Well, although I did enjoy the rails framework quite a bit, it's certainly not the first framework I've ever worked with. I've built applications with struts, ASP.Net (1.0 and 2.0), JSF, Django, etc, and I really do think rails is my favorite yet. My apologies if that offended you at all, I'll try to retain a little more cynicism next time. ;)
I think the guy's got a valid point, although perhaps not related directly to the "quantity" of work that you do. The real message here is "Follow this rule if you want to succeed: Whenever you're about to complain about something you haven't acheived, do something productive towards achieving it".
Personally, I'm suprised this train has generated as much steam as it has. The emotional intensity of the commentary wars between the "Arc Sucks" camp and the "You suck for thinking that Arc Sucks" camp is perhaps higher than the situation warrents. Those who like it will use it even in the absence of some important features, those who don't certainly don't have to (I daresay there are plenty of other programming languages for them to use). :-)
sigh every time I think that I know all the cool languages, somebody goes and builds a new one.
;)
Joel makes a really good point in this article. We cannot prepare for every eventuality, and in fact it simple isn't cost effective to do so. The best we can do is plan for the things that are expected to go wrong, and make permenant fixes (either with technology or with processes) when things we don't expect come up.
I think the author of this article may have missed the boat on functional programming languages. After all, a functional paradigm is not the same as an object-oriented paradigm, so if a functional language is a little verbose when dealing with objects I don't think that disqualifies it as a useful language.
I'm not sure. You don't buy facebook apps, you just use them if someone else invite you to. Is it possible that the advertising revenue is deep enough to support a 50+ employee company?
What a toll this kind of thing must take on oneself. I mean, in some ways it's good, becuase there's nothing that will make you appreciate the absence of pain like the prolonged presence of it. Still, his wrists were a mess, he was developing gastro-intestinal disorders, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have any friends during that time period.
I guess the links must be the money-maker, they tend to get more points then the comments.
I like the way this guys describes the technique of visualization. Some people have taken the idea of "visualizing" a goal and have forwarded the claim that the visualization will CAUSE the world to bend to your will.
The author displays the missing piece of the puzzle when he says that visualization will make you more AWARE so as to take advantage of opportunities that will lead to your goal.
good article.
That was really enjoyable. Practical and amusing. I sympathize, somewhat, with the plight of a career-writer. I have a hard enough time just getting a few blog posts up every week.
No kidding. I would love for my company to have a process for deployment that's as smooth as the one you're describing.
I disagree. It sounds like you work for a company who has their build process worked out really well, so fast changes are less impressive to you, but have you considered that maybe your company is not the average? I think it would be fair to say that most development shops are NOT that responsive to user changes because they don't have either the language features pg used, or a well-thought-out build process like your company.
If the article author works at one of those "average" shops, I think he has every reason to consider his experience on news.yc as a breath of fresh air and tell other people about it as an example.
Additionally, I think part of what impressed the author so much was that pg took the time to handle the request immediately. This isn't a site anyone pays to use, there's no revenue incentive, and the request was not the early stage of a riot, but they took care of it as though it was as important as a paying customer relationship, and that's not a response you expect from most web services. In fact, I think that may be what impressed the author more than just the speed of the fix.
I've had some thoughts in the past about a couple different mobile applications that would benefit from location data. It looks like the dev platform these guys are building could be the answer.
I don't know. You can't say that "They would not become advanced" just because they had a religious or superstitious outlook. What is to prevent an alien race that attributes their existence to a higher power from achieving technological progress? Would you also say then that our scientists of today who are advancing our level of technology are by definition irreligious?
Likewise, a warlike race of aliens is not hard to imagine. Wars are "expensive" in that they cost lots of money, but when america wages war the money that is spent in such great amounts is spent on American troops and government contractors, who in turn take the money they earned and spend it on other goods, so it does not "destroy" the money. In fact, war is generally an economy booster. As far as the destruction of resources, assume this hypothetical alien race is warlike toward OTHER species, not internally. The things they are destroying, then, are not on their homeworld, but on the worlds of those they conquer, and every world they conquer is another batch of resources for them to sap before moving on.
I just think you can't really predict the way another race would develop based on a random sample of 1 (humans).
I remember when the original offer from Oracle came out in october. The company I was working for then had an Oracle database and had just switched app-servers from Tomcat to Weblogic, so the idea of both coming under the same banner was not an unpleasent one.
Oracle's been doing a lot of acquisitions recently. I wonder who's next on their laundry list.
Whoa, didn't see that coming. I appreciate the humour, but as the others said, a warning would have been nice.
After searching for correlating articles, I believe that this article jumped the gun. It's cool to speculate on what would happen if we made contact with an alien civilization, but it appears this is premature for the particular signal they're talking about. See here:
It's the dream, for a company like MySQL. Build it until the community loves your product, and then cash in when you get acquired. Congrats to those guys for succeeding. I can only hope that I'll one day be fist-bumping with a major technology player who recently acquired one of my products (don't we all?).
That is a really brash statement. Usually this kind of comment comes from someone who hasn't really explored the advantages of the different languages they've tried, they've just taken every language that's come to them and manhandled it until it felt like the language they like. I've seen that happen before a lot, somebody likes C very much, so when they're introduced to Lisp, they basically write C in lisp. what does that give you? well for one thing, you have basically a program that is no better than the C version, but with a strange syntax. However, it means that the coder also hasn't taken advantage of the things you can do in lisp that are different from the things you can do in C. You can't write closures in C, so if you've only ever written in C you probably won't use them when writing in Lisp, and thus it seems like a pretty useless transition.
Languages ARE interfaces to the computer system, but that doesn't mean that some aren't more powerful than others. I could write a paper with a typewriter or a word processor, which are both viable ways to produce a document, but I can do things with a word processor that just aren't feasible on a typewriter. If you've never used a word processor, you won't miss things like "copy and paste" or being able to tweak your margins at any time, but if you HAVE used one before you will feel stifled without those abilities. Now, if you use a word processor, but you don't figure out how to use any of those handy features, than it's just an electronic typewriter to you and you'll say things like "tools don't matter! Typewriters and Word Processors are just two different ways to write a paper. That's it!"
of course, you'll probably get a few odd looks for saying that.
How cool is that? A cross-organization abstraction for the greater good.
People, when they write technical articles, commonly want to author the examples in the language they're most familiar with at the moment. If I'd been working primarily in Python for the last 6 months, I'd tend to write any coding examples in Python because it would allow me to focus on the article's content rather spending a couple hours refreshing myself in C to make sure I didn't make any embarrassing mistakes that might shoot through my credibility when read by somebody who spent the last 6 months writing C or C++. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, I usually think of it as an opportunity to rehone my skills on the langage in the examples (or take a look at the language for the first time in some examples).
I don't think that most managers are money-stupid at all. I think they rightly recognize in most cases that mediocre is far cheaper than great, and the difference might be worth the savings. If you're a manager of an internal IT department, it doesn't benefit you that much to have a kick-ass coder on your team, not nearly as much as it benefits you in your review to have saved that much money in salaries. jsrfded has the right idea, the only place to find proportionate compensation is in a business where the software is the product.
It's easy to get caught up in the profanity segment of this article, but I don't think that's the main point. I personally am not a fan of profanity in my personal or professional life, so I agree with edw519, but I get the feeling that the gist behind the article was more like "Why focus your energy on things that make you seem professional rather than doing a great job?" It's the difference between going out to get your haircut the morning of a big meeting or sitting in front of your computer burning code trying to put in that last feature you've been thinking about before you have to present. It's tossing ideas around through conversation and prototypes rather than through a monolithic "Business Requirements Document". Perhaps the suggesstion is that a common feature for small businesses that don't do so well is worrying first about the clothes and the office and the letterhead and the large staff, and second about the product.
That's a pretty machine, alright. The "aesthetic" factor almost makes me want to preorder one (I really like the look of the mac, even with the aforementioned design flaws). I won't, though, because my 2005 toshiba satellite is still ticking and all my current development tools run without a problem on it, so I can't justify it as a necessity.
There are definately some programmers who are 20X better than others, but I think the authors point was that the 20X difference is between programmers who are 3X above average and programmers who are multi-X BELOW average. The myth is that there are some super-coders who are 20x better than your average decent programmer, and I think that would be difficult to substantiate.
Although I thought the article was very perceptive, it's a wierd feeling to think about google being given a run for their money. Currently the popular perspective (which, of course, does not necessarily translate to "accurate perspective") is that google is a bastion impervious to seige. The points made are valid, though. Google is absolutely a general-purpose search, and when looking for something specific one is probably more likely to achieve effecient results with a more specialized tool. I don't expect Google to be blind to this fact, though. The author of the article (or at least his prime interview, VC Gus Tai) believes that Google would drown if they tried to enter the specialization arena, but I think the possibility is there for an entrance by the search-giant. What if they were to extract context from the keywords entered and offer an option to narrow search results to one of a set of more "vertical" flavours?