aardvark

Although a few high-level languages existed at the time, compilers back then were not capable of code optimization. The only way to write code tight enough to operate a spacecraft would have been Assembly language.

I went to college in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I can testify that about 30-40% of the CS students were female. And even then some people were expressing concern about how male-dominated the field was becoming.

Furthermore, the stock market isn’t influenced by value today like it was thirty years ago.

This simply isn't true. It was nearly 30 years ago that Warren Buffett published his article "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville" arguing that the market didn't accurately value many companies, and that anyone could become rich by taking the time to find market inefficiencies. And in the article he described the approach he had already been using for nearly three decades. There have always been discrepancies between stock prices and companies' true values.

This. And related to risk: When a website fails, it doesn't hurt anyone; if this tube were built, and then found to have a fatal design flaw, the liability would be enormous.

>Sure, if you have skills that are needed in Africa or Bangladesh, it's best to go there. But not everyone has such skills.

That's the key. It sounds like Trigg has found a way to combine his skills with his values in a unique way.

If a car has been on the lot a long time, then there's not a lot of interest in it. The dealer is more likely to accept any offer just to get it off the lot. For a car that's newly arrived, there's a greater likelihood (or at least a greater expectation) that several customers may be interested, so the dealer is better off waiting to see if someone is willing to pay more.

So, email corydoras@ridculousfish.com and he'll reply with a hint about his identity?

Or seawater marketed as fruit juice.

It looks great!

One thing I'd like to see, if possible, is an adjustment to account for deficit spending. In other words, if the government is spending $175 for every $100 collected, adjust the expenses accordingly, so we could clearly see what kind of cuts it would take to balance the budget.

Red Hat is making pretty good money supporting GPL'd software, over $700 million in FY 2010.

The cartoon notes that the comparison was taken from Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

Postman wrote this 25 years ago. If anything, his observation is even more true today.

When I decided I was ready to move on from my last job, I went over to the library (2 blocks away) to update my resume during my lunch hour. I saw that the library had an opening for a programmer, so I applied. I was called for an interview two days later, and they hired me the day after that. I didn't even have time to send out any other resumes.

I'm not convinced corporations would necessarily hire more people due to lower tax rates. If sales forecasts don't look promising, the additional workers' net contribution may be negative even with a 0% tax rate.

The copywriting is a little over the top, but my suggestion is for the book itself.

I'd like to see more details. Your sample chapter on Lexers, for example, would be much stronger if you went into more details (maybe 3-4 pages) on how a scanner identifies a token, how it knows when it has reached the end of a word, how it recognizes and handles whitespace, why it's important to keep track of indentation and newlines, what is the difference between keywords and other identifiers, etc. Maybe also give a written explanation describing what each section of your lexer for Awesome is doing.

Please consider this as constructive criticism: I think the book is a good idea, but I also think it needs more meat. I don't know how easy it is to revise it at this time, but I think you'd have better luck if you added more details.

Yeah, as if he's going to sell 500 copies at $39.99.

That's exactly the situation we had at the place I used to work. Management believed it was better to deal with the limitations of legacy software than with the expense of modernizing it. As of 2006, when I left, they were even still using Windows 98 on a handful of PCs because there was no reliable way to get all the data out of one of the applications and the software vendor had gone out of business.

Mel likely wrote the blackjack program before Kernighan ever offered that advice.

Good point. I wonder how much of that is due to the long period of peace and prosperity that the U.S. has experienced; in the absence of any serious external threats, it becomes easier for partisans to squeeze their political opponents into that role.

9/11 was an anomaly. Following the attacks we saw a time of genuine good will between the parties. The further we get from that date, the more our politics is descending back into petty partisanship.

True; the larger problem here is with the medium itself: Twitter does not provide room for context or nuance.

All I'm getting is "service unavailable"

It might be interesting to see the results of 15-20 iterations of this experiment, to see how perceptions differ over time.

I'm guessing the COBOL tweets are probably from people who primarily code in a different language, but still have that one legacy COBOL app that they still have to maintain.

Bytecode instructions?

Agreed about 40. That answer only works in English.

Are you calling josefresco a chimp?

I doubt Sun planned for this. If it hadn't been for the financial downturn, Sun's acquisition of MySQL (with its 12 million customer base) could have been Sun's path to new profitability. Maybe not a guarantee, but I suspect they were hoping for growth rather than a buyout.

"you'll quickly see that only one, Peter Eisentraut, works for Sun"

True, but Josh Berkus also worked for Sun until last summer. So maybe it's correct to say Sun has been a major backer.

I probably wasn't very clear. I'm not trying to say the technology is bad; simply that success in the market is due to the marketing and not to the technology. Others who are selling the same or similar technology haven't had the same market success as either Apple or Red Hat.

I'd say OSX's (and Red Hat's) success bears testimony to the fact that good marketing, not good technology, is the deciding factor in market success.

No surprise. Someone using Firefox is not going to switch back to IE, just like someone who has a favorite text editor is not going to switch to the next version of Microsoft Notepad.