the math department, who has never written software for a living and doesn't natively speak the language of most of his student body, and who disappears at the end of the class, shoving his students towards some grad students when they have questions... Where the "teaching" involves reading pages from a badly written $300 book, and then having exactly two interactions with the class: "Midterm" and "Final..." And where in many schools the dirty little secret is that the curve takes the average "D" or "F" up to a "C..."
Aside from a few top schools (who do their best filtering with the SAT, or heaven forbid, other parts of the application), this is the reality of undergrad CS (and these in particular are all true stories). I don't see why you'd waste time on the finer points.
The entire academy in the U.S. is collapsing. Yes, the pipelines for the few moneymaking careers left in society are still somewhat functional (finance, law... medicine, somewhat), but in many other places, the tornado of American societal collapse has passed through. More and more of the marginal schools and departments have essentially opted to become high-gloss degree mills rather than go gently into that good night. The scam is the educational equivalent of shitting where you sleep - only one generation of undergrads is going to get themselves bilked for $200k of student debt for the experience described above, let alone when most of their degrees "prepare" them for a future career lacking any hope of paying it back.
Computer science is still a white collar job in the West for a little longer, but it lacks a professional trade group giving licenses and setting educational benchmarks. And that leads us to the punch line. The C.S. degree isn't even needed for finding work. Anyone with good code to show from their own efforts, especially success in the open source world, will get a job today, and with a few resume lines no one is looking further down. And that, by the way, is because (aside from those top schools, and often even then), they know a degree is worthless as a predictor of quality.
I guess you can ignore all this and still decide philosophically whether you think CompSci is like medicine or even like plumbing, where there is some effort to make it difficult and filter out the riff-raff... or it'll stay just another joke degree.
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Nice, open Linux setup with easy API
Android, you mean. WebOS wouldn't qualify on the easy API part - in their attempt to make a rich client OS with web stack technologies, they failed, as the senior architects behind it practically admitted.
Personally I prefer writing clients in the Android APIs versus anything in the web world. Javascript is a nightmare to ship anything significant in. That's why so much of it is generated from another, better language these days.
WebOS-style UI
Well, you like what you like. I personally found WebOS's UI to be uninspiring, but certainly neither Android nor iOS are the be-all end-all either.
Not needing to be tied into an account like Google/Android...
Android does not tie you to an account. Even stock Android lets you skip that and then you just don't get the services that rely on it. A perfectly good choice, although those services are both free/ad-supported and quite awesome. Then you have the Android variants including the community-developed ones. so if you don't like being offered the option to put account credentials into the phone on first use, it can be removed.
Only in the Bush era could a treasury-looting boondoggle this bad actually go all the way to implementation.
These machines can be defeated by any illiterate petty criminal. Hello... body cavities?
Every actually respectable expert is on record against them, from Bruce Schneier to El Al's former head of security.
This is not just garden variety incompetence. The program was so wildly and thoroughly stupid that it goes beyond negligence into prima facie malicious intent. The bigs from the vendors and the feds on the procurement side should see prison on the grounds of corruption alone. It's no different than selling the army a billion dollars worth of non-working guns or vehicles to pocket the profits. God willing, someday we'll watch the trials on CSpan.
That's leaving aside the laugh-till-you-cry repugnant aspects of what they actually did - which is, let's not sugar coat it, take nude photographs of thousands and thousands of children.
Only in the Bush era could a treasury-looting boondoggle this bad actually go all the way to implementation.
These machines can be defeated by any illiterate petty criminal. Hello... body cavities?
Every actually respectable expert is on record against them, from Bruce Schneier to El Al's former head of security.
This is not just garden variety incompetence. The program was so wildly and thoroughly stupid that it goes beyond negligence into prima facie malicious intent. The bigs from the vendors and the feds on the procurement side should see prison on the grounds of corruption alone. It's no different than selling the army a billion dollars worth of non-working guns or vehicles to pocket the profits. God willing, someday we'll watch the trials on CSpan.
That's leaving aside the laugh-till-you-cry repugnant aspects of what they actually did - which is, let's not sugar coat it, take nude photographs of thousands and thousands of children.
Like Palm, these people squandered a multi-year lead. They had a lock on a wonderful customer base and supplied the dominant smartphone-precursor device to the world, and failed to follow up on through an inability to execute. What happened to the original scrappy, farsighted RIM, that created the Blackberry platform to begin with? Gone - eaten up in the ugly process of becoming a large incumbent business. Now they live on inertia, and their management can't execute their way out of a paper bag. An old story, and a common one.
It has been obvious for many months that RIM was a dead letter - not just behind in the race but lapped many times by multiple competitors. I mean, the Playbook? Really? If you weren't short RIM, sue your broker.
These distinctions, while quite valid in their context, are irrelevant to the creators of alternative platforms that take a holistic approach to developer productivity and capability. Android is a platform that is composed of languages, APIs and tools that work extremely well together as a coherent whole, benefiting from synergies that can only occur as each part is made to fit with the others. HTML5 is a sloppy mess that is half attempts at incremental evolution by pragmatists who want to offer rich client features to an already deployed web browser audience, and half accident.
700k+ smartphone OS devices sell in a day. They are already bleeding over into non-mobile form factors. Developers care about two things: what can I do and how easily can I do it? If the browser teams don't get their act together, in a few years the best answers to those questions will not involve Javascript or the DOM if the majority of users see the web browser as just another app they don't use much anymore, because it's slower, uglier, less reliable, and more complicated to use than another app, that they can find in their menu of apps, or install from a marketplace of apps.
WebOS interestingly was an attempt to leapfrog the standards bodies and build a viable platform with Javascript/HTML/CSS. It failed, so it's up to the remaining players now if they want to keep trying.
OK, I get it. Javascript is the best client scripting language around, and you know better than Google. And "doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does" is uniquely easier in Javascript. I could give you a free education in the relative merits of Javascript versus language X, Y, or Z, but really, you're starting from too far behind intellectually for a slashdot post to help you. Not to mention, recapping a decade worth of widely known debate in the language design community is a waste of time if you won't believe it from me anyway, right? And what are the odds, if you didn't believe it from all the quarters of the internet it was already coming from? Such as, oh I don't know, just for instance, the authors of the largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications?
Other languages are out there to be explored - you may find them interesting or you may hate them. But if you pick favorites more easily than you pick up new platforms, you could find yourself out in the cold when your favorites become obsolete. I leave you with that - good luck.
It is worse. Quite a bit worse than emerging alternatives. So much worse that the web could become gradually marginalized as a rich client platform if it isn't replaced. But don't take my word for it. Google has said so as well, and they know a thing or two about client-side scripting. PHP was originally quite simple in implementation, but it was purpose designed from the very beginning for its primary use to this day - a scripting and template language for dynamic website development. MySQL was directly intended for data storage - which is still all we use it for. Apache - a web server. OK, subversion tried to use it as part of their network layer, and look how that ended. :) Linux - an OS kernel with a Unix heritage. Android and iOS have been cleverly and purposefully designed to be rich client platforms - they already do more than what HTML5 hopes to achieve, and better. Companies are not making mobile web sites - they are making mobile apps, and these platforms are growing quickly enough that "mobile" is going to be a term that dates you after the end of the traditional desktop OS, when these new platforms become so ubiquitous as to erode the distinction.
Javascript and HTML clearly and obviously did not have the current rich client feature set in mind at their creation. That evolved over the many, many years. Worse, Javascript is just not the best scripting language to begin with. Even without being doctrinaire about whether certain kinds of dynamism have stood the test of time as good elements of language design, among similar scripting languages, there are just better alternatives than Netscape's mid-90's little sideline improvisation. The entire first era of Javascript involved implementations so poor, unstable, and limited that they were barely adequate to implement image rollovers. Even the most basic features that led to "Ajax" - anything resembling network IO - came years later and were pioneered by a different team at a different company - Microsoft. And it took even a few more years before anyone had the audacity to use it for i.e. Google Maps - in no small part because of how poor the platform was, and how different it was from the original intent of the creators.
Javascript is something of an accidental success. As with many languages before it, its users valiantly cope with its flaws and do their best to dress up the squalor they live in, but it's not funny for Google anymore. They have to develop, maintain, and test one of the largest JavaScript codebases in the world, and the it's-the-90's-and-I'm-high-on-cocaine-at-4am-and-it's-due-tomorrow scripting language design philosophy is not helping them. In fact the story of the last few years has been the quiet proving out of the "extra keystrokes for correctness" paradigm, from simple assertions (including "type assertions" aka good old fashioned strong typing) to unit tests to highly complex integration tests of harrowing complexity.
If I understand correctly, Google already writes much of their JavaScript in an intermediate language that adds certain features. They have long needed a compile step anyway for compression/"obfuscation" and I suspect it was a natural outgrowth of that. This appears to be another step in the evolution of that development pipeline.
There are many interesting developments brewing in the browser these days. I wish the browser guys luck, because I think have just a little longer to get their act together before the world gradually changes out from under them, and a purpose-designed, clever, far more powerful platform, such as Android or iOS, might actually start to change the web browser's position in the computing ecosystem. A modern scripting language is only part of the price of admission to staying relevant as a platform.
It starts with a few companies who "only" want to collect $5, or $10, or $35 per Android device. I suppose we can all nod our heads and agree that the mighty should be able to throw their weight around. It feels right. Who cares about the details - we're sure Linux must have stolen something. Otherwise how could it be so great? And so cheap?
But nothing stops the flow of new complaints. Do you know how many software patents there are? How many new applications per day? How many are obvious, trivial, or overly broad? Soon it will be a dozen companies collecting a Linux tax - forget merely on Android - and then it will be 30. A gold rush will ensue - get on the list of people who have to be paid off. Name your own price - the world's high tech giants will have to pay up! But, oh dear. iOS will suddenly have the exact same problem. Do you know how many patents they violate? So will Windows Phone. So will Blackberry. So will those little "learn to read" kiddie computers they sell in Toys R Us. So will everyone.
When it finally becomes more than just a few pariahs and evil actors in the tech industry who try to enforce their patents, it ends with every product having dozens and then hundreds of lawyers showing up to tax them. The only question is, how much economic damage will we do to ourselves before we finally take the obvious step and abolish software patents - which were never even allowed in the first place in Europe, India, and China. This economically pernicious barratry is so obviously stupid that it makes the US an object ridicule abroad.
The tacit policy of allowing software to be patentable reduces competition, stifles innovation, breaks healthy markets, and diverts money to billion-dollar portfolio buys instead of jobs. The only thing it reliably accomplishes is enriching lawyers - the least economically productive activity imaginable.
A lucid and trenchant analysis.
The world waits with baited breath for your solutions for increasing energy generation, food production, and water purification.
Oh and all this while we are about to run out of the millions of years of solar energy we just burned up in the form of fossil fuels.
Oh, you expected someone else to figure these things out. I see.
This only ends one way, and any fool can see it.
But sure, argue both sides. Have as many kids as you want. I couldn't guess their odds of living to 70, but I am willing to bet that this is that "magic" generation, and they will see suffering and mass death unprecedented in all of human history.
I pretend nothing. Obama can end the TSA noodz business anytime and score political points in the process. He doesn't so we are forced to do the math; which goes roughly, anyone not ending it looks either corrupt or stupid, and I like to hope our politicians are at least getting paid to pretend it all accomplishes something.
I am especially tired of people defending Bush - one of history's most indefensible American presidents. I'm tired of false equivalences and emotional desires for parity. Just because we're all human and no one's perfect and it's so darn hard to just call a spade a spade doesn't mean we throw up our hands and imply they're all in some sense equal, or that Bush didn't box way above his weight in the catastrophic fuckup championship. Yet it's hard not to feel there isn't something more pathetic about Obama just for how stingily he doles out actual liberalism versus the amount of scorn he receives for being liberal. With Bush, god damned if you didn't get exactly what you paid for. With Obama, if he was white and running for office in the 80's they would have called him a Republican. Except if Reagan had tortured and run a military tribunal for, say, Noriega.
Then again I would have said "for instance" Obama wouldn't do anything as actively stupid as voluntarily starting another war in the middle east, and then the idiot went into Libya ass first. I give up.
Can you answer a simple question: did Bush's people cook up this body scanner regime or not?
If you think I give Obama a pass on this, you're wrong - I just don't know which is worse, thinking of an idea this stupid, or not ending it on your first year in office. Also - are you against bashing our presidents? Or do you think dissent and criticism (current and historical) is unproductive or unpatriotic, like the Chinese?
Have we no sense of decency?
It was all fun and games when it was graft and bribery on a multibillion spend to put millimeter wave scanners in a few security lines. It was obviously stupid because the devices can be fooled by concealing things in body cavities. In a sane world, the criminal justice system would put the Bush-era TSA people who planned this scheme on the stand, where they'd say "well, we thought it was a good idea at the time;" any high-school educated jury wouldn't believe a word of it, and would hand out prison sentences for the various criminals involved in the federal security bureaucracy and device vendors. Security apparatus steals tax money, news at 11, complete with body scans of preteen girls.
But in these crazy times, in for a penny, in for a pound. Instead of just letting people opt-out of being scanned (no reason not to, since the devices are only reaching a few percent of travelers anyway, and even an illiterate petty criminal can explain why they're worthless for stopping terrorism), they're trying to push the issue with the also ineffective but highly titillating federally-funded full body massage.
Perhaps it's an experiment designed to determine just how debased the American people have become - how ignorant of their own rights and heritage. In which case, well played.
With all the ways I don't seem to see eye to eye with the Tea Party and the Texas government these days, it's a genuine pleasure to find some common ground, and say, I take my hat off to them.
Few of us have the luxury of seeing many schools to compare. All of the problems in my original post were observed first-hand. That's every single specific one, with no exaggeration or hyperbole. And tuition inflation is obviously a matter of public record. So you have a different anecdote. I'm sure it's true, but who's "right"? The only useful thing in between would be a survey, statistic, or etc. and in lieu of that the answer can't be "silence!" Rather, we just each give our experience and our opinion about it.
As an informal survey, this forum itself isn't so bad; after days, you seem to be in a minority of commenters who appear to have the thesis that the average CS undergrad education isn't so expensive, or bad, or bad as a deal. Most here don't seem to feel the way you do on the subject. That's probably telling you something right there.
I will give you this: CS programs are taught badly, and undergrad is wildly expensive - but the two problems do not always meet. There are definitely cheap government-funded schools left in the US - that is, if you are paying the insider tuition rates. Keep in mind - there are fewer of these deals every year (also a matter of public record), as all levels of U.S. government are going broke, and American voters have largely seemed to prefer politicians whose solution is tax cuts for the very wealthy, and cutting every public expenditure but defense.
you assert that this is the norm for the entire U.S.
Yes, I do.
Pretty much any university has this thing called office hours where one can talk to the professor on a one and one basis.
And pretty much any university won't fire a tenured prof for hiding from his students and organizing his grads to cover his office.
The CS curriculum is geared toward theoretical concepts rather than practical knowledge applicable to the industry.
One of the smaller problems with it, but yes.
Look, if you're a believer that paying a mid-tier school $200k for a CS Bachelor's degree is a good deal for you or anyone, that means you probably don't have a finance background, and I have a great mortgage backed security to sell you.
I have looked at job listings over the years on Monster.com, Hotjobs and Craigslist. Many have said "Bachelors in Computer Science" required.
I knew someone would say this. I also knew they would not give a percentage of software developer job postings that require a degree; a hint, it's not 100%. In fact I doubt it's 50%. And what's funnier is that even when they say it matters, it usually doesn't.
Yes, there are some non-technical hiring managers (mostly HR professionals) who are taught to put the degree requirement on every job posting they send out, just as a reflex. Try applying to those jobs anyway. If you have experience, they will not even notice or care that you lack a degree. We put it at the bottom of the resume for a reason - and most people don't read that far. If you do not have much experience, that's your problem and no degree, unless it's from a top 10 school, and preferably with honors, will fix it for you. Those hiring for junior positions know best of all how little age or a bachelor's degree matters versus the ability to demonstrate skill. Take your laptop to the park every day and code something cool, son. For bonus points, release it to the world in addition to your future employer.
Most importantly, what you don't do is give some sociopaths at a lower-tier school a $200k IOU for pretending to teach you "computer science." Not if you want to be a developer, anyway.
I was hired as a first year undergrad - so obviously whatever training I would eventually receive didn't matter to my employers. In fact, I was asked to drop out and come full-time repeatedly over the years before I graduated. No one cared if I finished and in fact, they argued that it wouldn't make any difference in my future career. I didn't believe them at the time.
The majority of places I've worked, over many years now, never cared about degree. The large majority. And I never pay attention to degree when hiring, unless someone has i.e. a Masters or PhD in something completely unrelated to CS. Then I take a little note, because you don't tend to switch careers unless you're passionate about what you're switching to.
And if you think Google cares about the degree, ask that "HR girl" how many pre-bachelor's positions they fill every year. They pay $6k/month even for 18 year old summer labor from the top schools, along with Microsoft, IBM, and all the bigs.
Wow. That was very well said. Thank you.
First of all, congratulations on having, by all appearances, crafted an outstanding career!
Philosophically, who could disagree with anything you've said. You are responsible, in the end, for your own success. Those who fail will suffer. This is the way of the world. But, before you go, consider an analogy.
"People going to restaurants and getting food poisoning are a bunch of suckers. Eating dinner without knowing the details of sourcing, preparation, proper management of staff and facilities, and ensuring that they are applied in your kitchen, let alone conducting a survey of other patrons to see how often they got sick from eating there? Suckers I tell you! Of course if you lazily skip these steps you will get poisoned. I haven't gotten sick yet, because I was lucky... I mean, skilled enough to guess... I mean choose the correct restaurants based on my natural ability to know who will make a tasty meal without poisoning me."
The answer, of course, isn't for each restaurant to "self regulate" and each diner to become an expert in restauranteur best practices and each conduct their own kitchen inspection. It's to have an FDA and a Health Department. Follow the rules and uphold the standards, or you can't be a restaurant. It's well established, elementary economics- er, I mean, it's well known liberal propaganda that big gubmint enforcing food safety produces vastly better results and stimulates the entire food services economy, as fewer people cook at home rather than take on the effort and risk of being their own Health Department.
The situation is exactly the same with schools and the various accreditation authorities (who are all utterly abdicating at this very moment). With one exception: the education system's customer is a student, who without the luck of a skilled parent, must by definition navigate the purchasing process at a disadvantage. When your product is an undergraduate degree, there is very little reason to believe the majority of your customers will be informed ones. Rather, your customers are a bunch of yokels who rely on things like the Princeton Review's rankings; the type of people who probably put their 401k's in Enron stock and buy Option ARMs.
Hence the scale of the scam now underway across the US, as the last act of the Reeds and Kenyons and South Dakota States of the world is to sell out their heritage for a few more years of existence as a degree mill, leaving a legacy of thousands of victims with the worst class of debt in the U.S. and little hope of relief, ever.
Ah, the H1-B. Purpose-designed to destroy the US skilled labor market, by ending the centuries-old "give me your skilled, your intelligent, your yearning to be economically productive" liberal immigration policies that made this nation great, and replacing them with a regime that allows smart foreigners to come to the US for education and a few years of on the job experience, then forces many who would gladly stay in the West to return to their currency-debased homelands, where they compete more effectively for the same work, at pennies on the dollar.
You can thank the brass at IBM, Oracle, CA and a few other leading tech companies for this ingenious economic ass fucking. We used to brain drain the world. Now it's yet another group of American senior managers shitting where they sleep, since the only thing that makes the U.S. any different from a chillier northern region of Mexico is the economic and social policies they're happy to undermine for a decade or two of quick bucks.
My point is that the "pedagogical technique" of 80-90% of US undergrad programs is worthless, for preparing people to code to a spec or any other purpose. CS classes are not alone in it. Arguing over the CS1 curricula is arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The whole system is fucked. As you say, the top schools are the only places left with value, and it's not as if the CS programs run like medical schools at MIT, Berkeley, RPI, CMU, etc. Yet all these schools generally cost the same (notwithstanding in-state tuition). As the victimization of young people by the non-top schools (200k in debt for 20k of value) is fully realized, many if not most of those schools will collapse, and we'll complete our journey back to the 19th century, where a few elite universities will cater to the children of the aristocracy, who are already lucky in having had a functional but expensive private primary and secondary education.
I'd say that was perfectly put. I can add nothing.
Cramming 150 kids into a lecture hall with a "mathematician" who wasn't smart enough for the math department, who has never written software for a living and doesn't natively speak the language of most of his student body, and who disappears at the end of the class, shoving his students towards some grad students when they have questions... Where the "teaching" involves reading pages from a badly written $300 book, and then having exactly two interactions with the class: "Midterm" and "Final..." And where in many schools the dirty little secret is that the curve takes the average "D" or "F" up to a "C..."
Aside from a few top schools (who do their best filtering with the SAT, or heaven forbid, other parts of the application), this is the reality of undergrad CS (and these in particular are all true stories). I don't see why you'd waste time on the finer points.
The entire academy in the U.S. is collapsing. Yes, the pipelines for the few moneymaking careers left in society are still somewhat functional (finance, law... medicine, somewhat), but in many other places, the tornado of American societal collapse has passed through. More and more of the marginal schools and departments have essentially opted to become high-gloss degree mills rather than go gently into that good night. The scam is the educational equivalent of shitting where you sleep - only one generation of undergrads is going to get themselves bilked for $200k of student debt for the experience described above, let alone when most of their degrees "prepare" them for a future career lacking any hope of paying it back.
Computer science is still a white collar job in the West for a little longer, but it lacks a professional trade group giving licenses and setting educational benchmarks. And that leads us to the punch line. The C.S. degree isn't even needed for finding work. Anyone with good code to show from their own efforts, especially success in the open source world, will get a job today, and with a few resume lines no one is looking further down. And that, by the way, is because (aside from those top schools, and often even then), they know a degree is worthless as a predictor of quality.
I guess you can ignore all this and still decide philosophically whether you think CompSci is like medicine or even like plumbing, where there is some effort to make it difficult and filter out the riff-raff... or it'll stay just another joke degree.
All the bullshit aside, the only reason anyone would loan them anything is the implicit guarantee of their non-basketcase EU neighbors.
Sort of similar to a number of American financial institutions, and the U.S. government. :)