I do a bit of programming teaching and I can sympathize with your problem of what language to choose.
One thing that helps is having a language with a decent REPL. Python has this, and I've had some success getting people going in Python. I miss the days of LOGO where you could get 6 year olds to get the cursor to draw around the screen. JavaScript was something I considered, but I'm reluctant because of how many oddities there are in the language, e.g. let vs var, for(var x in y) vs for(var x of y), == vs ===, and stuff like that.
One question? Have you tried C#? it's an excellent language, now quite superior to Java, but I'm unsure about using as a teaching language. What other languages have you tried?
My primary school age kids use their portable devices for games that can be played with a couple of fingers, but they know that for getting work done they use Windows OS. They have collections of photos they sort into folders, videos they edit, pictures they edit with their fine motor skills via the mouse, copying files to USB to take to school, powerpoint presentations, web pages they are copying and referencing, and this is all at the same time across multiple monitors. I guess if you really wanted an alternative there's MacOS, but then that doesn't run Visual Studio, so it's useless to me, and why would I buy a whole lot of different rigs for my home environment when the Windows OS installations I have all work nicely together?
Under what situation would someone run Android as a desktop operating system? It's like Linux but with a whole lot of vulnerabilities thrown on top. Maybe iOS could make it if Apple turf MacOS and give iOS a desktop shell. If you're hoping for some mobile OS to take over the desktop then that's probably your best bet, but then you are stuck in the walled garden on your desktop.
Fornite is a very social game, you discover that you don't really know somebody until you play Fortnite everyday with them on your team. It's a lot of fun if you have good friends to play with. This is a barrier to people on Slashdot, so most of them will find that it isn't fun for them.
Downtime is important, a few million isn't. The consultants from Sun Microsystems had hardware at arms reach so that's what was thrown at the problem first.
So you think we should have persisted with trying to get the Java solution working? You are making my point for me about Java devs. Launching Java in the login script to perform simple tasks just seems like a bad idea period. Why would you argue otherwise?
It's a funny thing, but in 20 years of development most of the biggest / most expensive screw ups I've seen seem to have Java at the core of the problem.
E.g. Had a server farm that was topped out performance wise when 1000 users logged in, so we threw a few million dollars worth of Sun servers at it and then they topped out. Deeper investigation revealed a Java asshole had been introduced into the dev team and had rewritten a C++ login app in Java just to fix a small issue that didn't really affect anyone. Apparently said dev just liked Java better even though he'd been hired to do C++ work. So each user was firing up a 70MB JVM when they logged in, which at 1000 users was 70GB of RAM. Which was quite a lot in 2004.
Java devs also seem to prefer quantity of quality when it comes to lines of code, and pull in massive middle ware packages to do something simple that could've been done with a few lines of SQL, but they went with Java because they didn't want to learn SQL. C++ programmers seem much more willing to learn other things in the interest of coming up with the best solution. Same thing seems to apply to a large percentage of the C# devs that we see.
But actually we've moved mostly away from Java, and Java devs! So if you are a Java dev I'd recommend that you stick solidly to that.
The problem with developing in.NET is that the developers are way more expensive. We can get teams of Java developers for only $17 per hour per developer, and there's plenty available waiting for a job. If we start up a C#/.NET project we have to pay up to $60 per hour per dev because the pool of available developers is near non existent.
As it turns out, Windows laptops with 32 GByte SSD's do not have enough room for Windows updates
WTF you talking about? I've got a 5+ year old ASUS T100 32GB storage + 2GB RAM Tablet + keyboard dock that came with Windows 8.1, which I then upgraded to Windows 10 Pro, and that I upgrade every month to the latest patch through Windows Update. Damn thing is a real trooper that keeps on going and going. Great for travelling. But I have never not had enough space to do an update.
Trump definitely knows the difference between China and Taiwan. You should do some research on the history of Trump and Taiwan. In Taiwan, it is illegal for foreigners to own any property except for their primary residence. 15 years ago Taiwan had a corrupt president who struck a deal with Trump that allowed Trump to buy up a whole lot of land in the capital, Taipei, and build some luxury high rise apartment blocks. This was a very lucrative deal for Trump. Trumps attempts to do anything like this in China have been stomped on with high prejudice.
It's morning here in Asia, so people are just starting to read this Slashdot post, and when browsing at threshold 4, the first 7 comments are all yours. Well done!
Unfortunately you've also distorted the apparent IQ of Slashdot posters by posting so many comments that are of higher quality than the norm. I generally come here to laugh at the idiots.
There is a downside to having free public transport. A couple of decades ago the local government in South Australia introduced free public transport for school aged children. The result was that kids from the poorer suburbs, caught the trains to the richer suburbs and mugged the richer kids for their sports shoes. Didn't have mobile phones back then, so your sports shoes - Nike, Adidas, Puma, Slazenger etc was the most valuable thing you had on you.
I'm still using one of the first T100s [...] Never given me any grief.
Last I checked, GNU/Linux on a T100 was missing a whole bunch of stuff. In particular, backlight brightness cannot be controlled, the camera is not detected, and suspend causes a full freeze.
I'm using Windows 10 as the host OS which was a free upgrade for this device. Makes things easier.
If it's anything like the last ASUS I owned (a TF101 Transformer) the keyboard will be shit (half the keys will stop working within 12 months) and there'll be a half-dozen dead pixels...
I came here with the same thoughts.
I don't know why the TF101 was so messed up when the T100 works really well. I'm still using one of the first T100s that came out with a 1366x768 display and 32GB eMMC with a 500GB HDD in the detachable keyboard. I think it's over 5 years old now and still going strong. Never given me any grief.
The way I've got it set up is I can use it as a media consumption device when it's detached from the keyboard booting off the internal 32GB storage, or I can boot off a development environment stored as a VHD on the 500GB HDD in the keyboard. Its a neat little device that I can use for hacking on C++ code anywhere.
Matlab and VBA have this problem that no matter what amazing other skills you have you always end up stuck writing scripts in Matlab or VBA. With Matlab you often end up in a cycle of constantly improving someone else's old Matlab code.
VBA is particularly bad because management love Excel and once they find a person to write macros for them they won't let go. I once new this genius who had a PhD in Engineering and Mathematics and worked for an Aerospace company, unfortunately he had VBA/Excel on his resume so the manager who selected him for his team had him writing Excel macros for years on end. Eventually the guy quit, removed VBA from his resume and got a really nice job at a Sigma 6 technology company.
The problem for you is that you are in "Enterprise Java". That's pretty much a field where any tool (cheap programmer) can do the job.
If you think that, then I hope you are not working in that field.
I don't just think that, I thrive on it. I've been on the board of an outsourcing company for nearly a decade. Given 6 months notice I can put up to 500 Enterprise Java programmers onto a job. I'm also part of the A team that handles very high value projects that aren't Enterprise Java.
The problem for you is that you are in "Enterprise Java". That's pretty much a field where any tool (cheap programmer) can do the job.
I'm in a room full of grey beards, we do have a young guy on the team who is in his mid 30s but the rest are past their mid 40s, 50s, and into their 60s. The team does low level scientific algorithms in C++ (with C# GUI interfaces), that need to work in real time systems. This is hard stuff where you really need a group of people who are precise and know what they are doing. Most of the team are irreplaceable, which is a problem because people keep on dieing of heart attacks.
There's another factor that should be taken into account, last month is also when Microsoft released Ubuntu for Windows 10 in the Windows store. So potentially a whole lot of new Linux desktops got installed as people were trying out the new functionality.
That doesn't seem very interesting, anyone can demonstrate skills in spreadsheets and word processors. What about an Emacs competition, that would be much more relevant and exciting.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't put too much faith in the TIOBE index, for example it shows VB.NET at number 5, above C# at number 6 which can't be right.
I think you'll find PYPL to be a better indicator of language popularity which has VBA and VB in its proper place at #13 and #17 respectively.
I do a bit of programming teaching and I can sympathize with your problem of what language to choose.
One thing that helps is having a language with a decent REPL. Python has this, and I've had some success getting people going in Python. I miss the days of LOGO where you could get 6 year olds to get the cursor to draw around the screen. JavaScript was something I considered, but I'm reluctant because of how many oddities there are in the language, e.g. let vs var, for(var x in y) vs for(var x of y), == vs ===, and stuff like that.
One question? Have you tried C#? it's an excellent language, now quite superior to Java, but I'm unsure about using as a teaching language. What other languages have you tried?
So that would be a Chromebook then because Microsoft will use Chrome as the engine for Edge
My primary school age kids use their portable devices for games that can be played with a couple of fingers, but they know that for getting work done they use Windows OS. They have collections of photos they sort into folders, videos they edit, pictures they edit with their fine motor skills via the mouse, copying files to USB to take to school, powerpoint presentations, web pages they are copying and referencing, and this is all at the same time across multiple monitors. I guess if you really wanted an alternative there's MacOS, but then that doesn't run Visual Studio, so it's useless to me, and why would I buy a whole lot of different rigs for my home environment when the Windows OS installations I have all work nicely together? Under what situation would someone run Android as a desktop operating system? It's like Linux but with a whole lot of vulnerabilities thrown on top. Maybe iOS could make it if Apple turf MacOS and give iOS a desktop shell. If you're hoping for some mobile OS to take over the desktop then that's probably your best bet, but then you are stuck in the walled garden on your desktop.
We aren't in the Matrix yet, so all is not lost. Just keep taking that blue pill and everything will be ok.
Not fired, but reassigned to running network cables
Fornite is a very social game, you discover that you don't really know somebody until you play Fortnite everyday with them on your team. It's a lot of fun if you have good friends to play with. This is a barrier to people on Slashdot, so most of them will find that it isn't fun for them.
Q) How do you spot a non-Fortnite player at a party?
A) Don't worry they'll tell you.
You should check out Taiwan's crowd sourced government stuff https://www.technologyreview.c...
Downtime is important, a few million isn't. The consultants from Sun Microsystems had hardware at arms reach so that's what was thrown at the problem first.
So you think we should have persisted with trying to get the Java solution working? You are making my point for me about Java devs. Launching Java in the login script to perform simple tasks just seems like a bad idea period. Why would you argue otherwise?
It's a funny thing, but in 20 years of development most of the biggest / most expensive screw ups I've seen seem to have Java at the core of the problem.
E.g. Had a server farm that was topped out performance wise when 1000 users logged in, so we threw a few million dollars worth of Sun servers at it and then they topped out. Deeper investigation revealed a Java asshole had been introduced into the dev team and had rewritten a C++ login app in Java just to fix a small issue that didn't really affect anyone. Apparently said dev just liked Java better even though he'd been hired to do C++ work. So each user was firing up a 70MB JVM when they logged in, which at 1000 users was 70GB of RAM. Which was quite a lot in 2004.
Java devs also seem to prefer quantity of quality when it comes to lines of code, and pull in massive middle ware packages to do something simple that could've been done with a few lines of SQL, but they went with Java because they didn't want to learn SQL. C++ programmers seem much more willing to learn other things in the interest of coming up with the best solution. Same thing seems to apply to a large percentage of the C# devs that we see.
But actually we've moved mostly away from Java, and Java devs! So if you are a Java dev I'd recommend that you stick solidly to that.
The problem with developing in .NET is that the developers are way more expensive. We can get teams of Java developers for only $17 per hour per developer, and there's plenty available waiting for a job. If we start up a C#/.NET project we have to pay up to $60 per hour per dev because the pool of available developers is near non existent.
WTF you talking about? I've got a 5+ year old ASUS T100 32GB storage + 2GB RAM Tablet + keyboard dock that came with Windows 8.1, which I then upgraded to Windows 10 Pro, and that I upgrade every month to the latest patch through Windows Update. Damn thing is a real trooper that keeps on going and going. Great for travelling. But I have never not had enough space to do an update.
Trump definitely knows the difference between China and Taiwan. You should do some research on the history of Trump and Taiwan. In Taiwan, it is illegal for foreigners to own any property except for their primary residence. 15 years ago Taiwan had a corrupt president who struck a deal with Trump that allowed Trump to buy up a whole lot of land in the capital, Taipei, and build some luxury high rise apartment blocks. This was a very lucrative deal for Trump. Trumps attempts to do anything like this in China have been stomped on with high prejudice.
It's morning here in Asia, so people are just starting to read this Slashdot post, and when browsing at threshold 4, the first 7 comments are all yours. Well done! Unfortunately you've also distorted the apparent IQ of Slashdot posters by posting so many comments that are of higher quality than the norm. I generally come here to laugh at the idiots.
There is a downside to having free public transport. A couple of decades ago the local government in South Australia introduced free public transport for school aged children. The result was that kids from the poorer suburbs, caught the trains to the richer suburbs and mugged the richer kids for their sports shoes. Didn't have mobile phones back then, so your sports shoes - Nike, Adidas, Puma, Slazenger etc was the most valuable thing you had on you.
I'm using Windows 10 as the host OS which was a free upgrade for this device. Makes things easier.
I don't know why the TF101 was so messed up when the T100 works really well. I'm still using one of the first T100s that came out with a 1366x768 display and 32GB eMMC with a 500GB HDD in the detachable keyboard. I think it's over 5 years old now and still going strong. Never given me any grief.
The way I've got it set up is I can use it as a media consumption device when it's detached from the keyboard booting off the internal 32GB storage, or I can boot off a development environment stored as a VHD on the 500GB HDD in the keyboard. Its a neat little device that I can use for hacking on C++ code anywhere.
Matlab and VBA have this problem that no matter what amazing other skills you have you always end up stuck writing scripts in Matlab or VBA. With Matlab you often end up in a cycle of constantly improving someone else's old Matlab code.
VBA is particularly bad because management love Excel and once they find a person to write macros for them they won't let go. I once new this genius who had a PhD in Engineering and Mathematics and worked for an Aerospace company, unfortunately he had VBA/Excel on his resume so the manager who selected him for his team had him writing Excel macros for years on end. Eventually the guy quit, removed VBA from his resume and got a really nice job at a Sigma 6 technology company.
I don't just think that, I thrive on it. I've been on the board of an outsourcing company for nearly a decade. Given 6 months notice I can put up to 500 Enterprise Java programmers onto a job. I'm also part of the A team that handles very high value projects that aren't Enterprise Java.
The trick isn't what you put in your resume but rather what you don't put in your resume. Here's some things you should leave out:
The problem for you is that you are in "Enterprise Java". That's pretty much a field where any tool (cheap programmer) can do the job.
I'm in a room full of grey beards, we do have a young guy on the team who is in his mid 30s but the rest are past their mid 40s, 50s, and into their 60s. The team does low level scientific algorithms in C++ (with C# GUI interfaces), that need to work in real time systems. This is hard stuff where you really need a group of people who are precise and know what they are doing. Most of the team are irreplaceable, which is a problem because people keep on dieing of heart attacks.
There's another factor that should be taken into account, last month is also when Microsoft released Ubuntu for Windows 10 in the Windows store. So potentially a whole lot of new Linux desktops got installed as people were trying out the new functionality.
That doesn't seem very interesting, anyone can demonstrate skills in spreadsheets and word processors. What about an Emacs competition, that would be much more relevant and exciting.