I'm a male software dev. And I look at computers as tools to do other things. What's more, I think most people, including male people, are more or less the same as me. I'm on the computer so much because I'm using it as a tool to, say, communicate with other people. Or consume information. Or compete with people online. Etc.
Also worth noting is that the downward trend in Java's market share is mirrored by downward trends in the share of other "highly popular" languages. This possibly indicates the market is becoming more diverse. TIOBE's chart goes back to June 2001, which, according to their numbers, is the high water mark for Java at 26.5%. In that month the shares for C and C++ were 20.2% and 14.2% respectively. In August 2014 Java had declined to 15.0%. C and C++ declined to 16.4% and 4.7% respectively. Woe is C++. In fact, of the top ten languages in 2014 the only ones to gain market share over the past year are Javascript and Objective-C. Javascript has been more or less flat; Objective-C spiked earlier this year but has since dropped back to 2013 levels.
Python? Peaked in February 2011 when it reached 7.0% in TIOBE's index. It's currently sitting at 3.1% in August 2014.
Ruby? Peaked at 4.0% in December 2008. Currently at 1.2% in August 2014.
I can't get info on Scala, Go, Haskell, Scheme, Erlang, Groovy, et. al. because they aren't used widely enough for TIOBE to even report stats.
Possibly related to Microsoft's failure to gain a foothold in the mobile / app space? Since we're talking about "market share", if a new market materializes and C# isn't used at all in that market then its relative share should appear to decline.
You should run some benchmarks with and without Proguard. I'm curious to know what performance benefits it provides (if any). I was actually thinking more of running things like the web containers themselves through ProGuard. Tomcat vs. Tomcat+Proguard. JBoss vs. JBoss+Proguard. Or Eclipse, for that matter.
You could meaningfully refer to "2+ sigma" developers without assuming a normal distribution, though. So his criticism is "sort of" valid given you never explicitly stated you were talking about a normal distribution. Maybe the distribution of of ability among developers is skewed right, in which case more than half of them are "below average".
If you've used a credit card or done any banking in the past 10 years you've probably made use of Java. Or if you've used an Android phone. If you're speaking narrowly in terms of desktop apps then sure, I'll buy the 10 years stat.
Since moving to Android development (from the back-end Java world) I'm a little surprised that ProGuard doesn't get used more in the non-app space. That gives you another round of optimization before your byte code even hits the JVM.
Java is moving into archaic irrelevance faster than ever.
This seems like it should be quantifiable. That is, you seem to be saying that the rate of decrease in Java's popularity is at an all time high. The slope of its decline is steeper than its ever been, so to speak. Do the popularity metrics bear out that claim? After some cursory googling, the TIOBE rankings are the only one I could find online that has historical data. If you look at their chart it looks like Java's rate of decline in market share is approximately linear, with a fair amount of fluctuation. If you focus only on the period from April 2014 to August 2014 then the decline is indeed rather steep, but it's no steeper than, say, the period from February 2013 to July 2013. So while Java may indeed be waning (gradually) I'm calling B.S. on the claim that it's "moving into archaic irrelevance faster than ever".
I have only a dim recollection of Ada from a programming languages "survey" course in college, but I remember being bothered by the fact that everything was a word. Some of them could have been symbols. It seemed really...verbose.
It bugs me that we're using words like "hip" and "cool" to describe programming languages. That anyone would choose to learn (or use) a language on the basis of it being "hip" is dumb. I'm looking at you, Ruby.
It bugs me that we're using words like "hip" and "cool" to describe programming languages. That anyone would choose to learn (or use) a language on the basis of it being "hip" is dumb. I'm looking at you, Ruby.
Students always had the option of buying books online through Amazon.
Not when I was in school we didn't. That said, yes, it's been an option for some time now. On the other hand, there's no guarantee every textbook will be available. Perhaps this agreement guarantees that any textbook assigned to a Purdue student will be carried. The university may also have negotiated a group discount.
Agreed. Open question as to whether that's a net positive. My point is that the pace of language modifications should slow down as a language matures and all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. It's unrealistic to expect a constant rate of change.
Java != Spring. Java != J2EE. At some point, when a language has been tweaked for, say, 20 years, do you get to the point where the addition of new language features (as opposed to libraries) should be a fairly rare thing?
That's easily addressed. Just feature prominent verbiage in the opt-in agreement making it clear that the filter isn't perfect, but that if you can live with the false positives then it's better than nothing at all if one's goal is to make it harder to access porn et. al. My complaint was with the article's implication that single-digit adoption rates are evidence that interest is low. That's true if one supposes that the entire customer base as the target audience for this feature. If the target audience is only those households with children, though, then the interest level (among those in the target audience) may be higher than the single-digit overall percentage would suggest.
The vast, vast majority of households that are interested in such filters are those that include minor-aged children. So, to measure uptake you'd want to look at what percentage of those households are opting in.
Microsoft or any company already supposed to have to show a genuine need before going to an H1B worker. That means that you have exhausted other possibilities. These companies all use the same stupid trick to show a need: create an unbelievably narrow job description that almost literally cannot be filled, and advertise that job domestically, and then create a reasonable job description, and advertise that internationally. Same job. Then use the lack of qualified resumes from the domestic advert, and the wealth of resumes from the foreign advert, as the basis for importing an H1B worker.
That's shady. If they're doing that then they should be called on it and heavily fined and/or have their H1B visa rights revoked. That said, I'm not even sure I agree with the requirement that employers demonstrate a need. Given that it's the law, though, they should be held to it.
The H1B program facilitates labor arbitrage, where lightly experienced foreign IT workers are repackaged as high-priced experts and sold for high-rates to American companies. The companies in the middle sprinkle some domestic management and technical resources, and reap large economic benefits that are economically unjustified.
I'd say the program empowers companies to be dumb in that particular way, i.e. hiring people who aren't qualified, but I'm not sure that dumbness is inherently baked into the program. One can imagine a company that actually vets its hires properly and only hires people who are actually qualified.
With the caveat that I'm not an expert on H1B, my gripe with the program is that encourages people to live and work in the U.S. temporarily as opposed to permanently. What I'd like to see is an immigration policy that actively courts and keeps highly educated and capable people who want to live and work in the U.S. permanently. Skimming the world's best and brightest can only help the U.S. in the long-term.
Nope. And I didn't use one. He's not wrong because he's associated with Tea Party. I mentioned that affiliation to highlight what his potential motivations might be for making a big stink about the H1B visas. His constituents are predominantly of the opinion that foreigners are coming in and "taking our jobs". So he seizes upon the Microsoft layoff and links it to a program that brings more foreigners into the country and yells a little bit. His constituents see that he's "mad as hell" about foreigner-job-stealing and feel confident he's "fighting the good fight" for them in D.C. Mission accomplished.
Most of my comments have nothing to do with the Tea Party. I don't work for a PAC. In fact, I work in the industry most likely to be affected by an influx of H1B visa workers.
Sure. But I don't "speak" Java. It's a mechanism for encoding instructions. To the extent English can also be used to encode instructions I suppose they're similar in that way, but natural languages interact with the brain in a completely different way.
Jeff Sessions, Tea Party Guy. Of course he's going to take the nativist view. He probably thinks Microsoft could just take the 18,000 people it's laying off and repurpose them to fill whatever positions it's trying to use H1B visas for. Because tech skills are interchangeable, right? And all those 18,000 are totally okay relocating across the country (or globe) right?
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I'm a male software dev. And I look at computers as tools to do other things. What's more, I think most people, including male people, are more or less the same as me. I'm on the computer so much because I'm using it as a tool to, say, communicate with other people. Or consume information. Or compete with people online. Etc.
Also worth noting is that the downward trend in Java's market share is mirrored by downward trends in the share of other "highly popular" languages. This possibly indicates the market is becoming more diverse. TIOBE's chart goes back to June 2001, which, according to their numbers, is the high water mark for Java at 26.5%. In that month the shares for C and C++ were 20.2% and 14.2% respectively. In August 2014 Java had declined to 15.0%. C and C++ declined to 16.4% and 4.7% respectively. Woe is C++. In fact, of the top ten languages in 2014 the only ones to gain market share over the past year are Javascript and Objective-C. Javascript has been more or less flat; Objective-C spiked earlier this year but has since dropped back to 2013 levels.
Python? Peaked in February 2011 when it reached 7.0% in TIOBE's index. It's currently sitting at 3.1% in August 2014.
Ruby? Peaked at 4.0% in December 2008. Currently at 1.2% in August 2014.
I can't get info on Scala, Go, Haskell, Scheme, Erlang, Groovy, et. al. because they aren't used widely enough for TIOBE to even report stats.
Possibly related to Microsoft's failure to gain a foothold in the mobile / app space? Since we're talking about "market share", if a new market materializes and C# isn't used at all in that market then its relative share should appear to decline.
You should run some benchmarks with and without Proguard. I'm curious to know what performance benefits it provides (if any). I was actually thinking more of running things like the web containers themselves through ProGuard. Tomcat vs. Tomcat+Proguard. JBoss vs. JBoss+Proguard. Or Eclipse, for that matter.
You could meaningfully refer to "2+ sigma" developers without assuming a normal distribution, though. So his criticism is "sort of" valid given you never explicitly stated you were talking about a normal distribution. Maybe the distribution of of ability among developers is skewed right, in which case more than half of them are "below average".
If you've used a credit card or done any banking in the past 10 years you've probably made use of Java. Or if you've used an Android phone. If you're speaking narrowly in terms of desktop apps then sure, I'll buy the 10 years stat.
Since moving to Android development (from the back-end Java world) I'm a little surprised that ProGuard doesn't get used more in the non-app space. That gives you another round of optimization before your byte code even hits the JVM.
This seems like it should be quantifiable. That is, you seem to be saying that the rate of decrease in Java's popularity is at an all time high. The slope of its decline is steeper than its ever been, so to speak. Do the popularity metrics bear out that claim? After some cursory googling, the TIOBE rankings are the only one I could find online that has historical data. If you look at their chart it looks like Java's rate of decline in market share is approximately linear, with a fair amount of fluctuation. If you focus only on the period from April 2014 to August 2014 then the decline is indeed rather steep, but it's no steeper than, say, the period from February 2013 to July 2013. So while Java may indeed be waning (gradually) I'm calling B.S. on the claim that it's "moving into archaic irrelevance faster than ever".
He may have assumed the normal distribution.
I have only a dim recollection of Ada from a programming languages "survey" course in college, but I remember being bothered by the fact that everything was a word. Some of them could have been symbols. It seemed really...verbose.
It bugs me that we're using words like "hip" and "cool" to describe programming languages. That anyone would choose to learn (or use) a language on the basis of it being "hip" is dumb. I'm looking at you, Ruby.
Know what else is irritating? Posting on the wrong thread. Doh.
It bugs me that we're using words like "hip" and "cool" to describe programming languages. That anyone would choose to learn (or use) a language on the basis of it being "hip" is dumb. I'm looking at you, Ruby.
Not when I was in school we didn't. That said, yes, it's been an option for some time now. On the other hand, there's no guarantee every textbook will be available. Perhaps this agreement guarantees that any textbook assigned to a Purdue student will be carried. The university may also have negotiated a group discount.
My exposure to Java is in the context of Android development, so I haven't even touched anything newer than 1.6.
Agreed. Open question as to whether that's a net positive. My point is that the pace of language modifications should slow down as a language matures and all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. It's unrealistic to expect a constant rate of change.
Java != Spring. Java != J2EE. At some point, when a language has been tweaked for, say, 20 years, do you get to the point where the addition of new language features (as opposed to libraries) should be a fairly rare thing?
That's easily addressed. Just feature prominent verbiage in the opt-in agreement making it clear that the filter isn't perfect, but that if you can live with the false positives then it's better than nothing at all if one's goal is to make it harder to access porn et. al. My complaint was with the article's implication that single-digit adoption rates are evidence that interest is low. That's true if one supposes that the entire customer base as the target audience for this feature. If the target audience is only those households with children, though, then the interest level (among those in the target audience) may be higher than the single-digit overall percentage would suggest.
The vast, vast majority of households that are interested in such filters are those that include minor-aged children. So, to measure uptake you'd want to look at what percentage of those households are opting in.
That's shady. If they're doing that then they should be called on it and heavily fined and/or have their H1B visa rights revoked. That said, I'm not even sure I agree with the requirement that employers demonstrate a need. Given that it's the law, though, they should be held to it.
I'd say the program empowers companies to be dumb in that particular way, i.e. hiring people who aren't qualified, but I'm not sure that dumbness is inherently baked into the program. One can imagine a company that actually vets its hires properly and only hires people who are actually qualified.
With the caveat that I'm not an expert on H1B, my gripe with the program is that encourages people to live and work in the U.S. temporarily as opposed to permanently. What I'd like to see is an immigration policy that actively courts and keeps highly educated and capable people who want to live and work in the U.S. permanently. Skimming the world's best and brightest can only help the U.S. in the long-term.
Nope. And I didn't use one. He's not wrong because he's associated with Tea Party. I mentioned that affiliation to highlight what his potential motivations might be for making a big stink about the H1B visas. His constituents are predominantly of the opinion that foreigners are coming in and "taking our jobs". So he seizes upon the Microsoft layoff and links it to a program that brings more foreigners into the country and yells a little bit. His constituents see that he's "mad as hell" about foreigner-job-stealing and feel confident he's "fighting the good fight" for them in D.C. Mission accomplished.
I agree. Instead of H1B visas, we should get most of those folks on the fast track to citizenship. Then Sessions would work for them.
Most of my comments have nothing to do with the Tea Party. I don't work for a PAC. In fact, I work in the industry most likely to be affected by an influx of H1B visa workers.
Sure. But I don't "speak" Java. It's a mechanism for encoding instructions. To the extent English can also be used to encode instructions I suppose they're similar in that way, but natural languages interact with the brain in a completely different way.
Jeff Sessions, Tea Party Guy. Of course he's going to take the nativist view. He probably thinks Microsoft could just take the 18,000 people it's laying off and repurpose them to fill whatever positions it's trying to use H1B visas for. Because tech skills are interchangeable, right? And all those 18,000 are totally okay relocating across the country (or globe) right?