I'm not sure why this guy got modded down... his answer was actually informative and useful. I'll check out SQLAlchemy next time I'm in a position to tinker.
The last time I tinkered with Django, I tried writing a simple CRUD app for an existing database at my job. After wasting a few hours learning how the ORM package works and setting up my models, I came to realize that Django does not support database tables with composite primary keys. In other words, it doesn't work with almost any legacy database that you will find in any enterprise shop on the planet. It wasn't worth re-working the schema, so I had to retreat back to Spring MVC and wrestle its XML.
I'll give Django credit, though. It's still several steps ahead of Ruby on Rails, which my last experiment taught me doesn't support more than one database per app!
I make a point to take one these "dynamic language" frameworks for a spin every 6-12 months... because I keep hearing that they are leapfrogging Java, and Oracle is destroying the universe anyway, and my career will be over soon if I don't migrate my skillset. So far I'm just not seeing it, though. These frameworks may be useful for simple non-commerce apps, stood up in a hurry by junior-level devs... but none of them seem remotely ready for any of the realities I deal with day-to-day when working for large companies or handling commerce.
In any case, this is a grad course, so the price of undergrad tuition is not really relevant to the discussion... This is all to say that I don't think Stanford's trying to rip anyone off here (quite the contrary, since they're providing the course for free).
[nitpick] It is in fact an undergrad course. [/nitpick]
Ultimately, I didn't so much intend to comment on the cost of elite-level education as I on the exclusivity of it. If it turns out that there are thousands of "general public" people who outscore the Stanford students on the grading curve... then on some level it would call into question why those students are "Stanford material" and the higher-scoring public members are not. We often presume that the system is a meritocracy, and what I'm basically trying to point out is how this may illustrate that it is not.
I'm sorry about your bitterness with your career, but your sarcasm misses the point. I do not presume that $55,385 per student per year makes its way into a professor's pocket. Probably only a minuscule fraction of it does (although the amount is no doubt higher for publishing professors at the elite level than it is for those who "merely" teach at the common level). If you're looking for additional cynicism, though... I'm sure the professor is partially motivated by book sales. He wrote the textbook, it costs $100+ a pop, and it will now sell thousands of additional copies since it's required for this class.
Anyway, putting aside the expense of the textbook (which many will pirate anyway)... the cost of the class for the online student is indeed zero dollars. And zero cents. Please don't interpret that as ignorance about the broader economics, or as a self-manufactured slight to your esteem.
If the content of this class is exactly the same as the "real" version, and at the end you are evaluated on the grading curve right alongside "real" students... then you have to question why the cost of "really" being a Stanford student is $55,385 per year, while the cost of receiving the same product without the formal diploma is $0.
How much of the expense of modern university education today is actually tied to the core product, and how much is simple sociology? That is, only a certain percentage of society can be in the "elite" ranks by definition... and so elite institutions must price themselves accordingly to maintain the appropriate exclusion.
I'm a 12+ year Java developer, who recently completed a JD at a T2 law school. I was basically bored and unsatisfied in my career. I still love to code, but I've seen pretty much everything there is to see... and I spend 95% of my time in meetings or wrestling with environmental dependencies rather than coding.
However, I've stayed in I.T. regardless, because the grass is NOT greener on the other side. As with anything else in society, the top-5% of lawyers are doing great... but things are miserable for the bottom-95%. It's the worst legal job market in almost a hundred years. It can take a year or two of searching to find a legal job, and the only legal jobs available consist of soul-crushing drudgery (even by I.T. standards). Finally, the average salary for non-top-5% lawyer is about 50% below that of an experienced Java developer (who can always land a new job on a few weeks notice).
I know that the parent comment was played for sarcasm, but don't believe the hype. The legal field sucks much worse than I.T.
Just release it. Once public, it become prior art and cannot be patented by someone else. After a period of time (~ one year), you can't patent it yourself anymore either.
You know, for a website that loves to pontificate about patent law every 10 minutes, Slashdot and its editors sure don't seem to know jack shit about the subject..."
(DISCLAIMER: If one of the various "patent reform" bills makes it through Congress and becomes law, and the U.S. moves from a "first to invent" system to a "first to file" system, then all this will probably change. But that's not the state of things right now.
Ultimately, you can either be a PM or a developer. I agree with other comments, that trying to be both simultaneously invites failure. That said, it seems like most careers in I.T. involve "stepping sideways" into something along the way.
I'm more accustomed to seeing this flow in the opposite direction... people who start off as developers, yet later in their careers step into management, hands-off architecture, pre-sales support, etc. However, there's no reason why you can't flow the other way. You would have a hard time being taken seriously at something truly hardcore, like development of compilers, kernels, or large enterprise back-end systems. However, who are we kidding... **most** of the JavaScript coders I've ever met were HTML designers who gradually stepped into development, and a ton of PHP or Ruby guys just kinda stumbled into it with no Computer Science background at all.
However, if you want that career path... you ARE going to have to "shit or get off the pot", and say farewell to being a PM (at least in the sense that most people use that job title). A true PM stays the hell out of the codebase, although you can pitch yourself as having "team lead" experience if you want to leverage that background. As far as making the transition, do the same thing any other entry-level programmer would do. Pick up a degree in the evenings, or maybe some certifications (they can matter a little bit at the entry-level). Dive into an open source project, so you have some resume code floating out there. Make your company aware that you want this transition, and be prepared for the fact that you likely will need to change companies for it to really stick.
Also be aware that you may be talking about a pay cut at first, because you're going from being an experienced PM to an entry-level coder. However, senior coders make more money than PM's... so you can be better off in the long run as far as that goes.
Hmm... it's been a few years since I last threw Mint in a VM, and at that time it looked even more newbie-oriented than Ubuntu itself. Maybe I'll grab the latest LiveCD and tinker around a bit to see where things stand today.
It's interesting to read the responses to this post... the consensus of which seems to be, "Who cares? You can always install it".
In the past, I've seen Slashdot go ape-shit because the window controls were moved from the right to the left. People are incensed about an auto-hide launcher bar on the left side of the screen. Then Canonical basically replaces their decent apt wrapper with a dumbed-down version of the Apple App Store... and people barely shrug.
I just don't get it anymore. I'm in my mid-30's, and feel like an old man. I simply don't understand OS or UI design best practices in the year 2011, or how people today come about the preferences that they have. Personally, I'm the opposite from the majority here. Bring on the appley-googley imitation crap if you must... I adjust pretty quickly to minor cosmetic changes intended to keep things fresh. However, I get frustrated by rapid changes to the defaults of actual system management.
If there were a distribution which leveraged Ubuntu's excellent apt repository, yet was intended for power users (rather than dumbed-down even further like Mint), then I would jump ship in 5 minutes. Yeah, I can change all this stuff manually in Ubuntu... but defaults matter. Why would I want to spend a freaking hour trying to make every new install act like Hardy Heron?
THIS IS THE GREATEST EXAMPLE OF HYPERBOLE ON SLASHDOT EVER!!!!!
But seriously... customs officials at any of the world's borders make bigger busts than this all the time, for trafficking actual physical goods. For that matter, taking out a single Somali rowboat would be a bigger "piracy bust" than this.
I agree that 60 hours of WORK per week is probably hyperbole... but the spirit rings true. When I was in my 20's, all I had was work and leisure. Period. As I shifted into my 30's, I now have wife and family. I'm active in church, and a couple of civic organizations. I have more home maintenance chores, because I now own rather than rent. I started learning a musical instrument, because when you get older you want to tackle some of those "one of these days..." life goals. Etc.
So, yeah... I may work just a hair over 40 hours a week, but I feel like I have 80-100 hours per week of stuff going on. Life's just different from what it was in my 20's.
Nothing personal, but this is exactly what I was talking about in terms of "Hello World" mindshare.
High memory usage (7) and slow startup times (3) are legitimate complaints about large-scale Java applications. However, compilers (4), build scripts (1), and some sort of container system (6) are simply par for the course in any large-scale enterprise environment. To make the Gee-Wiz-Webby-2.0-Hello-World stuff scale to industrial-strength levels... companies have to either break off the most intensive operations to be handled by a JRE (e.g. Twitter), or write their own traditional compiler for the language (e.g. Facebook).
Config files are a hassle (2), but frameworks like Spring and Hibernate have been moving toward annotations and config-by-convention for years. No matter how you slice it, if you're using dependency-injection or any sort of modern design practices, then that wiring information has to be maintained SOMEWHERE. If you're not used to maintaining that information, then that just says you haven't worked on any large-scale applications. Speaking of which, frameworks (10) are bad?!? Even the Hello World stuff is all based on frameworks, e.g. Rails for Ruby, Symfony or Cake for PHP, Django for Python, Grails for Groovy, etc. People stopped throwing their homegrown Perl scripts into "/cgi-bin" back in 1997!
I don't know what to say about "wordy" (9) or "curly brace" (8) complaints. That stuff is subjective... these traits were simply adopted from C, the primary language for doing real work prior to Java becoming the primary language for real work. However, the final item (5) is by far the dumbest on this list. I don't mind a manager who "loves a language they don't have to use". I hate managers who see the shiny graphics on the Ruby or Rails websites, spend 15-minutes walking through the hello world Rails tutorial, and then start pushing it because they magically feel like a programmer too! All things considered, "disrespecting your job" is a hell of a lot better than "thinking they could do your job".
I can name at least dozen "scripting" languages that run atop the Java Runtime Environment. About half of them have been around for nearly a decade. The most popular non-Java scripting languages (e.g. Ruby, Python) started creeping into the enterprise by way of their JRE implementations (e.g. JRuby, Jython). Nevertheless, apparently the ultimate "Java Killer" is going to be... yet ANOTHER language running atop the Java Runtime Environment! Developed by the company behind the JBoss, one of the top-5 Java application servers. And Seam, one of the top-5 Java application frameworks. Apparently, Java "dies" in the same manner as Dr. Who...
I get it. I understand why these posts are so popular, and why Slashdot runs at least one per week. Compared to Ruby on Rails or whatever... Java is relatively verbose, and it's more cumbersome for newbies to write their first Hello World app. Of course when you're working on real-world enterprise projects, with large developer teams and significant codebases, then much of that cumbersome stuff makes life a lot easier. But many people online are closer to that Hello World end of the spectrum, so a language's "Hello World experience" drives message board mindshare. Plus, there is the evil-Oracle thing on top of that. So Java sucks. Java's dying. I get it.
Except that it's not. At least not anytime soon, and not until you can show me a credible replacement that doesn't have "Runs On The JRE!" as its main selling point. I'm sure that something will come along eventually, but hell... in the realm of core business logic, Java only just surpassed "legacy" languages such as COBOL and C++ within the past few years! Moreover, the best contenders for "Next Big Thing" are JRE-based languages such as Scala, for which fundamental Java knowledge makes you more productive. Hell, even *off* the JRE, I would argue that being a top-class Ruby or Python developer requires as much computer science knowledge as with Java. Once you get beyond the Hello World stage, the idea that "scripting" languages are easier to learn is a fairy tale.
All that being said... I'm poo-poo'ing the hyperbole in the title, and not the content itself. It's nice to see another strongly-typed language on the JRE besides Scala. From what I see in the slideshow, this Ceylon thing looks like a "me too!" version of Scala, which has an 8-year head start. However, the Seam framework from RedHat has always been a rather "me too!" competitor to Spring also. Even though I've worked more in the Spring camp, I've still benefited from Seam because it pushes Spring to stay ahead. Maybe Scala can benefit from this competition also.
On one side of the scale, place a million dollars (relative to the annual revenue of Oracle).
On the other side of the scale, place the value of maintaining some kind of redirect for the millions of links that will never completely go away. Then place the value of keeping the domain out of the hands of anyone who might use it in a way detrimental to your interests. Last but not least... place the fact that "sun.com" is embedded in the DTD's and XML Schemas for virtually all Java technology, and it would take decades to fully migrate away from and decommission all that.
This is so stupidly lopsided, the scale would break. Oracle will never do this. Maybe the point is simply that this domain name has a high appraisal value... but even that is not particularly interesting (*every* three-letter domain has a high appraisal value). This "story" is only here because any lazy filler involving Oracle, Microsoft, or the other standard villains is always good for a few clicks and advertising impressions.
Exactly. Every week or two, some variant of this "story" is cut-n-pasted by an editor who either doesn't know any better... or who does know better and posts it anyway to attract ignorant eyeballs. Clueless people love reading and ranting on this issue... because it involves:
1) A company that everyone hates (Oracle)
2) A subject that almost everyone here hates and almost no one here understands (patents)
3) A language (Java) that most people here never quite trusted in the first place, either because:
a) They're C/C++ old farts, and think it's for young whipper-snappers
2) They're PHP/Ruby whipper-snappers, and think it's for old farts, or
... what are you kids TALKING about? It seems like most of the replies on this branch of the thread are about convergence between phones and PC's, and eventually using productivity apps on your phone. Who on earth wants to use a 3-inch phone to manipulate a spreadsheet, type in a word processor, or anything beyond the most specialized niche of data-entry for any extended period of time? Even tablet devices are poorly-suited for such tasks.
The intended purpose of a smart phone is not content generation or productivity. Their purpose is to read stuff (e.g. important email, directions to the restaurant, etc), and to play Angry Birds... until you've finished your car trip or boring meeting, and can return to your PC. You might tap a one-sentence reply to an email (with crappy grammar and capitalization), or enter the name of the restaurant, but that's about it for productive data-entry.
The limitation behind this is not the number of CPU cores in the device, nor its power budget. The limitation is the form factor! Duh! You can cram a supercomputer into the thing... yet even with the most clever swipey-typing system, it will still suck compared to a keyboard and full-sized monitor screen. Now, the idea of docking stations for your phone (or perhaps a standard docking port for phones on your PC) does sound like it could be useful in some circumstances... but I'm highly skeptical of full-blown "convergence".
Jesus Tittyfucking Christ... I don't know why I still bother to browse this site from time to time. It's a hollow shell of what it was before the buyout. Most of the posts today are some variation of:
(EVIL ENTITY X) is doing (NEFARIOUS ACTION Y) in the realm of (PATENTS || COPYRIGHT || LEGISLATION || OPEN SOURCE || YOUR FAVORITE LANGUAGE || YOUR FAVORITE GADGET || APPLE FANBOYS || APPLE HATERS). Discuss!
The information is always utter crap, neither fact-checked nor probably even read by the editor... and has no other purpose than to attract eyeballs by provoking flamewars. 90% of the comments are by marks who swallowed the bait, and of course didn't bother to RTFA. The only real value of this site is in the 10% of readers who have a clue and comment with actual information in response to the posts.
The parent is one such 10%'er. NetBeans is not "dropping" Ruby... it's simply handing off the code to the community. Just as Oracle did in handing off TopLink (i.e. EclipseLink) to the Eclipse Foundation. The person who submitted this story is an idiot, as is the lazy editor who posted it. There's really nothing else to add.
Whether it's under the Western legal system, or under any cognizable system of morality developed by the human race... children are not recognized as being capable of forming proper consent for sexual activity. Therefore, sexual activity with a child is inherently coercive and exploitative. Therefore, the only pedophile who is arguably "non-threatening" is one who is a pedophile only in his or her mind... without ever putting it into practice.
This is a debate that can be held with calm and cool heads, addressing each other rationally. However, the claim that pedophilia is a "sexual orientation" really does warrant a gay person punching you in the face. Really, really hard. You do not get to piggyback a ride with illegal aliens, or Muslims, or any other completely unrelated group that is solely calculated to draw reflexively-liberal sympathy. That accomplishes nothing except hurting those groups by giving ammunition to their right-wing enemies, who already think in those terms and look for excuses to justify it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure why this guy got modded down... his answer was actually informative and useful. I'll check out SQLAlchemy next time I'm in a position to tinker.
I know... that point was a reference to Rails.
The last time I tinkered with Django, I tried writing a simple CRUD app for an existing database at my job. After wasting a few hours learning how the ORM package works and setting up my models, I came to realize that Django does not support database tables with composite primary keys . In other words, it doesn't work with almost any legacy database that you will find in any enterprise shop on the planet. It wasn't worth re-working the schema, so I had to retreat back to Spring MVC and wrestle its XML.
I'll give Django credit, though. It's still several steps ahead of Ruby on Rails, which my last experiment taught me doesn't support more than one database per app !
I make a point to take one these "dynamic language" frameworks for a spin every 6-12 months... because I keep hearing that they are leapfrogging Java, and Oracle is destroying the universe anyway, and my career will be over soon if I don't migrate my skillset. So far I'm just not seeing it, though. These frameworks may be useful for simple non-commerce apps, stood up in a hurry by junior-level devs... but none of them seem remotely ready for any of the realities I deal with day-to-day when working for large companies or handling commerce.
In any case, this is a grad course, so the price of undergrad tuition is not really relevant to the discussion ... This is all to say that I don't think Stanford's trying to rip anyone off here (quite the contrary, since they're providing the course for free).
[nitpick] It is in fact an undergrad course. [/nitpick]
Ultimately, I didn't so much intend to comment on the cost of elite-level education as I on the exclusivity of it. If it turns out that there are thousands of "general public" people who outscore the Stanford students on the grading curve... then on some level it would call into question why those students are "Stanford material" and the higher-scoring public members are not. We often presume that the system is a meritocracy, and what I'm basically trying to point out is how this may illustrate that it is not.
I'm sorry about your bitterness with your career, but your sarcasm misses the point. I do not presume that $55,385 per student per year makes its way into a professor's pocket. Probably only a minuscule fraction of it does (although the amount is no doubt higher for publishing professors at the elite level than it is for those who "merely" teach at the common level). If you're looking for additional cynicism, though... I'm sure the professor is partially motivated by book sales. He wrote the textbook, it costs $100+ a pop, and it will now sell thousands of additional copies since it's required for this class.
Anyway, putting aside the expense of the textbook (which many will pirate anyway)... the cost of the class for the online student is indeed zero dollars. And zero cents. Please don't interpret that as ignorance about the broader economics, or as a self-manufactured slight to your esteem.
If the content of this class is exactly the same as the "real" version, and at the end you are evaluated on the grading curve right alongside "real" students... then you have to question why the cost of "really" being a Stanford student is $55,385 per year, while the cost of receiving the same product without the formal diploma is $0.
How much of the expense of modern university education today is actually tied to the core product, and how much is simple sociology? That is, only a certain percentage of society can be in the "elite" ranks by definition... and so elite institutions must price themselves accordingly to maintain the appropriate exclusion.
I'm a 12+ year Java developer, who recently completed a JD at a T2 law school. I was basically bored and unsatisfied in my career. I still love to code, but I've seen pretty much everything there is to see... and I spend 95% of my time in meetings or wrestling with environmental dependencies rather than coding.
However, I've stayed in I.T. regardless, because the grass is NOT greener on the other side. As with anything else in society, the top-5% of lawyers are doing great... but things are miserable for the bottom-95%. It's the worst legal job market in almost a hundred years. It can take a year or two of searching to find a legal job, and the only legal jobs available consist of soul-crushing drudgery (even by I.T. standards). Finally, the average salary for non-top-5% lawyer is about 50% below that of an experienced Java developer (who can always land a new job on a few weeks notice).
I know that the parent comment was played for sarcasm, but don't believe the hype. The legal field sucks much worse than I.T.
Eh, I'm posting on Slashdot... what do I know? :)
Just release it. Once public, it become prior art and cannot be patented by someone else. After a period of time (~ one year), you can't patent it yourself anymore either.
You know, for a website that loves to pontificate about patent law every 10 minutes, Slashdot and its editors sure don't seem to know jack shit about the subject..."
(DISCLAIMER: If one of the various "patent reform" bills makes it through Congress and becomes law, and the U.S. moves from a "first to invent" system to a "first to file" system, then all this will probably change. But that's not the state of things right now.
Ultimately, you can either be a PM or a developer. I agree with other comments, that trying to be both simultaneously invites failure. That said, it seems like most careers in I.T. involve "stepping sideways" into something along the way.
I'm more accustomed to seeing this flow in the opposite direction... people who start off as developers, yet later in their careers step into management, hands-off architecture, pre-sales support, etc. However, there's no reason why you can't flow the other way. You would have a hard time being taken seriously at something truly hardcore, like development of compilers, kernels, or large enterprise back-end systems. However, who are we kidding... **most** of the JavaScript coders I've ever met were HTML designers who gradually stepped into development, and a ton of PHP or Ruby guys just kinda stumbled into it with no Computer Science background at all.
However, if you want that career path... you ARE going to have to "shit or get off the pot", and say farewell to being a PM (at least in the sense that most people use that job title). A true PM stays the hell out of the codebase, although you can pitch yourself as having "team lead" experience if you want to leverage that background. As far as making the transition, do the same thing any other entry-level programmer would do. Pick up a degree in the evenings, or maybe some certifications (they can matter a little bit at the entry-level). Dive into an open source project, so you have some resume code floating out there. Make your company aware that you want this transition, and be prepared for the fact that you likely will need to change companies for it to really stick.
Also be aware that you may be talking about a pay cut at first, because you're going from being an experienced PM to an entry-level coder. However, senior coders make more money than PM's... so you can be better off in the long run as far as that goes.
Good luck.
There's a Bitcoins joke in here somewhere...
Hmm... it's been a few years since I last threw Mint in a VM, and at that time it looked even more newbie-oriented than Ubuntu itself. Maybe I'll grab the latest LiveCD and tinker around a bit to see where things stand today.
It's interesting to read the responses to this post... the consensus of which seems to be, "Who cares? You can always install it".
In the past, I've seen Slashdot go ape-shit because the window controls were moved from the right to the left. People are incensed about an auto-hide launcher bar on the left side of the screen. Then Canonical basically replaces their decent apt wrapper with a dumbed-down version of the Apple App Store... and people barely shrug.
I just don't get it anymore. I'm in my mid-30's, and feel like an old man. I simply don't understand OS or UI design best practices in the year 2011, or how people today come about the preferences that they have. Personally, I'm the opposite from the majority here. Bring on the appley-googley imitation crap if you must... I adjust pretty quickly to minor cosmetic changes intended to keep things fresh. However, I get frustrated by rapid changes to the defaults of actual system management.
If there were a distribution which leveraged Ubuntu's excellent apt repository, yet was intended for power users (rather than dumbed-down even further like Mint), then I would jump ship in 5 minutes. Yeah, I can change all this stuff manually in Ubuntu... but defaults matter. Why would I want to spend a freaking hour trying to make every new install act like Hardy Heron?
THIS IS THE GREATEST EXAMPLE OF HYPERBOLE ON SLASHDOT EVER!!!!!
But seriously... customs officials at any of the world's borders make bigger busts than this all the time, for trafficking actual physical goods. For that matter, taking out a single Somali rowboat would be a bigger "piracy bust" than this.
Lame, editors.
I agree that 60 hours of WORK per week is probably hyperbole... but the spirit rings true. When I was in my 20's, all I had was work and leisure. Period. As I shifted into my 30's, I now have wife and family. I'm active in church, and a couple of civic organizations. I have more home maintenance chores, because I now own rather than rent. I started learning a musical instrument, because when you get older you want to tackle some of those "one of these days..." life goals. Etc.
So, yeah... I may work just a hair over 40 hours a week, but I feel like I have 80-100 hours per week of stuff going on. Life's just different from what it was in my 20's.
On the other hand, I just noticed that he titled his post "Paradigm shift". Actually, you can mod *down* for that.
This sums it up. Everyone else can stop now.
This summary reminds me of every dumb phone I've ever received from incompetent I.T. recruiters, as they mindlessly read off buzzwords...
Recruiter: Do you have "JEE"?
Me: Yeah.
Recruiter: Do you have "Java"?
Me: That's included in the previou... oh, nevermind. Yeah.
Recruiter: Do you have "Oracle"?
Me: Yeah.
Recruiter: Do you have "SQL"?
Me: That's part of...... yeah.
Recruiter: Do you have "agile"?
Me: Oh fuck my life...
Nothing personal, but this is exactly what I was talking about in terms of "Hello World" mindshare.
High memory usage (7) and slow startup times (3) are legitimate complaints about large-scale Java applications. However, compilers (4), build scripts (1), and some sort of container system (6) are simply par for the course in any large-scale enterprise environment. To make the Gee-Wiz-Webby-2.0-Hello-World stuff scale to industrial-strength levels... companies have to either break off the most intensive operations to be handled by a JRE (e.g. Twitter), or write their own traditional compiler for the language (e.g. Facebook).
Config files are a hassle (2), but frameworks like Spring and Hibernate have been moving toward annotations and config-by-convention for years. No matter how you slice it, if you're using dependency-injection or any sort of modern design practices, then that wiring information has to be maintained SOMEWHERE. If you're not used to maintaining that information, then that just says you haven't worked on any large-scale applications. Speaking of which, frameworks (10) are bad?!? Even the Hello World stuff is all based on frameworks, e.g. Rails for Ruby, Symfony or Cake for PHP, Django for Python, Grails for Groovy, etc. People stopped throwing their homegrown Perl scripts into "/cgi-bin" back in 1997!
I don't know what to say about "wordy" (9) or "curly brace" (8) complaints. That stuff is subjective... these traits were simply adopted from C, the primary language for doing real work prior to Java becoming the primary language for real work. However, the final item (5) is by far the dumbest on this list. I don't mind a manager who "loves a language they don't have to use". I hate managers who see the shiny graphics on the Ruby or Rails websites, spend 15-minutes walking through the hello world Rails tutorial, and then start pushing it because they magically feel like a programmer too! All things considered, "disrespecting your job" is a hell of a lot better than "thinking they could do your job".
I can name at least dozen "scripting" languages that run atop the Java Runtime Environment. About half of them have been around for nearly a decade. The most popular non-Java scripting languages (e.g. Ruby, Python) started creeping into the enterprise by way of their JRE implementations (e.g. JRuby, Jython). Nevertheless, apparently the ultimate "Java Killer" is going to be... yet ANOTHER language running atop the Java Runtime Environment! Developed by the company behind the JBoss, one of the top-5 Java application servers. And Seam, one of the top-5 Java application frameworks. Apparently, Java "dies" in the same manner as Dr. Who...
I get it. I understand why these posts are so popular, and why Slashdot runs at least one per week. Compared to Ruby on Rails or whatever... Java is relatively verbose, and it's more cumbersome for newbies to write their first Hello World app. Of course when you're working on real-world enterprise projects, with large developer teams and significant codebases, then much of that cumbersome stuff makes life a lot easier. But many people online are closer to that Hello World end of the spectrum, so a language's "Hello World experience" drives message board mindshare. Plus, there is the evil-Oracle thing on top of that. So Java sucks. Java's dying. I get it.
Except that it's not. At least not anytime soon, and not until you can show me a credible replacement that doesn't have "Runs On The JRE!" as its main selling point. I'm sure that something will come along eventually, but hell... in the realm of core business logic, Java only just surpassed "legacy" languages such as COBOL and C++ within the past few years! Moreover, the best contenders for "Next Big Thing" are JRE-based languages such as Scala, for which fundamental Java knowledge makes you more productive. Hell, even *off* the JRE, I would argue that being a top-class Ruby or Python developer requires as much computer science knowledge as with Java. Once you get beyond the Hello World stage, the idea that "scripting" languages are easier to learn is a fairy tale.
All that being said... I'm poo-poo'ing the hyperbole in the title, and not the content itself. It's nice to see another strongly-typed language on the JRE besides Scala. From what I see in the slideshow, this Ceylon thing looks like a "me too!" version of Scala, which has an 8-year head start. However, the Seam framework from RedHat has always been a rather "me too!" competitor to Spring also. Even though I've worked more in the Spring camp, I've still benefited from Seam because it pushes Spring to stay ahead. Maybe Scala can benefit from this competition also.
Take a scale.
On one side of the scale, place a million dollars (relative to the annual revenue of Oracle).
On the other side of the scale, place the value of maintaining some kind of redirect for the millions of links that will never completely go away. Then place the value of keeping the domain out of the hands of anyone who might use it in a way detrimental to your interests. Last but not least... place the fact that "sun.com" is embedded in the DTD's and XML Schemas for virtually all Java technology, and it would take decades to fully migrate away from and decommission all that.
This is so stupidly lopsided, the scale would break. Oracle will never do this. Maybe the point is simply that this domain name has a high appraisal value... but even that is not particularly interesting (*every* three-letter domain has a high appraisal value). This "story" is only here because any lazy filler involving Oracle, Microsoft, or the other standard villains is always good for a few clicks and advertising impressions.
Exactly. Every week or two, some variant of this "story" is cut-n-pasted by an editor who either doesn't know any better... or who does know better and posts it anyway to attract ignorant eyeballs. Clueless people love reading and ranting on this issue... because it involves:
... what are you kids TALKING about? It seems like most of the replies on this branch of the thread are about convergence between phones and PC's, and eventually using productivity apps on your phone. Who on earth wants to use a 3-inch phone to manipulate a spreadsheet, type in a word processor, or anything beyond the most specialized niche of data-entry for any extended period of time? Even tablet devices are poorly-suited for such tasks.
The intended purpose of a smart phone is not content generation or productivity. Their purpose is to read stuff (e.g. important email, directions to the restaurant, etc), and to play Angry Birds... until you've finished your car trip or boring meeting, and can return to your PC. You might tap a one-sentence reply to an email (with crappy grammar and capitalization), or enter the name of the restaurant, but that's about it for productive data-entry.
The limitation behind this is not the number of CPU cores in the device, nor its power budget. The limitation is the form factor! Duh! You can cram a supercomputer into the thing... yet even with the most clever swipey-typing system, it will still suck compared to a keyboard and full-sized monitor screen. Now, the idea of docking stations for your phone (or perhaps a standard docking port for phones on your PC) does sound like it could be useful in some circumstances... but I'm highly skeptical of full-blown "convergence".
Jesus Tittyfucking Christ... I don't know why I still bother to browse this site from time to time. It's a hollow shell of what it was before the buyout. Most of the posts today are some variation of:
The information is always utter crap, neither fact-checked nor probably even read by the editor... and has no other purpose than to attract eyeballs by provoking flamewars. 90% of the comments are by marks who swallowed the bait, and of course didn't bother to RTFA. The only real value of this site is in the 10% of readers who have a clue and comment with actual information in response to the posts.
The parent is one such 10%'er. NetBeans is not "dropping" Ruby... it's simply handing off the code to the community. Just as Oracle did in handing off TopLink (i.e. EclipseLink) to the Eclipse Foundation. The person who submitted this story is an idiot, as is the lazy editor who posted it. There's really nothing else to add.
Pedophilia is a sexual orientation.
Whether it's under the Western legal system, or under any cognizable system of morality developed by the human race... children are not recognized as being capable of forming proper consent for sexual activity. Therefore, sexual activity with a child is inherently coercive and exploitative. Therefore, the only pedophile who is arguably "non-threatening" is one who is a pedophile only in his or her mind... without ever putting it into practice.
This is a debate that can be held with calm and cool heads, addressing each other rationally. However, the claim that pedophilia is a "sexual orientation" really does warrant a gay person punching you in the face. Really, really hard. You do not get to piggyback a ride with illegal aliens, or Muslims, or any other completely unrelated group that is solely calculated to draw reflexively-liberal sympathy. That accomplishes nothing except hurting those groups by giving ammunition to their right-wing enemies, who already think in those terms and look for excuses to justify it.