erictobia

You make a great point and I do agree to a certain extent. However, there have been some projects I've worked on where having a great manager made all the difference in the world. Having someone that deals with all of the non-technical minutia so that programmers can keep building stuff is really valuable IMHO.

Maybe software could fulfill this role one day, but as you say we're not there yet.

It may be that I'm getting too old and cynical, but when I hear arguments about eliminating the middle-man I can't help but think of a quote from Malcolm Reynolds in the show Firefly:

"About 50% of the human race is middlemen and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated."

Any (non U.S.) folks with startups in the countries on this list? Is the article consistent with your experience?

This sets the bar for an elite programmer fairly low IMHO.

(it only gets difficult if you need to start embedding charts and specifying fonts)

We do need to do some of this

The latest (licensed) version of Office we have is 2003. As far as we know using Office 2003 for server side Excel generation is not recommended.

Thanks for the link to the Python framework though.

I haven't had a look at that...looks promising. Right now I'd be looking for something I can use with C#.

Thanks for the suggestion.

You're right - it has been there since at least 2.0. I threw that in there as an example. I apologize for not clarifying that.

It's actually possible to write slightly less verbose code with C# 3.0. For example:

  //...

  char[] someChars = {'A', 'B', 'C'};

  var moreChars = new [] {'D', 'E', 'F'};

  SomeMethod(new[] { 'G', 'H', 'I' });

  //...