I've seen this said on Slashdot a fair bit but I've never seen any evidence of it in reality, that is, it's not that I haven't seen jobs where they demand years of experience, but I've never seen an employer that actually holds people to that.
I say this because I got a C#.NET job without any commercial experience and because when I've moved up the chain I've gotten "requires 5 years experience" jobs and job offers when I only had 2 years experience.
I'm not sure if this multi-year experience meme on Slashdot is a result of some American-centric practice, but it certainly isn't something that's universally, or even widely true in the UK. Even the companies that seemed braindead and staffed by annoying or awful people at interview time all seemed to have the pragmaticism to worry more about whether you could actually do the job rather than some arbitrary numbers.
I don't think most companies do mobile apps in house, I say this because my last employer made it's existence producing the exact sort of apps you mention for just about every industry going from the MoD through to the who's who of the automotive industries and just about every major business in the financial sector. This means you're going to be limited to the handful of companies that do do in-house development of mobile apps, or the handful that that development is outsourced to.
"I'm not really very employable as a coder, because I ended up going into desktop IT soon after leaving university, and a decade on, I don't have the CV for dev work."
Well maybe my story will give you a bit of encouragement then, I was never really good with school, I was too far ahead from self-learning in IT to care about the lessons, I got my GCSEs, all A - Cs but mostly Cs, and dropped out of A-Level Maths and Physics, barely finished computing with a D and went into IT support as a result too believing I didn't have the grades to go into software. I did 7 years IT support, 5 years through deciding to start a degree in Maths alongside work (I would've done Computing but I'd have been bored repeating stuff I knew so needed something challenging) but well before that degree was complete I decided I needed a new job and figured why not try for software dev jobs? nothing to lose. Within 3 weeks of starting to search I'd had 3 interviews and two offers and so I was gone. I finished my degree whilst doing that job and did end up doing another in comp. sci. I've switched jobs twice since and done some contracts on the side and salary has more than tripled since my desktop days in only 5 years.
I live in rural Yorkshire so not entirely highly populated or rich with jobs either. I do have to commute about an hour each way, we could move of course but I kind of like living rurally so we choose to stay when we are and accept the commute.
I accept it's possible some luck was involved but it was also right at the start of the economic crisis I got my first dev role.
But if I've ever regretted or kicked myself for anything it's not doing what I did sooner. I wish I'd stopped worrying about whether I could get a dev role telling myself I wasn't qualified much sooner because I sincerely believe I could've got one long before.
I was actually studying for my Microsoft developer certs at the same time as my degree and had an in progress section on my CV where I mentioned them and my degree, I never finished the MS certs, I couldn't be bothered to chase them in the end but employers liked seeing that I simply had qualifications in progress - don't be afraid to study something and have it on your CV even if it's not complete, I think employers always found that evidence of self-learning a really big draw, and given that I could tell them what I'd learnt so far at interview they didn't see it as just fluffing up my CV.
So I too had a CV completely useless for dev work given that I had zero commercial experience, but ensuring I was clear on my CV with a little section "About Myself" that described how I'd been programming in my spare time since I was young, describing what I'd done and learnt in my spare time, and a "Qualifications in Progress" section listing some qualifications relevant to the role that I was genuinely studying at the time and that was enough to get interviews and the interviews were enough to let me demonstrate my knowledge face to face and get jobs.
Perhaps you've tried all this and not been so lucky, but if not then I hope it helps, you'll get there!
I don't know, but given that Waterfall has consistently failed them it's worth them trying anything at this point.
One thing public sector does spend a lot on is training (I worked public sector for 7 years) so it's actually possible that they will do a better job of this than many private companies. It's deeply ingrained within public sector culture if you're asked to do something out of your knowledge rather than to learn it yourself to demand training and you'll get it.
Whether the workers have the underlying competence to succeed regardless though is yet to be seen, my experience there was that you can't train laziness out of someone and demand for training was just an excuse for a day off their normal job or something for their CV. But sometimes, just sometimes in public sector you do get skilled competent teams, maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.
"The numbers above are somewhat flawed. 27% 'found fit' - this is before appeals. For represented appeals - there is someone to help with the appeal - well over 50% succeed."
So assuming you're right - I couldn't find any evidence for the figure you claim - but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, that's still going to be at least 10% of claimants that are taking the piss. That's still hundreds of thousands of people, that's still many millions of pounds of tax payers money down the drain just because people are lazy. It's still a far cry from the 0.5% fraud level you claimed.
But the document itself seems to state that that 27% figure is adjusted for appeals. Specifically, it says:
"Outcomes of initial assessments adjusted to account for outcomes after appeals for incapacity benefits claimants referred for reassessment between June 2012 and August 2012 show:"
So I'm afraid it looks like you're clutching at straws, your 0.5% figure seemed to be plucked from thin air, and your claim of appeals altering that number seems not to be true.
The new claimant stats are even more interesting, for new claimants 48% post appeals were determined to be fit for work which implies there are a lot of people trying it on too.
Even if half of the cases were unfair then there's still an awful lot of people who were on, or who have tried to get onto but were not in genuine need of disability benefits. There was still millions of pounds down the drain to people who neither needed, nor deserved the money.
I know there are many thousands of valid cases like the example you cite where people were fit for work, there were also unfortunately thousands of people with "bad backs" and so forth that are magically invisible to medical examination however whether you care to admit it or not. I think you need to accept facts on this one, the numbers are well published and transparent.
Can I be honest? you seem to live in the UK, and you seem interested in software development. I have absolutely nothing against Python, I quite like it, but across much of the UK it's just not where the jobs are.
You may hate Microsoft or whatever else but if you want a software development job in the UK then C# and.NET is where it's at, there's just so many jobs floating around and not enough people to fill them. It's a gravy train right now, and.NET salaries have most definitely been on the up for a good few years now. Even here in Yorkshire where salaries tend to be lower the average starting salary of a junior.NET developer seems to have gone from about £18k up to about £26k in the last 5 years alone, even when most other salaries have been declining. If you can get through a book like C# in Depth and understand and be comfortable with most of it then you'll already be well ahead of most junior developers and in fact ahead of many non-junior developers. It's a decent book I recommend for people job seeking because it also seems to cover the things that come up often in interviews pretty well.
I sympathise if you don't want to say publicly what sort of salary you're looking for and whereabouts in the UK you are but I'd be intrigued to know, I could at very least give you a rough idea as to whether your expectations are reasonable.
I think it's well worth your while learning Python, as I say, it's a great language, but if employment is your goal then C# and.NET are the way to go. Of course, maybe things are slightly different wherever in the UK you actually are but when I've looked into it things seem fairly uniform across the UK bar London where Java and C++ become far more prominent because of it's large financial sector, but you can always figure it out for yourself - look for developer jobs in your area on jobsite or monster.com and count the number of listings for each language. Apologies though if this is obvious and you've tried all this!
One final question though, are you bothering with recruiters at all or just using job sites and the job centre? Some recruiters are better than others so don't be put off all of them if you've had some bad run-ins.
From about 2005 to 2011 disability benefit claimaints increased by 30% even though there's no justifiable reason for this to be the case because the benefit hadn't really changed and there hadn't been any kind of mass reason for increased levels of disability in the populace.
When the government decided to reassess all claimants the initial figures showed that 37% were found to be fit for work which isn't too dissimilar to the unexplained increase, especially when you factor in appeals and so forth.
Which now states 27% of reassessments determined people were fit for work, so post-appeal this again isn't too different.
But even if you give some leeway and assume there's some bias, these figures are a long way away from your quoted 0.5% so perhaps the issue is that you're misleadingly referring to cases that were determined as outright fraud, rather than the government's reassessment which has avoided claims of fraud and acted somewhat as an amnesty.
Fundamentally though the point is valid, that there has been widescale unnecessary payments of incapacity benefit to people who simply were fit for work. Call it fraud, dishonesty, honest mistake, whatever you want, fundamentally, too many people were getting paid disability benefits unnecessarily so yes they absolutely needed to be cut.
This is of course before you factor in the work that has gone on in recent years to make workplaces more disability friendly such as mandating that all workplaces be wheelchair friendly. These sorts of things mean that incapacity benefit claims should be going down because there are ever less disabilities that outright prevent working.
I'm not a big fan of government, it rather sickens me that they do nothing to deal with benefits for millionaire pensioners who still get free bus passes and winter fuel allowances and so forth and other such stupid nonsense like that. I don't even pretend disability benefits should necessarily have been the biggest priority, but they were a problem, pretending otherwise is just dishonest and your 0.5% figure is grossly misleading relative to the 27% who were found to be fit for work when full reassessment was carried out.
Don't even try, most Agile detractors on Slashdot don't know the first thing about it, they just had a bad manager come in one day and tell them they were doing some Agile when they weren't, they were just doing some half-arsed hearsay version in a poorly implemented manner that they thought could just be shoe-horned in and somehow achieve results. They're completely oblivious that the likes of scrum is as well defined and disciplined as anything like waterfall.
Not to mention that waterfall has been behind hundreds of billions of pounds of IT failure in British government for decades now, so why not try a different tact regardless? If project management was the problem it's obvious that waterfall certainly wasn't the solution, though for what it's worth I think the problem is far deeper than just project management.
Most Agile failure stems from bad managers/developers viewing it as a tickbox buzzword and ramming some half-arsed implementation of it into their team overnight without truly understanding it. But just as getting waterfall right and dealing with the problems that stem from it's rigidity take some time to get used Agile is no different. But after these teams fail because they didn't properly invest in learning it, naively believing that running a project is something you can just wing now that they've changed project management paradigm they then whinge about how it couldn't possibly be them that failed and that people tell them they were doing agile wrong. No fucking shit? you were doing it wrong so of course people were going to tell you you were doing it wrong, them telling you you were doing it wrong doesn't make them wrong, it makes you wrong for doing it wrong and pretending you weren't the problem when you tried it.
I've never seen a team that's been professionally trained in something like scrum and that has taken a bit of time to get used to it and get it right ever have any real problems with it. It does what it does - it allows a project to continue as long as the client wants it to continue determined by the amount of funding they're willing to put in relative to the amount of features and level of quality they want. By definition the biggest cost you can have from Agile is the amount of sprints you're willing to accept before you declare failure. That's far better than doing a whole project and then determining it a failure which is far more costly.
Don't get me wrong, it has it's challenges, if you're doing an Agile project for a client then sometimes the client can be the problem and they wont get people evaluating your releases at each sprint like they should be, but this is still no worse than waterfall where it's only at the end of the project they find it wasn't what they wanted.
But none of those problems you mention are insurmountable, the real problem is as it always is in the UK - the same old companies get hired time and time again despite failing over and over and the contracts are always so badly negotiated that the companies involved get paid regardless of whether they actually deliver.
Until government stops using the like of Accenture and so forth for these projects it's never going to see things turn out any differently. They pay way over the top for something they could get so much cheaper that corruption is the most likely reason.
Too many public sector workers allow contracts to be signed that award private sector companies to be paid even when they fail and then those very public sectors end up working at these companies when failure occurs. It's money for nothing and the payer foots the bill.
They just need to start hiring companies that actually want to do the job, rather than companies whose entire business model revolves around back-handers and getting paid for favourable contracts that award them greatly for not doing the job.
Look at G4S with the Olympics, they completely failed to deliver but rather than refusing all payment and recovering all funds paid to date for breach of contract the government spends months bartering over how many millions it should give them with spurious comments from the executives of the company like "We may have to take a loss on this" - no fucking shit? You failed to deliver, if it cost you that's not our fucking problem we still want our money back, though from what I understand they didn't make a loss on it in the end, despite failing to deliver.
As soon as reward for failure stops in British public sector projects, then failure itself will suddenly become much less common.
Does that mean the US has a method of testing for how people suffered an affliction?
How does the US differentiate between people who got HIV through carelessness and those who were raped? What about telling the difference between people who got lung cancer through smoking and others who got it because they had to take a bar staff job to be able to afford to eat and contracted it through no other choice than to suffer passive smoking?
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that's a bad thing?
It means films can be made for books without inheriting families or copyright hoarders blocking it unnecessarily or with unrealistic demands. It means people outside Hollywood can have a go at making films based on books without needing Hollywood style fortunes to barter for a license.
It sounds like a very good thing IMO, sure it may mean more crap films on famous books, but it also means more choice, and amongst that choice will be a bunch of gems that would never otherwise be able to be made.
It sounds like a very very good thing for culture to me.
"I expect that the government may have interpreted the results of that consultation very differently than they did."
No they wouldn't, because your current government is a US puppet government, so copyright reform in favour of Hollywood et. al. was always on the agenda. This was just the particular excuse they chose to use in this instance, it doesn't make sense of course, but they thought it sounded good enough to dupe people like you.
Think about it, it doesn't matter if those responses are the same, the fact is it still means there were thousands of people who wanted a relaxation of copyright laws in favour of the consumer rather than corporations, but your government chose to ignore that, it told you that because they were the same they have no merit, which is simply completely false. People still sent them because they wanted it known how they felt, but the fact they were duplicates doesn't reduce their merit, it just means there were more people with the same opinion than the government wanted to accept.
Hopefully you've learnt your lesson and you'll get rid of Harper and his cronies soon though, but given that you're allowing them a break, given that you're adding merit to their excuse by pretending that what they say is true, that duplicate submissions makes those submissions meaningless when it doesn't, they're still expressions of valid opinion, I'm not sure you have learnt your lesson. Please realise that the problem for you wasn't the duplicate submissions, it was the corrupt government you elected.
That's because you live in a world where Pascal is a commonly used language and don't know much about the topic.
Just because PHP has spurious use of $ scattered around and a bunch of new keywords doesn't change the fact it's general code style, 90% of it's operators, and most of it's fundamental keywords are taken directly from C, nor does it change the fact that some PHP functions pretty much map directly to underlying C standard library calls. Even the keywords that aren't the same are mostly those that were bodged on for OO and mirror the C++ keywords instead.
I can only guess if you think PHP isn't a C-like language then you've never actually seen a language that isn't C-like. I'll give you a hint - things are very different.
It seems all you can do is coming up with more nonsense and no evidence.
But what else can I expect? You're suggesting marijuana news sites are an objective source of information. Do you really not see that's like saying Sarah Palin's blog is the best source for objective news about the democrats? you really don't realise how stupid that sounds?
I guess you're not much used to the world of software development, your lack of understanding of the subject screams that, so I'll explain it to you.
"As for the others, I dispute this very much. PHP "resembles" C? In what universe? And Java? Hardly."
When people say a language resembles C, they're talking about the fact that bracket usage, brace usage, and keyword usage is often very similar. This is why PHP and Java are referred to as C-like languages. I find it rather amusing that you class C# as a C-based language, yet not PHP when half of PHP's common library just wraps the C standard library. In this respect C# is a larger break from the foundations of C than even PHP is. If you can't see the similarities between Java and C then you really need to learn both C and Java syntax before commenting, the use of braces, brackets, and various keywords are identical to C in many many ways. This isn't coincidence, this is intentional, it's intentional because C used to be the single most popular programming language on the planet and language designers over the years have determined that all that teaching and prior knowledge needn't just go to waste.
"Nonsense. Look at what the most commonly used languages are today."
What exactly do you think the most commonly used languages are today? I ask because I listed them but you oddly seem to think they're something very different.
"(And anybody who tries to use SQL as a "general purpose" language probably IS an idiot.) "
Well given that no one's claimed that then I'm not sure what your point is, you simply spoke of the "most commonly used languages today" of which SQL is one of the most prominent.
"What about Lisp? What about Pascal (Delphi)? What about Python or Ruby? "
What about them? Lisp isn't used for anything much in the real world even if it's a fantastic academic language, Pascal and especially Delphi have been basically dead for coming up to two decades now, and Ruby is still and also-ran, it's just not as popular as the languages I listed. It's sat on the fringes certainly, but it's just not making that last bit of traction needed to break into the list of most prominent languages. Python is about the only one that's really getting there, but it's still not quite reached a point of being one of the mainstream languages like those I listed.
"And as for "popularity", you have to take that graph with a grain of salt. Github might be a decent indicator of popularity, but Stack Overflow is a weak one, if at all. All THAT traffic is about problems. The number of problems with a language, I daresay, is only a weak indicator of its popularity. I mean ActionScript? Really? Who in their right mind would include ActionScript as among the most "popular" languages?"
What graph are you talking about? My list was based on the languages that real actual businesses both use and are recruiting for because that's a far more solid indicator of actual popularity. No one is looking for Pascal/Delphi developers anymore, some companies look for the odd Lisp and Python programmer, but far and away the majority of recruitment is still for Java, PHP, C#, Objective-C, Javascript and C++ developers. You can also simply look at what half the software that's around is developed in, hint: it's not Pascal, or Lisp. You may use the odd Ruby web application and the odd Python application, Google for example has some Python holding it together (though it also has some Java and C++ too).
"Really? Who in their right mind would include ActionScript as among the most "popular" languages?"
Maybe if you had any understanding of the field you'd realise that ActionScript is used by Flash, and Flash is still insanely popular for many internal things, it powers the e-learning programmes for most companies in the world covering various things ranging from health and safety to regulatory compliance. It may well be listed higher than it should be but I think you grossly underestimate it's usage.
"Soon the vectorization problem will cause humans to derive the minimal atomic expressions of such a language and encode it into hardware (thus the requirement for it to be self scripting i.e. self compiling and self hosting)."
Aren't you effectively just going to end up right back at something like lambda calculus?
"While you can generally postulate that coding in non typed scripting languages where you don't have to worry about memory management is going to be faster than coding in a typed, manually memory managed language like C."
But even this falls down when you factor in size of application and long term maintenance/debugging.
I have real world experience of delivering and maintaining large projects in.NET, Java, C++, Javascript, and PHP and whilst PHP is deceptively quick to write code with it's advantage is long lost when it comes to debugging and the disparity grows exponentially as the size of project increases. The problem is that because more errors are caught at compile time with compiled languages and because type conversions are simple enough to be trivial or are explicit much fewer bugs make it through to testing than do with languages like PHP where issues can survive longer and cause more of a testing, debugging, and maintenance headache.
I've thought long and hard about an objective way of measuring productivity with languages and I just don't think there is one, key problems are:
- Different languages excel at solving different problems, coming up with a test project that benefits no language over another is potentially impossible
- Programmers improve over time, and each time they implement a solution to the same problem they'll do it more efficiently so you can't just do the same project in two different languages - later attempts will be written more efficiently than earlier attempts
- If you do a different project with each language it's hard to claim that the projects were identical in terms of scope to compare efficiency but different enough to avoid the same/near problem solving advantage efficiency above after each attempt
- You could use multiple programmers to eliminate the fact that a programmer would work faster the second time around on the same problem, but then you just create a new problem - no two programmers are identical in terms of the speed at which they solve every problem
- Small projects can solve some of these problems, but then you get the aforementioned problems mentioned above where the pitfalls of dynamic languages like PHP and the benefits of compiled languages that change the game in terms of efficiency in the long term come to light
- Do you factor in tools or should everything be written in Notepad? Javascript and C# don't feel much different to write syntactically but throw Visual Studio compared with the fact that just about every Javascript editor is relatively shit and C# has a massive efficiency advantage. Are you measuring the full toolchain or just the language?
I don't think there is a solution to these problems, I don't think you can objectively and scientifically compare language efficiency to a reasonable degree. The best you can do is get a personal feel for the problem and even that might just depend on you personally - I genuinely find C# and Visual Studio the most efficient toolset for developing the sorts of software I've had to develop, but that's simply because I'm primarily used to OO languages and because I primarily develop on and for Windows. Other developers are going to have completely different knowledge sets and so be used to and more efficient than I am in other toolsets. You can theorise over some generalisations, for example, I do think as a generalisation that compiled languages are better than dynamic languages for large projects for the aforementioned problem than the ease and speed of debugging compiled applications grows much more linearly than that of applications written in dynamic languages where bugs can come to light much later in the process but it's hard to even prove that sort of assertion scientifically - I can only go on my extensive experience of that being the case and the fact that the logic behind the reason for that makes a lot of sense- that bugs caught both earlier and automatically due to the inherent traits of the tool chain are bugs that are less problematic, and hence result in less lost time.
"It shouldn't be a flame war. In order to make a meaningful comparison between two programming languages I think you need to have a high level of skill in each, and write two feature-equivalent non-trivial programs in each."
I'm not even sure this is true, each time you write a program you'll learn something about how you could've done it better, so once you've written it once in one language there's a danger that writing it again in another language you'll implement the more efficient solution you should've implemented the first time around but didn't realise until it was too late.
If the application is non-trivial it'd be quite tough to make sure you weren't developing faster with the second language only because you'd learnt from the mistakes and already figured out solutions to the hard problems that slowed you down with the first language.
Even if you insert a third language, to figure out most of the issues first before doing the other two languages, I think you'll still find efficiency gains on even your second iteration so the problem still exists albeit to a lesser extent. You could probably keep doing this, if you write it in, what, 5 languages and then write it in the two more you actually want to compare you may by that point have a fairly realistic comparison because you'll know your efficient solution inside out by that point such that implementation should be less about figuring out a more efficient solution and problem solving and just about writing the code but even there it's not guaranteed, you could overlook efficiency improvements across many iterations potentially.
I've thought about this many times before and it's pretty hard to come up with a reasonably objective manner of testing languages like this because not only do you have the problem I just mentioned but also the problem of the fact some languages handle some problems better than others that someone else also mentioned to you in response. Eliminating these problems and coming up with a genuinely objective test is going to be difficult, if not impossible.
"Marijuana was also widely used as an ingredient in loads of medicines. This dissappeared with its legality. Today, since marijuana cannot be copyrighted, it is pretty useless to the pharmaceutical makers, who couldnt profit from it or make protected intellectual property from it."
This makes zero sense. The same is true of carrots, tobacco, water, and many other things, yet companies still make a profit off of these things because there is money in producing a brand surrounding the product. All your comment does is show us you have no concept of how businesses can make money from products rather than provide any real actual insight as to why any company in this day and age would profit from it being banned. Even here though with a product like this there is a lot of scope for companies like the big pharma groups to produce their own copy protected strain of the product that is superior or at least marketed to be so so even intellectual property concerns are a non issue for them. It's long been established in law that you can get intellectual property protections on certain strains of plants you have created.
I'm not in this debate to prove you wrong that people have been harmed because that'll never happen, even if I do provide an example you'll dismiss it as propaganda, a lie, made up by your mystical conspiratorial opponents. I'm not playing that game because it's pointless. However, why not just search for yourself if you genuinely want evidence? This would be the obvious starting point and unlike you it provides citations for it's claims:
What I do ask however is that if you are going to demand others provide citations for their claims that you play by the same rules, that you provide evidence of your profit-based conspiracy as to why companies in this day and age would profit from a ban on marijuana.
You just don't seem to grasp the fundamental concept that there is a market for marijuana, a highly profitable market, but one that is currently illegal. It's illegality does not change the fact that it is a market however. This means that no business has anything to lose profit-wise by this market because they could equally enter the market upon legalisation and take their share of the profit from that market that already exists. If pharmaceutical companies are going to lose marketshare of their products to marijuana based products then that simply means they can enter that market and replace lost marketshare by their own branded marijuana products - there's no net loss for them, but potential for net gain, something every business will actively encourage the potential for.
But last but not least, you've still not provided any evidence for your argument despite asking anyone else to do so, all you've done is spout more nonsense and make stupid claims about weeding out idiots, despite just making yourself look more like an idiot.
You're not entering the conversation, your spouting nonsense you've completely and utterly failed to back up without any evidence whilst suggesting someone else is wrong because they've done the exact same thing you have.
Prove your point or accept you are just spouting personal opinion, not any kind of established fact. That's what you demanded of the other guy, that's what I'm demanding of you.
And then blame Europe for it when the public complain.
It's Europe's fault prisoners may have to be given the vote!
No it's not, it's our fault for deciding that human rights might be something worth actually giving a damn about and recognising that denying prisoners the vote and then imprisoning political opposition is a common tactic for seizing power that we may wish to avoid in our country. All Europe has done is confirm to us what we've said we agreed with previously. It's not their fault we can't get our message straight, that we legislate one way and then bitch, moan, and complain that we want it another.
I should probably elaborate as both your response and the AC's suggest I probably wont clear enough. I do not think being self-taught necessarily precludes a university education also, because I think the best people who go to university also have passion enough for the topic in question to learn about it both before they take on the subject and whilst they are studying it formally. Everyone has some degree of formal education so I simply view someone as self-taught as someone who has learnt the majority of what they know off their own back and that may for example mean that they learnt everything in CS101 before they even went to university - university didn't teach them that, it simply provided useful confirmation, so I'd still define them as self-taught in that area.
I also did exactly this because I also studied a comp. sci. degree alongside work after I'd started working professionally as a developer, in large part because I wanted academic confirmation of what I had taught myself. I'm not one of those who believes there is no merit in formal education, I fully appreciate the benefits of it, and I think it augments self-teaching very well, but I do not think it by itself guarantees any superiority over self-teaching, on the contrary.
I do agree with you, my point was more that I believe someone who has only ever done a degree in software development or computer science and never bothered to study anything outside of that will not be as good as someone who is self-taught whether that self-taught person hasn't, or has also done a degree as well as being heavily self-taught.
Or in other words, my point is that whether formal education is involved or not, self-teaching is the differentiator, someone who is self-taught is better than someone who is merely formally educated with no self-teaching outside of that, whilst, yes, I agree someone who is heavily self-taught but also did a degree as well will be even better again.
My opinion is of course only formed by my own personal experience, so perhaps it doesn't work universally, but I believe a lot of this because I was helping my friends who went straight into comp. sci. degrees using purely my self-taught knowledge because I was well ahead of them by the time they were doing their degrees and after they'd graduated. I was also doing better in the field professionally than they were before I did my formal degree, but doing that degree has helped me do even better again, I appreciate the fact that it was a good opportunity to open my eyes to topics I might never have properly bothered with but which have become very useful for me, such as AI, specifically genetic algorithms and and neural nets.
I should also add however that I believe my other degree in maths has been highly important in helping me grasp topics too that my friends struggled with and to find solutions that my colleagues couldn't, so perhaps my original study of that does distort things a little bit.
Make of it what you will, but I've always found the best hires to be far and away those who spend a lot of time self-teaching, degree as well or not, so until I find a stellar candidate who has only ever done formal education if such a thing exists then I doubt my opinion will ever change.
So I hope you'll understand at least that I'm not one of those who never bothered with academia and so claims it's useless because they never even tried it and don't want to admit they could be missing out, I do very much think it has value and despite being on a hiatus right now I do plan to do even more postgraduate study in the years to come, but I do think that value is secondary to being a motivated self-learner. After all, let's be honest, what happens when you've studied to the limits of human knowledge and available formal education on a topic? self-learning goes hand in hand with research into new frontiers and is the only way to further knowledge on a topic in the first place - when you reach that height, there is no formal education to further your abilities anyway, discovery through self-learning is the only way forward.
Actually a lot of training courses allow you to keep your jobseekers allowance. My girlfriend's uncle was unemployed for 3 years and got paid jobseekers allowance for the entire duration because he kept going on training courses.
I don't think the welfare state is designed to stop you from losing your home but it is designed to stop you from being homeless - there's a subtle difference there, if you had a £500k house and lost your job then the state shouldn't be expected to keep paying for that, you need to downsize into a £100k house if need be. This makes sense otherwise everyone would be encouraged to buy something wholly unaffordable and then demand the state makes up the shortfall.
Most areas of high unemployment have training centres situated within them, LearnDirect centres are aplenty. Here in Yorkshire there's a hell of a lot of villages that are high in unemployment as a continued result at the loss of mining, but the amount of money that has been pumped into them is phenomenal. You can't go more than 10 miles without hitting a train station that'll get you to places like Leeds, or Sheffield which are the 3rd and 4th largest cities in the UK in no time at all and the fares are subsidised so extremely cheap, more so for the unemployed. There are many new businesses and cheap business units so people can try and start their own businesses being built and so forth too. Despite this there's a massive disparity in the villages, the worst off have ever more investment pumped into them ranging from brand new health centres, to brand new LearnDirect centres, new housing and new businesses as well as ever better transport, but despite this they don't improve. Others that were equally badly off are doing pretty well and are becoming much more afluent, the people in this places are starting their own businesses, they're commuting to major cities and doing well.
I accept that there may be cases where you have people in low unemployment areas that are unemployed and so might not enjoy quite such benefits but they're the exception, not the rule.
So despite the nonsense from the about how these people can't help it blah blah blah it's simply not true, it's not about can't, it's about wont. We have these case studies that prove this, we have villages from identical starting points, but attitudes in some are simply wont, they choose to wallow in their pit of failure and misery whilst their neighbours pick themselves up and sort themselves out and more and more funding can't help those that wont, because the problem is wont, not can't, and that's the issue.
I've lived around here long enough to see that those living in cloud cuckoo land like Owen Jones just have no idea about the real problems, neither do successive governments that think throwing money at the problem will make it better. The problem isn't lack of opportunities, the problem is completely about attitude. You can provide all the opportunities in the world to these people, but they still wont take them because they simply cannot be bothered to learn, or to work. All they want is to spend their days in the local working mens club, or betting shop. The fact that entire villages coming from the exact same starting point have done more with less investment is proof enough that they can sort themselves out and get more than just call centre jobs if the will is there to do so.
I don't pretend to know what the solution is, but it's like you need to move a bunch of highly motivated people to live in these villages to work their way up and show them what they can make of themselves if they actually try. It's like success, and failure are contagious and the difference between the successful and failed villages is simply catalyst people who do try, who do take the opportunities handed to them, and do succeed and everyone else follows, but it's definitely not lack of opportunities, lack of ability to get training and so forth - all this is handed them all on a plate.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen this said on Slashdot a fair bit but I've never seen any evidence of it in reality, that is, it's not that I haven't seen jobs where they demand years of experience, but I've never seen an employer that actually holds people to that.
I say this because I got a C# .NET job without any commercial experience and because when I've moved up the chain I've gotten "requires 5 years experience" jobs and job offers when I only had 2 years experience.
I'm not sure if this multi-year experience meme on Slashdot is a result of some American-centric practice, but it certainly isn't something that's universally, or even widely true in the UK. Even the companies that seemed braindead and staffed by annoying or awful people at interview time all seemed to have the pragmaticism to worry more about whether you could actually do the job rather than some arbitrary numbers.
I don't think most companies do mobile apps in house, I say this because my last employer made it's existence producing the exact sort of apps you mention for just about every industry going from the MoD through to the who's who of the automotive industries and just about every major business in the financial sector. This means you're going to be limited to the handful of companies that do do in-house development of mobile apps, or the handful that that development is outsourced to.
"I'm not really very employable as a coder, because I ended up going into desktop IT soon after leaving university, and a decade on, I don't have the CV for dev work."
Well maybe my story will give you a bit of encouragement then, I was never really good with school, I was too far ahead from self-learning in IT to care about the lessons, I got my GCSEs, all A - Cs but mostly Cs, and dropped out of A-Level Maths and Physics, barely finished computing with a D and went into IT support as a result too believing I didn't have the grades to go into software. I did 7 years IT support, 5 years through deciding to start a degree in Maths alongside work (I would've done Computing but I'd have been bored repeating stuff I knew so needed something challenging) but well before that degree was complete I decided I needed a new job and figured why not try for software dev jobs? nothing to lose. Within 3 weeks of starting to search I'd had 3 interviews and two offers and so I was gone. I finished my degree whilst doing that job and did end up doing another in comp. sci. I've switched jobs twice since and done some contracts on the side and salary has more than tripled since my desktop days in only 5 years.
I live in rural Yorkshire so not entirely highly populated or rich with jobs either. I do have to commute about an hour each way, we could move of course but I kind of like living rurally so we choose to stay when we are and accept the commute.
I accept it's possible some luck was involved but it was also right at the start of the economic crisis I got my first dev role.
But if I've ever regretted or kicked myself for anything it's not doing what I did sooner. I wish I'd stopped worrying about whether I could get a dev role telling myself I wasn't qualified much sooner because I sincerely believe I could've got one long before.
I was actually studying for my Microsoft developer certs at the same time as my degree and had an in progress section on my CV where I mentioned them and my degree, I never finished the MS certs, I couldn't be bothered to chase them in the end but employers liked seeing that I simply had qualifications in progress - don't be afraid to study something and have it on your CV even if it's not complete, I think employers always found that evidence of self-learning a really big draw, and given that I could tell them what I'd learnt so far at interview they didn't see it as just fluffing up my CV.
So I too had a CV completely useless for dev work given that I had zero commercial experience, but ensuring I was clear on my CV with a little section "About Myself" that described how I'd been programming in my spare time since I was young, describing what I'd done and learnt in my spare time, and a "Qualifications in Progress" section listing some qualifications relevant to the role that I was genuinely studying at the time and that was enough to get interviews and the interviews were enough to let me demonstrate my knowledge face to face and get jobs.
Perhaps you've tried all this and not been so lucky, but if not then I hope it helps, you'll get there!
I don't know, but given that Waterfall has consistently failed them it's worth them trying anything at this point.
One thing public sector does spend a lot on is training (I worked public sector for 7 years) so it's actually possible that they will do a better job of this than many private companies. It's deeply ingrained within public sector culture if you're asked to do something out of your knowledge rather than to learn it yourself to demand training and you'll get it.
Whether the workers have the underlying competence to succeed regardless though is yet to be seen, my experience there was that you can't train laziness out of someone and demand for training was just an excuse for a day off their normal job or something for their CV. But sometimes, just sometimes in public sector you do get skilled competent teams, maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.
"The numbers above are somewhat flawed.
27% 'found fit' - this is before appeals.
For represented appeals - there is someone to help with the appeal - well over 50% succeed."
So assuming you're right - I couldn't find any evidence for the figure you claim - but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, that's still going to be at least 10% of claimants that are taking the piss. That's still hundreds of thousands of people, that's still many millions of pounds of tax payers money down the drain just because people are lazy. It's still a far cry from the 0.5% fraud level you claimed.
But the document itself seems to state that that 27% figure is adjusted for appeals. Specifically, it says:
"Outcomes of initial assessments adjusted to account for outcomes after appeals for incapacity benefits claimants referred for reassessment between June 2012 and August 2012 show:"
So I'm afraid it looks like you're clutching at straws, your 0.5% figure seemed to be plucked from thin air, and your claim of appeals altering that number seems not to be true.
The new claimant stats are even more interesting, for new claimants 48% post appeals were determined to be fit for work which implies there are a lot of people trying it on too.
Even if half of the cases were unfair then there's still an awful lot of people who were on, or who have tried to get onto but were not in genuine need of disability benefits. There was still millions of pounds down the drain to people who neither needed, nor deserved the money.
I know there are many thousands of valid cases like the example you cite where people were fit for work, there were also unfortunately thousands of people with "bad backs" and so forth that are magically invisible to medical examination however whether you care to admit it or not. I think you need to accept facts on this one, the numbers are well published and transparent.
Can I be honest? you seem to live in the UK, and you seem interested in software development. I have absolutely nothing against Python, I quite like it, but across much of the UK it's just not where the jobs are.
You may hate Microsoft or whatever else but if you want a software development job in the UK then C# and .NET is where it's at, there's just so many jobs floating around and not enough people to fill them. It's a gravy train right now, and .NET salaries have most definitely been on the up for a good few years now. Even here in Yorkshire where salaries tend to be lower the average starting salary of a junior .NET developer seems to have gone from about £18k up to about £26k in the last 5 years alone, even when most other salaries have been declining. If you can get through a book like C# in Depth and understand and be comfortable with most of it then you'll already be well ahead of most junior developers and in fact ahead of many non-junior developers. It's a decent book I recommend for people job seeking because it also seems to cover the things that come up often in interviews pretty well.
I sympathise if you don't want to say publicly what sort of salary you're looking for and whereabouts in the UK you are but I'd be intrigued to know, I could at very least give you a rough idea as to whether your expectations are reasonable.
I think it's well worth your while learning Python, as I say, it's a great language, but if employment is your goal then C# and .NET are the way to go. Of course, maybe things are slightly different wherever in the UK you actually are but when I've looked into it things seem fairly uniform across the UK bar London where Java and C++ become far more prominent because of it's large financial sector, but you can always figure it out for yourself - look for developer jobs in your area on jobsite or monster.com and count the number of listings for each language. Apologies though if this is obvious and you've tried all this!
One final question though, are you bothering with recruiters at all or just using job sites and the job centre? Some recruiters are better than others so don't be put off all of them if you've had some bad run-ins.
That's because it wasn't outsourced to Accenture along with a contract that lets them get paid even if they fail to deliver.
Where do you get your numbers?
From about 2005 to 2011 disability benefit claimaints increased by 30% even though there's no justifiable reason for this to be the case because the benefit hadn't really changed and there hadn't been any kind of mass reason for increased levels of disability in the populace.
When the government decided to reassess all claimants the initial figures showed that 37% were found to be fit for work which isn't too dissimilar to the unexplained increase, especially when you factor in appeals and so forth.
I've just found this:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/200001/esa_wca_summary_apr13.pdf
Which now states 27% of reassessments determined people were fit for work, so post-appeal this again isn't too different.
But even if you give some leeway and assume there's some bias, these figures are a long way away from your quoted 0.5% so perhaps the issue is that you're misleadingly referring to cases that were determined as outright fraud, rather than the government's reassessment which has avoided claims of fraud and acted somewhat as an amnesty.
Fundamentally though the point is valid, that there has been widescale unnecessary payments of incapacity benefit to people who simply were fit for work. Call it fraud, dishonesty, honest mistake, whatever you want, fundamentally, too many people were getting paid disability benefits unnecessarily so yes they absolutely needed to be cut.
This is of course before you factor in the work that has gone on in recent years to make workplaces more disability friendly such as mandating that all workplaces be wheelchair friendly. These sorts of things mean that incapacity benefit claims should be going down because there are ever less disabilities that outright prevent working.
I'm not a big fan of government, it rather sickens me that they do nothing to deal with benefits for millionaire pensioners who still get free bus passes and winter fuel allowances and so forth and other such stupid nonsense like that. I don't even pretend disability benefits should necessarily have been the biggest priority, but they were a problem, pretending otherwise is just dishonest and your 0.5% figure is grossly misleading relative to the 27% who were found to be fit for work when full reassessment was carried out.
Don't even try, most Agile detractors on Slashdot don't know the first thing about it, they just had a bad manager come in one day and tell them they were doing some Agile when they weren't, they were just doing some half-arsed hearsay version in a poorly implemented manner that they thought could just be shoe-horned in and somehow achieve results. They're completely oblivious that the likes of scrum is as well defined and disciplined as anything like waterfall.
Not to mention that waterfall has been behind hundreds of billions of pounds of IT failure in British government for decades now, so why not try a different tact regardless? If project management was the problem it's obvious that waterfall certainly wasn't the solution, though for what it's worth I think the problem is far deeper than just project management.
Most Agile failure stems from bad managers/developers viewing it as a tickbox buzzword and ramming some half-arsed implementation of it into their team overnight without truly understanding it. But just as getting waterfall right and dealing with the problems that stem from it's rigidity take some time to get used Agile is no different. But after these teams fail because they didn't properly invest in learning it, naively believing that running a project is something you can just wing now that they've changed project management paradigm they then whinge about how it couldn't possibly be them that failed and that people tell them they were doing agile wrong. No fucking shit? you were doing it wrong so of course people were going to tell you you were doing it wrong, them telling you you were doing it wrong doesn't make them wrong, it makes you wrong for doing it wrong and pretending you weren't the problem when you tried it.
I've never seen a team that's been professionally trained in something like scrum and that has taken a bit of time to get used to it and get it right ever have any real problems with it. It does what it does - it allows a project to continue as long as the client wants it to continue determined by the amount of funding they're willing to put in relative to the amount of features and level of quality they want. By definition the biggest cost you can have from Agile is the amount of sprints you're willing to accept before you declare failure. That's far better than doing a whole project and then determining it a failure which is far more costly.
Don't get me wrong, it has it's challenges, if you're doing an Agile project for a client then sometimes the client can be the problem and they wont get people evaluating your releases at each sprint like they should be, but this is still no worse than waterfall where it's only at the end of the project they find it wasn't what they wanted.
But none of those problems you mention are insurmountable, the real problem is as it always is in the UK - the same old companies get hired time and time again despite failing over and over and the contracts are always so badly negotiated that the companies involved get paid regardless of whether they actually deliver.
Until government stops using the like of Accenture and so forth for these projects it's never going to see things turn out any differently. They pay way over the top for something they could get so much cheaper that corruption is the most likely reason.
Too many public sector workers allow contracts to be signed that award private sector companies to be paid even when they fail and then those very public sectors end up working at these companies when failure occurs. It's money for nothing and the payer foots the bill.
They just need to start hiring companies that actually want to do the job, rather than companies whose entire business model revolves around back-handers and getting paid for favourable contracts that award them greatly for not doing the job.
Look at G4S with the Olympics, they completely failed to deliver but rather than refusing all payment and recovering all funds paid to date for breach of contract the government spends months bartering over how many millions it should give them with spurious comments from the executives of the company like "We may have to take a loss on this" - no fucking shit? You failed to deliver, if it cost you that's not our fucking problem we still want our money back, though from what I understand they didn't make a loss on it in the end, despite failing to deliver.
As soon as reward for failure stops in British public sector projects, then failure itself will suddenly become much less common.
Does that mean the US has a method of testing for how people suffered an affliction?
How does the US differentiate between people who got HIV through carelessness and those who were raped? What about telling the difference between people who got lung cancer through smoking and others who got it because they had to take a bar staff job to be able to afford to eat and contracted it through no other choice than to suffer passive smoking?
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that's a bad thing?
It means films can be made for books without inheriting families or copyright hoarders blocking it unnecessarily or with unrealistic demands. It means people outside Hollywood can have a go at making films based on books without needing Hollywood style fortunes to barter for a license.
It sounds like a very good thing IMO, sure it may mean more crap films on famous books, but it also means more choice, and amongst that choice will be a bunch of gems that would never otherwise be able to be made.
It sounds like a very very good thing for culture to me.
"I expect that the government may have interpreted the results of that consultation very differently than they did."
No they wouldn't, because your current government is a US puppet government, so copyright reform in favour of Hollywood et. al. was always on the agenda. This was just the particular excuse they chose to use in this instance, it doesn't make sense of course, but they thought it sounded good enough to dupe people like you.
Think about it, it doesn't matter if those responses are the same, the fact is it still means there were thousands of people who wanted a relaxation of copyright laws in favour of the consumer rather than corporations, but your government chose to ignore that, it told you that because they were the same they have no merit, which is simply completely false. People still sent them because they wanted it known how they felt, but the fact they were duplicates doesn't reduce their merit, it just means there were more people with the same opinion than the government wanted to accept.
Hopefully you've learnt your lesson and you'll get rid of Harper and his cronies soon though, but given that you're allowing them a break, given that you're adding merit to their excuse by pretending that what they say is true, that duplicate submissions makes those submissions meaningless when it doesn't, they're still expressions of valid opinion, I'm not sure you have learnt your lesson. Please realise that the problem for you wasn't the duplicate submissions, it was the corrupt government you elected.
That's because you live in a world where Pascal is a commonly used language and don't know much about the topic.
Just because PHP has spurious use of $ scattered around and a bunch of new keywords doesn't change the fact it's general code style, 90% of it's operators, and most of it's fundamental keywords are taken directly from C, nor does it change the fact that some PHP functions pretty much map directly to underlying C standard library calls. Even the keywords that aren't the same are mostly those that were bodged on for OO and mirror the C++ keywords instead.
I can only guess if you think PHP isn't a C-like language then you've never actually seen a language that isn't C-like. I'll give you a hint - things are very different.
It seems all you can do is coming up with more nonsense and no evidence.
But what else can I expect? You're suggesting marijuana news sites are an objective source of information. Do you really not see that's like saying Sarah Palin's blog is the best source for objective news about the democrats? you really don't realise how stupid that sounds?
I guess you're not much used to the world of software development, your lack of understanding of the subject screams that, so I'll explain it to you.
"As for the others, I dispute this very much. PHP "resembles" C? In what universe? And Java? Hardly."
When people say a language resembles C, they're talking about the fact that bracket usage, brace usage, and keyword usage is often very similar. This is why PHP and Java are referred to as C-like languages. I find it rather amusing that you class C# as a C-based language, yet not PHP when half of PHP's common library just wraps the C standard library. In this respect C# is a larger break from the foundations of C than even PHP is. If you can't see the similarities between Java and C then you really need to learn both C and Java syntax before commenting, the use of braces, brackets, and various keywords are identical to C in many many ways. This isn't coincidence, this is intentional, it's intentional because C used to be the single most popular programming language on the planet and language designers over the years have determined that all that teaching and prior knowledge needn't just go to waste.
"Nonsense. Look at what the most commonly used languages are today."
What exactly do you think the most commonly used languages are today? I ask because I listed them but you oddly seem to think they're something very different.
"(And anybody who tries to use SQL as a "general purpose" language probably IS an idiot.) "
Well given that no one's claimed that then I'm not sure what your point is, you simply spoke of the "most commonly used languages today" of which SQL is one of the most prominent.
"What about Lisp? What about Pascal (Delphi)? What about Python or Ruby? "
What about them? Lisp isn't used for anything much in the real world even if it's a fantastic academic language, Pascal and especially Delphi have been basically dead for coming up to two decades now, and Ruby is still and also-ran, it's just not as popular as the languages I listed. It's sat on the fringes certainly, but it's just not making that last bit of traction needed to break into the list of most prominent languages. Python is about the only one that's really getting there, but it's still not quite reached a point of being one of the mainstream languages like those I listed.
"And as for "popularity", you have to take that graph with a grain of salt. Github might be a decent indicator of popularity, but Stack Overflow is a weak one, if at all. All THAT traffic is about problems. The number of problems with a language, I daresay, is only a weak indicator of its popularity. I mean ActionScript? Really? Who in their right mind would include ActionScript as among the most "popular" languages?"
What graph are you talking about? My list was based on the languages that real actual businesses both use and are recruiting for because that's a far more solid indicator of actual popularity. No one is looking for Pascal/Delphi developers anymore, some companies look for the odd Lisp and Python programmer, but far and away the majority of recruitment is still for Java, PHP, C#, Objective-C, Javascript and C++ developers. You can also simply look at what half the software that's around is developed in, hint: it's not Pascal, or Lisp. You may use the odd Ruby web application and the odd Python application, Google for example has some Python holding it together (though it also has some Java and C++ too).
"Really? Who in their right mind would include ActionScript as among the most "popular" languages?"
Maybe if you had any understanding of the field you'd realise that ActionScript is used by Flash, and Flash is still insanely popular for many internal things, it powers the e-learning programmes for most companies in the world covering various things ranging from health and safety to regulatory compliance. It may well be listed higher than it should be but I think you grossly underestimate it's usage.
Thank you for a thought provoking post.
"Soon the vectorization problem will cause humans to derive the minimal atomic expressions of such a language and encode it into hardware (thus the requirement for it to be self scripting i.e. self compiling and self hosting)."
Aren't you effectively just going to end up right back at something like lambda calculus?
"Sure, there are a lot that do look like C. But not many of the most often-used languages."
What? The most often used languages are C++, Java, C#, PHP, Javascript, Objective C. All of these look a lot like C.
About the only most commonly used languages that don't are SQL and Visual Basic.
"While you can generally postulate that coding in non typed scripting languages where you don't have to worry about memory management is going to be faster than coding in a typed, manually memory managed language like C."
But even this falls down when you factor in size of application and long term maintenance/debugging.
I have real world experience of delivering and maintaining large projects in .NET, Java, C++, Javascript, and PHP and whilst PHP is deceptively quick to write code with it's advantage is long lost when it comes to debugging and the disparity grows exponentially as the size of project increases. The problem is that because more errors are caught at compile time with compiled languages and because type conversions are simple enough to be trivial or are explicit much fewer bugs make it through to testing than do with languages like PHP where issues can survive longer and cause more of a testing, debugging, and maintenance headache.
I've thought long and hard about an objective way of measuring productivity with languages and I just don't think there is one, key problems are:
- Different languages excel at solving different problems, coming up with a test project that benefits no language over another is potentially impossible
- Programmers improve over time, and each time they implement a solution to the same problem they'll do it more efficiently so you can't just do the same project in two different languages - later attempts will be written more efficiently than earlier attempts
- If you do a different project with each language it's hard to claim that the projects were identical in terms of scope to compare efficiency but different enough to avoid the same/near problem solving advantage efficiency above after each attempt
- You could use multiple programmers to eliminate the fact that a programmer would work faster the second time around on the same problem, but then you just create a new problem - no two programmers are identical in terms of the speed at which they solve every problem
- Small projects can solve some of these problems, but then you get the aforementioned problems mentioned above where the pitfalls of dynamic languages like PHP and the benefits of compiled languages that change the game in terms of efficiency in the long term come to light
- Do you factor in tools or should everything be written in Notepad? Javascript and C# don't feel much different to write syntactically but throw Visual Studio compared with the fact that just about every Javascript editor is relatively shit and C# has a massive efficiency advantage. Are you measuring the full toolchain or just the language?
I don't think there is a solution to these problems, I don't think you can objectively and scientifically compare language efficiency to a reasonable degree. The best you can do is get a personal feel for the problem and even that might just depend on you personally - I genuinely find C# and Visual Studio the most efficient toolset for developing the sorts of software I've had to develop, but that's simply because I'm primarily used to OO languages and because I primarily develop on and for Windows. Other developers are going to have completely different knowledge sets and so be used to and more efficient than I am in other toolsets. You can theorise over some generalisations, for example, I do think as a generalisation that compiled languages are better than dynamic languages for large projects for the aforementioned problem than the ease and speed of debugging compiled applications grows much more linearly than that of applications written in dynamic languages where bugs can come to light much later in the process but it's hard to even prove that sort of assertion scientifically - I can only go on my extensive experience of that being the case and the fact that the logic behind the reason for that makes a lot of sense- that bugs caught both earlier and automatically due to the inherent traits of the tool chain are bugs that are less problematic, and hence result in less lost time.
"It shouldn't be a flame war. In order to make a meaningful comparison between two programming languages I think you need to have a high level of skill in each, and write two feature-equivalent non-trivial programs in each."
I'm not even sure this is true, each time you write a program you'll learn something about how you could've done it better, so once you've written it once in one language there's a danger that writing it again in another language you'll implement the more efficient solution you should've implemented the first time around but didn't realise until it was too late.
If the application is non-trivial it'd be quite tough to make sure you weren't developing faster with the second language only because you'd learnt from the mistakes and already figured out solutions to the hard problems that slowed you down with the first language.
Even if you insert a third language, to figure out most of the issues first before doing the other two languages, I think you'll still find efficiency gains on even your second iteration so the problem still exists albeit to a lesser extent. You could probably keep doing this, if you write it in, what, 5 languages and then write it in the two more you actually want to compare you may by that point have a fairly realistic comparison because you'll know your efficient solution inside out by that point such that implementation should be less about figuring out a more efficient solution and problem solving and just about writing the code but even there it's not guaranteed, you could overlook efficiency improvements across many iterations potentially.
I've thought about this many times before and it's pretty hard to come up with a reasonably objective manner of testing languages like this because not only do you have the problem I just mentioned but also the problem of the fact some languages handle some problems better than others that someone else also mentioned to you in response. Eliminating these problems and coming up with a genuinely objective test is going to be difficult, if not impossible.
Wrong sort of aliens, they mean the illegal kind. You know, to cut costs.
Yeah but only bits that needed a good clean anyway, like Kent. So it's all okay.
"Marijuana was also widely used as an ingredient in loads of medicines. This dissappeared with its legality. Today, since marijuana cannot be copyrighted, it is pretty useless to the pharmaceutical makers, who couldnt profit from it or make protected intellectual property from it."
This makes zero sense. The same is true of carrots, tobacco, water, and many other things, yet companies still make a profit off of these things because there is money in producing a brand surrounding the product. All your comment does is show us you have no concept of how businesses can make money from products rather than provide any real actual insight as to why any company in this day and age would profit from it being banned. Even here though with a product like this there is a lot of scope for companies like the big pharma groups to produce their own copy protected strain of the product that is superior or at least marketed to be so so even intellectual property concerns are a non issue for them. It's long been established in law that you can get intellectual property protections on certain strains of plants you have created.
I'm not in this debate to prove you wrong that people have been harmed because that'll never happen, even if I do provide an example you'll dismiss it as propaganda, a lie, made up by your mystical conspiratorial opponents. I'm not playing that game because it's pointless. However, why not just search for yourself if you genuinely want evidence? This would be the obvious starting point and unlike you it provides citations for it's claims:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis
What I do ask however is that if you are going to demand others provide citations for their claims that you play by the same rules, that you provide evidence of your profit-based conspiracy as to why companies in this day and age would profit from a ban on marijuana.
You just don't seem to grasp the fundamental concept that there is a market for marijuana, a highly profitable market, but one that is currently illegal. It's illegality does not change the fact that it is a market however. This means that no business has anything to lose profit-wise by this market because they could equally enter the market upon legalisation and take their share of the profit from that market that already exists. If pharmaceutical companies are going to lose marketshare of their products to marijuana based products then that simply means they can enter that market and replace lost marketshare by their own branded marijuana products - there's no net loss for them, but potential for net gain, something every business will actively encourage the potential for.
But last but not least, you've still not provided any evidence for your argument despite asking anyone else to do so, all you've done is spout more nonsense and make stupid claims about weeding out idiots, despite just making yourself look more like an idiot.
You're not entering the conversation, your spouting nonsense you've completely and utterly failed to back up without any evidence whilst suggesting someone else is wrong because they've done the exact same thing you have.
Prove your point or accept you are just spouting personal opinion, not any kind of established fact. That's what you demanded of the other guy, that's what I'm demanding of you.
And then blame Europe for it when the public complain.
It's Europe's fault prisoners may have to be given the vote!
No it's not, it's our fault for deciding that human rights might be something worth actually giving a damn about and recognising that denying prisoners the vote and then imprisoning political opposition is a common tactic for seizing power that we may wish to avoid in our country. All Europe has done is confirm to us what we've said we agreed with previously. It's not their fault we can't get our message straight, that we legislate one way and then bitch, moan, and complain that we want it another.
I should probably elaborate as both your response and the AC's suggest I probably wont clear enough. I do not think being self-taught necessarily precludes a university education also, because I think the best people who go to university also have passion enough for the topic in question to learn about it both before they take on the subject and whilst they are studying it formally. Everyone has some degree of formal education so I simply view someone as self-taught as someone who has learnt the majority of what they know off their own back and that may for example mean that they learnt everything in CS101 before they even went to university - university didn't teach them that, it simply provided useful confirmation, so I'd still define them as self-taught in that area.
I also did exactly this because I also studied a comp. sci. degree alongside work after I'd started working professionally as a developer, in large part because I wanted academic confirmation of what I had taught myself. I'm not one of those who believes there is no merit in formal education, I fully appreciate the benefits of it, and I think it augments self-teaching very well, but I do not think it by itself guarantees any superiority over self-teaching, on the contrary.
I do agree with you, my point was more that I believe someone who has only ever done a degree in software development or computer science and never bothered to study anything outside of that will not be as good as someone who is self-taught whether that self-taught person hasn't, or has also done a degree as well as being heavily self-taught.
Or in other words, my point is that whether formal education is involved or not, self-teaching is the differentiator, someone who is self-taught is better than someone who is merely formally educated with no self-teaching outside of that, whilst, yes, I agree someone who is heavily self-taught but also did a degree as well will be even better again.
My opinion is of course only formed by my own personal experience, so perhaps it doesn't work universally, but I believe a lot of this because I was helping my friends who went straight into comp. sci. degrees using purely my self-taught knowledge because I was well ahead of them by the time they were doing their degrees and after they'd graduated. I was also doing better in the field professionally than they were before I did my formal degree, but doing that degree has helped me do even better again, I appreciate the fact that it was a good opportunity to open my eyes to topics I might never have properly bothered with but which have become very useful for me, such as AI, specifically genetic algorithms and and neural nets.
I should also add however that I believe my other degree in maths has been highly important in helping me grasp topics too that my friends struggled with and to find solutions that my colleagues couldn't, so perhaps my original study of that does distort things a little bit.
Make of it what you will, but I've always found the best hires to be far and away those who spend a lot of time self-teaching, degree as well or not, so until I find a stellar candidate who has only ever done formal education if such a thing exists then I doubt my opinion will ever change.
So I hope you'll understand at least that I'm not one of those who never bothered with academia and so claims it's useless because they never even tried it and don't want to admit they could be missing out, I do very much think it has value and despite being on a hiatus right now I do plan to do even more postgraduate study in the years to come, but I do think that value is secondary to being a motivated self-learner. After all, let's be honest, what happens when you've studied to the limits of human knowledge and available formal education on a topic? self-learning goes hand in hand with research into new frontiers and is the only way to further knowledge on a topic in the first place - when you reach that height, there is no formal education to further your abilities anyway, discovery through self-learning is the only way forward.
Actually a lot of training courses allow you to keep your jobseekers allowance. My girlfriend's uncle was unemployed for 3 years and got paid jobseekers allowance for the entire duration because he kept going on training courses.
I don't think the welfare state is designed to stop you from losing your home but it is designed to stop you from being homeless - there's a subtle difference there, if you had a £500k house and lost your job then the state shouldn't be expected to keep paying for that, you need to downsize into a £100k house if need be. This makes sense otherwise everyone would be encouraged to buy something wholly unaffordable and then demand the state makes up the shortfall.
Most areas of high unemployment have training centres situated within them, LearnDirect centres are aplenty. Here in Yorkshire there's a hell of a lot of villages that are high in unemployment as a continued result at the loss of mining, but the amount of money that has been pumped into them is phenomenal. You can't go more than 10 miles without hitting a train station that'll get you to places like Leeds, or Sheffield which are the 3rd and 4th largest cities in the UK in no time at all and the fares are subsidised so extremely cheap, more so for the unemployed. There are many new businesses and cheap business units so people can try and start their own businesses being built and so forth too. Despite this there's a massive disparity in the villages, the worst off have ever more investment pumped into them ranging from brand new health centres, to brand new LearnDirect centres, new housing and new businesses as well as ever better transport, but despite this they don't improve. Others that were equally badly off are doing pretty well and are becoming much more afluent, the people in this places are starting their own businesses, they're commuting to major cities and doing well.
I accept that there may be cases where you have people in low unemployment areas that are unemployed and so might not enjoy quite such benefits but they're the exception, not the rule.
So despite the nonsense from the about how these people can't help it blah blah blah it's simply not true, it's not about can't, it's about wont. We have these case studies that prove this, we have villages from identical starting points, but attitudes in some are simply wont, they choose to wallow in their pit of failure and misery whilst their neighbours pick themselves up and sort themselves out and more and more funding can't help those that wont, because the problem is wont, not can't, and that's the issue.
I've lived around here long enough to see that those living in cloud cuckoo land like Owen Jones just have no idea about the real problems, neither do successive governments that think throwing money at the problem will make it better. The problem isn't lack of opportunities, the problem is completely about attitude. You can provide all the opportunities in the world to these people, but they still wont take them because they simply cannot be bothered to learn, or to work. All they want is to spend their days in the local working mens club, or betting shop. The fact that entire villages coming from the exact same starting point have done more with less investment is proof enough that they can sort themselves out and get more than just call centre jobs if the will is there to do so.
I don't pretend to know what the solution is, but it's like you need to move a bunch of highly motivated people to live in these villages to work their way up and show them what they can make of themselves if they actually try. It's like success, and failure are contagious and the difference between the successful and failed villages is simply catalyst people who do try, who do take the opportunities handed to them, and do succeed and everyone else follows, but it's definitely not lack of opportunities, lack of ability to get training and so forth - all this is handed them all on a plate.