Mostly agree, however for a guy who hasn't actually divorced and handed his life responsibilities downstream to some other shmuck to deploy, 8x40 hour work week is unsustainable. You need the late shift occasionally.
Precise estimates? Heh. Get real. We estimate continuously all the time otherwise we couldn't do anything, just not about the things mgmt cares about. The need for estimates is created by the fictional role of "uninvolved bystanders", also known as Management, or Customers.
Mgmt's role is to create loops and count beans WRT those loops, but not for me to spoon feed them their own estimates...
It scares me to think of the sheer brainpower that would have to be possessed by the candidate they'd hire to do deployments with no prior dev knowledge of the apps...
hey wait, that's me!
I'm downstream from all the devs, who document nothing.
Speaking as a former dev, to document everything to the extent required for deployment personnel is very costly and the antithesis of agile.
I wouldn't want to read your stinking docs. Go ahead, jar everything to oblivion and hand me the keys.
If java syntax actually *did* something useful, then perhaps your argument that it's not Java's fault would be valid. It is Java's fault. Java is useless. Java is worse than useless in that it's also a hazard. So you can't just leave it there and give it nothing to do, because it's offensive to the productive languages in the vicinity.
skills and consequent bad hiring decision for the I-don't-know-how-manyeth time, I now will be looking for one thing: can this person solve their way out of a wet sack of shyt? I don't care about the degree.
To determine this I have developed 2 questions:
1) give me an example of a problem you have solved recently
2) how would you approach problem X?
Everything flows from those questions, no need to remember anything else.
that's funny I once had a co-worker describe this type of code as the output of "real good" programmers. that's what he was doing to try to shut me up...the implication being that I wasn't one of those. That's what you do when you first learn c++. give me python.
Please, I'll take anything that does DRY, gets rid of compilation, and puts the object layer to work instead of the object layer putting me to work. Django, Rails, Turbogears, Zend Framework, whatever
>It doesn't look like the essay defines "silver bullet" and I don't have the >original in front of me, but a Silver Bullet is a single methodology or >technology change that by itself always results in an order-of-magnitude >improvement, thus seeming to "slay" previously immortal beasts of problems.
That'd be a thing called "defining the problem" or even "contacting the problem", since nobody ever does this. Nobody. That's why anyone who does the simplest first step of going towards the problem seems to walk on water.
That's a long time...I'll be done with my own framework long before then.
And I mean that. Zend need to have better imagination for controller than just copying Rails. That architecture doesn't score any maintenance points with me because a directory full of little controllers is no controller in my book.
generating HTML from within programming language was a bad idea.
Even worse in an unreadable language like smalltalk. When are they going to let that horrible syntax die? I never bought that smalltalk was intuitive enough to be a "teaching language".
IBM owns smalltalk now.
ST useless.
>(Symfony, Rails, Django, Zope) are kicking the collective asses
>of old-school hardcore 100% polymorphic OOP bloat advocates up and down the street (Java).
yes. however, old-school doesn't necessarily mean "older" in years. I know some young people who won't consider PHP/MySQL platform, preferring instead the Java bloatlets.
This attitude is typical of most of my students. They don't believe in drills. Even when they finally get a concept after doing a drill that is designed to heighten the problem to be solved (the problem they are having), so that it forces them to focus on that one problem and solve it using their own natural ability to learn.
Even after they use them successfully, even after they create them for themselves, they don't believe in the concept of drills. What is "chasing a tennis ball" but a drill? It will teach, perhaps, flow and effective application of whatever has been learned so far. If there is a teacher involved in explaining something, then drills are required to define terms and concepts, like "edges", "pressure", we're talking the stuff you probably take for granted. A lot of people aren't at the level you take for granted.
I agree. The new one looks worse. Besides that there are hardly any differences between what they have now. And he got a laptop for that? Heck, I could do that. Why didn't I? Because I didn't even know there was a contest. I just heard about it now, after the results were already in. What kind of lunatic process is this?
I agree with your last sentence, but your approach to skating is slightly reckless?
Skating is a complex skill that needs to be broken down into drills to learn the fundamentals.
I can see your point though.
I used to think that but got into trouble, you need to drill the fundamentals. Very bad advice that is. I wonder if the OP actually did that. I never see anyone writing books on that approach. What you see instead is the Total Immersion approach, you see it in swimming, skiiing, rollerblading. Drills which break down a complex skill into something learnable.
I think the OP may have a lot of skill they take for granted. In other words they can do it, but don't know the fundamentals.
I agree completely with drilling fundamentals. (the other guy who said chase a golf ball on skates to learn skating is dispensing BS).
I would differ in that most application programming you get into stitching things together to get paid (you write code on your own time). So the fundamentals are not to be found in programming languages, but between them. Basically we get paid to implement various transduction phenomena.
At the risk of being redundant...
Was just configuring a PHP include file, realizing there is not standard or even accepted practice for the names and forms of include files in PHP.
I remember this one C project though that had standardized on having no compiler checking on function declarations, prefering instead this giant switch statement that decided what function to call at runtime. What a nightmare. This was a "best practice". Had arrived late as a troubleshooter, took me forever to recover my senses and ask why the hell are we doing this.
For applications, I would think the names and forms of things would be more standard in Ruby, will see...I like Python for its significant whitespace.
Go Python for now, keep an eye on Rubyforge.
Not sure if the way Ruby is implemented (with the syntax trees rather than bytecodes) is going to be an issue or not.
Also mod_ruby is implemented still kind of wonky I understand.
Just took a look at Plone/Zope yesterday.
Dropped it on Win32, built it on SuSE 9.1 (couldn't use the SuSE 10 RPM bundle, oh well configure, make, make install...)
Java failed to integrate everything cost-effectively.
Python stands the best chance now. Ruby isn't ready.
PHP, though productive, isn't even in the same league.
Execs are eyeing the piecemeal array of fragmented systems that have grown up in the last 8 years and thinking MSFT for everything. Need to do something else fast.
Python or MSFT, take your pick.
What's "hard" about HTML?
Can't expect to be able to exchange a DOM with a page designer.
Assimilating the HTML into script code, programmer becomes a rate limiter, a bottleneck. XML/XSLT won't work for the same reason.
On the contrary, maintenance programmers ask that we please use page templaters such as smarty, freemarker, the one's built into Django and RoR.
There's a billion little content management web application thingies that use PHP/MySQL.
I wish it was Python/MySQL.
With PHP you end up using Smarty to stay sane, so you end up with tagless scripts anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly agree, however for a guy who hasn't actually divorced and handed his life responsibilities downstream to some other shmuck to deploy, 8x40 hour work week is unsustainable. You need the late shift occasionally. Precise estimates? Heh. Get real. We estimate continuously all the time otherwise we couldn't do anything, just not about the things mgmt cares about. The need for estimates is created by the fictional role of "uninvolved bystanders", also known as Management, or Customers. Mgmt's role is to create loops and count beans WRT those loops, but not for me to spoon feed them their own estimates...
It scares me to think of the sheer brainpower that would have to be possessed by the candidate they'd hire to do deployments with no prior dev knowledge of the apps... hey wait, that's me! I'm downstream from all the devs, who document nothing. Speaking as a former dev, to document everything to the extent required for deployment personnel is very costly and the antithesis of agile. I wouldn't want to read your stinking docs. Go ahead, jar everything to oblivion and hand me the keys.
If java syntax actually *did* something useful, then perhaps your argument that it's not Java's fault would be valid. It is Java's fault. Java is useless. Java is worse than useless in that it's also a hazard. So you can't just leave it there and give it nothing to do, because it's offensive to the productive languages in the vicinity.
skills and consequent bad hiring decision for the I-don't-know-how-manyeth time, I now will be looking for one thing: can this person solve their way out of a wet sack of shyt? I don't care about the degree. To determine this I have developed 2 questions: 1) give me an example of a problem you have solved recently 2) how would you approach problem X? Everything flows from those questions, no need to remember anything else.
that's funny I once had a co-worker describe this type of code as the output of "real good" programmers. that's what he was doing to try to shut me up...the implication being that I wasn't one of those. That's what you do when you first learn c++. give me python.
Please, I'll take anything that does DRY, gets rid of compilation, and puts the object layer to work instead of the object layer putting me to work. Django, Rails, Turbogears, Zend Framework, whatever
once you get that the rest falls into place. don't need to read a 10 page article.
yes, why when you could use the python bindings?
>It doesn't look like the essay defines "silver bullet" and I don't have the >original in front of me, but a Silver Bullet is a single methodology or >technology change that by itself always results in an order-of-magnitude >improvement, thus seeming to "slay" previously immortal beasts of problems. That'd be a thing called "defining the problem" or even "contacting the problem", since nobody ever does this. Nobody. That's why anyone who does the simplest first step of going towards the problem seems to walk on water.
No, I believe he directed The Good The Bad and the Ugly, Straw Dogs, and had the starring role in Taxi Driver.
That's a long time...I'll be done with my own framework long before then. And I mean that. Zend need to have better imagination for controller than just copying Rails. That architecture doesn't score any maintenance points with me because a directory full of little controllers is no controller in my book.
The better programmers I know won't hesitate to chuck it if it's crap.
generating HTML from within programming language was a bad idea. Even worse in an unreadable language like smalltalk. When are they going to let that horrible syntax die? I never bought that smalltalk was intuitive enough to be a "teaching language". IBM owns smalltalk now. ST useless.
USIT. learn it. it represents 50 years distillation of problem solving.
>(Symfony, Rails, Django, Zope) are kicking the collective asses >of old-school hardcore 100% polymorphic OOP bloat advocates up and down the street (Java). yes. however, old-school doesn't necessarily mean "older" in years. I know some young people who won't consider PHP/MySQL platform, preferring instead the Java bloatlets.
This attitude is typical of most of my students. They don't believe in drills. Even when they finally get a concept after doing a drill that is designed to heighten the problem to be solved (the problem they are having), so that it forces them to focus on that one problem and solve it using their own natural ability to learn. Even after they use them successfully, even after they create them for themselves, they don't believe in the concept of drills. What is "chasing a tennis ball" but a drill? It will teach, perhaps, flow and effective application of whatever has been learned so far. If there is a teacher involved in explaining something, then drills are required to define terms and concepts, like "edges", "pressure", we're talking the stuff you probably take for granted. A lot of people aren't at the level you take for granted.
I agree. The new one looks worse. Besides that there are hardly any differences between what they have now. And he got a laptop for that? Heck, I could do that. Why didn't I? Because I didn't even know there was a contest. I just heard about it now, after the results were already in. What kind of lunatic process is this?
I agree with your last sentence, but your approach to skating is slightly reckless? Skating is a complex skill that needs to be broken down into drills to learn the fundamentals. I can see your point though.
I used to think that but got into trouble, you need to drill the fundamentals. Very bad advice that is. I wonder if the OP actually did that. I never see anyone writing books on that approach. What you see instead is the Total Immersion approach, you see it in swimming, skiiing, rollerblading. Drills which break down a complex skill into something learnable. I think the OP may have a lot of skill they take for granted. In other words they can do it, but don't know the fundamentals.
I agree completely with drilling fundamentals. (the other guy who said chase a golf ball on skates to learn skating is dispensing BS). I would differ in that most application programming you get into stitching things together to get paid (you write code on your own time). So the fundamentals are not to be found in programming languages, but between them. Basically we get paid to implement various transduction phenomena.
At the risk of being redundant... Was just configuring a PHP include file, realizing there is not standard or even accepted practice for the names and forms of include files in PHP. I remember this one C project though that had standardized on having no compiler checking on function declarations, prefering instead this giant switch statement that decided what function to call at runtime. What a nightmare. This was a "best practice". Had arrived late as a troubleshooter, took me forever to recover my senses and ask why the hell are we doing this. For applications, I would think the names and forms of things would be more standard in Ruby, will see...I like Python for its significant whitespace.
Go Python for now, keep an eye on Rubyforge. Not sure if the way Ruby is implemented (with the syntax trees rather than bytecodes) is going to be an issue or not. Also mod_ruby is implemented still kind of wonky I understand.
Just took a look at Plone/Zope yesterday. Dropped it on Win32, built it on SuSE 9.1 (couldn't use the SuSE 10 RPM bundle, oh well configure, make, make install...) Java failed to integrate everything cost-effectively. Python stands the best chance now. Ruby isn't ready. PHP, though productive, isn't even in the same league. Execs are eyeing the piecemeal array of fragmented systems that have grown up in the last 8 years and thinking MSFT for everything. Need to do something else fast. Python or MSFT, take your pick.
What's "hard" about HTML? Can't expect to be able to exchange a DOM with a page designer. Assimilating the HTML into script code, programmer becomes a rate limiter, a bottleneck. XML/XSLT won't work for the same reason. On the contrary, maintenance programmers ask that we please use page templaters such as smarty, freemarker, the one's built into Django and RoR.
There's a billion little content management web application thingies that use PHP/MySQL. I wish it was Python/MySQL. With PHP you end up using Smarty to stay sane, so you end up with tagless scripts anyway.