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airfoil

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Dad. Husband. Coder. Wannabe Entrepreneur.

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It’s happened to me. I’m terrible at the whiteboard in these situations. I have a severe disdain for whiteboard sessions. I’m an experienced engineer, but I’m likely to fumble at the whiteboard.

When I’ve interviewed candidates I make it a point to talk about something they’ve worked on and drill down into it. If they need the whiteboard to convey something, that’s great. We’re having a conversation and I’m not giving them a test. I’ll ask about potential optimizations and/or improvements, but I try my best not to make things adversarial. This has worked out really well. The best conversations have resulted in great hires in my experience.

I was two semesters away from finishing my degree. I quit. As a result I was unable to pursue the job that I had dreamed about as a child (joining the Navy as an officer and flying). I've also been turned down for opportunities, that I was qualified for, simply because I didn't have a degree. It took me years to gain the experience that overshadowed my lack of a degree and it was a long, painful, and difficult road. Please get your degree.

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I'm building a game/simulation so I don't need a "native" UI. I've played with QML a bit and it's very nice to work with. I've also discovered that PyQt5 can be deployed to mobile so the combination of PyQt and QML might be the best of all worlds for me (I love Python).

Based on your reply it looks like LiveCode doesn't provide a productivity advantage over Qt/QML. What was a pain in the ass about LiveCode/RunRev?

I'm sorry for not adding much value to the conversation but I just wanted to say that this was an excellent reply jblow. So much of this is spot on, particularly the parts about personal identity.

I've stayed in jobs where I became complacent and stayed too long. When I had finally had enough it was incredibly difficult for me to find something new because my skills were so specific that people couldn't see where I would fit. I will never do that again. If I have to switch jobs several times over the course of a few years, I'll take that over droning away and having my skills atrophy.

One thing that's kept me relatively sane are my side projects. My side projects have also made me realize I won't really be happy until I'm doing my own thing (or at least taking a shot at it). With a family though, I need the predictable income and benefits that a "regular" job provides. I'd love to take a few years off to pursue some of my own ideas, but it's just not feasible for me right now. Or I'm too scared/stupid to figure out how to put myself in the position to pursue my ideas.

It's tough knowing what you should be doing, but not knowing how to get in a position to do what you should be doing.

I had the exact opposite experience. I found that I was laser focused on a particular chunk of code when working in Clojure. Functions were logically grouped together. I never found myself jumping around.

I think this is the crux of the article:

"Greenwald and Banaji are not suggesting that people stop helping their friends, relatives and neighbors. Rather, they suggest that we direct some effort to people we may not naturally think to help."

This is correct. Once the Disney deal was announced, LucasArts folks had a feeling there wasn't much time left. I know a few people who left LucasArts for exactly the reason you describe.

Not well versed in both, but I think desktop apps are an area where Clojure shines. Let's say I want to write a cross platform desktop GUI app in Haskell. What do I use? wxHaskell seems to be actively maintained, but a lot of the projects listed on http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_librarie... appear to be inactive or dead.

With Clojure I have access to Swing (yeah I know...Swing isn't everyone's favorite) without installing any additional libraries. Then there is seesaw which is a very nice layer on top of Swing. To install seesaw I simply edit a text file in my Clojure project and the project management/automation system installs it for me. Very nice.

It looks like there is some sort of plan in place as I received a "SourceForge Project Upgrade Notification" a few days ago letting me know that they've upgraded an old project of mine to the new platform. My project is small, really old, and unmaintained so maybe they're starting with low visibility/impact projects.

Why Lisp? 14 years ago

I wonder if Python's metaclasses would get you what you're describing. Some thought would have to go into the primitives required to generate the constructs for the destination language(s), but metaclasses would allow you to serialize to different languages fairly easily once the primitives are in place. This approach isn't nearly as elegant as Lisp, but I think it takes what you're describing out of the "pretty much impossible" realm.

Overall though I agree with you, I just had a slight disagreement with the "pretty much impossible" claim.

Why Lisp? 14 years ago

Why generate Java code if Clojure runs on the JVM?

Why is it "pretty much impossible" generate the game engine C code in a non-lisp language? What is it about Lisp that makes it possible?

Nice work!

I played with it for a bit and one thing I noticed was that the "Home" key took me to the beginning of the line/prompt instead of the start of my input. Also if I backspace far enough it will start to kill my prompt.

One thing that would make this awesome for me is emacs keybindings.

Overall though, I think this has nice potential to be a super useful tool. Thanks for sharing!

Try Haxe 14 years ago

I tried a bunch of different game engines, toolkits, frameworks, languages, etc. for the game I'm working on and the thing that sold me on Haxe was NME. I was able to build for Mac and Flash without changing my code. I simply specified a different target platform at the command line. I haven't built for mobile yet, but I suspect there won't be very many changes to my code when I do.

Also, the Haxe community is full of great hackers and incredibly helpful.

Pet Projects 14 years ago

Ah yes. I wrote a game (text-based "sports" sim) in Python and wxPython roughly eight years ago that still has a small, but hardcore community of players. I started on a "version 2" of the game about six years ago. Anytime I want to learn a new language I try and implement "version 2" using the new language. As a result I've learned Ruby, JavaScipt, ActionScript, Scala, Clojure, Lua, Haxe, and a ton of frameworks/libraries associated with the previous languages. It's been an absolute blast, but I still haven't released "version 2" yet.