jaybill

The author of the article wrote it using words. He didn't make a video or draw a picture, because words were the best way for him to communicate with other humans. For some reason, he wants a different way to communicate with machines, one that is inherently not the way humans communicate with each other.

I also agree with what others have said, that this is nothing but a bitch fest with nothing actionable other than we ought to be creating visual programming tools no one wants or needs instead of doing actual work. Sure, buddy. I'll get right on that.

Thanks for posting this. I thought the linked article seemed to be making a lot of dubious assumptions, but didn't have the references handy.

And it STILL doesn't play DVDs without additional software! sigh

This is going to sound arrogant and troll-y, but I assure you it isn't.

I don't look. When I want a new job, I stop ignoring recruiters and wait to see what comes along. I've never waited more than a few days to have a pile of interesting opportunities. (I also end up with a much bigger pile of bullshit talent-trawls, but that's beside the point)

I wish I could say this was a function of my being awesome, but I think it has more to do with the job market in my area (PDX). There just aren't enough senior developers to go around.

That is quite a leap of logic based on a single correlation.

Precious $DIETY, take my $APPENDAGE. Please let the next version of OWA look like this.

Being Dutch is not an excuse for saying terrible things about who should and should not have children. People are suffering. Have some respect.

This isn't "running Java on iOS". This is cross-compiling Java to Objective C, the exact same way that other toolkits like MonoTouch, Titanium and RubyMotion do it.

The difference is important.

You can use this toolkit to target iOS from Java, but that doesn't mean that you get that language's infrastructure with it. I'd argue that's probably a good thing, but either way it's a far cry from "running Java on iOS".

This ought to be front and center on their site. What you wrote there turned a bunch of meaningless buzzwords into a useful product description. I'm now actually interested in the product. Well done!

I don't know. This is essentially saying that the way to solve problems is to add additional layers of abstraction. If you want to see a bunch of examples of why that's a bad idea, take a look at any J2EE application.

RAPHT (https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/Raphters/blob/master/RAP...) attempts to something similar (adding more layers of abstraction to MVC) but I have the same problem with that.

If we were really understood the problem we'd have come up with a way to make things simpler, not more complicated.

I think the real problem is that MVC is understood by different people to mean different things but they think they're talking about the SAME thing. Back end developers tend to think of the view layer as a trivial thing ("It's just HTML and Javascript! How hard can that be?") and front end developers tend to think of the model layer as trivial. ("Look, my backbone.js code is handing out and consuming JSON, how hard can it be to persist that?")

I'm not sure why, but I find the term "for the masses" horribly insulting and elitist. It instantly turns me off on whatever it is you're talking about and tells me absolutely nothing about the product other than you think your target market is a mass of people that aren't as smart as you.

How is that a fallacy? I think the fact that private keys have been leaked in the past demonstrates that they will be leaked in the future.

I was with you right up until you called everyone who doesn't do it your way a retard.

Two part answer. First, I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head. Second, though, is that I don't think it matters. You need to find something you like to do and then get someone to pay you to do it. If you don't do that, the money won't matter, because you'll be miserable.

I think that really depends on your goals. If your goal is to bash out a web application and get a startup off the ground, you ought to learn something that is tailored to doing that. Ruby on Rails and Django(Python) aren't bad choices. I'd avoid PHP, but that is my opinion and you'll find lots of people who disagree. Research your options and learn something that makes sense to you and will enable you to bring other people on later.

If you want to launch a career as a systems programmer, which is a fundamentally different goal, then yes, you should learn C, even if you end up using other things.

What kind of "beginner"? If you mean someone who has never programmed before, Go is much simpler to learn than C and makes a lot more sense.

If you mean someone that is a programmer and hasn't used go before, I can tell you I went from "never having seen Go before" to "reasonably proficient" inside of two months. Further, my Go code is easier to read and maintain than anything I've done in other languages. (I came largely from Java, so maybe that's not saying much.)

I think that for beginners of either kind, the documentation and community support are just as important as the language itself. I mean, look at something like JavaScript, which is picked up by "beginners" all the time and is, frankly, obtuse as hell. Go has great docs and a really friendly and helpful community.

I am not sure you can make the claim that cooperation and mutual aid are "principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial", nor would you find a large body of either biologists or anthropologists rushing in to support said claim.

Life on earth has gone roughly four billion years relying largely on predation, competition and survival of the fittest. I think you will find symbiosis and mutualism to be in the vast minority when quantitatively evaluating "things that work in nature".

I'm not saying that means cooperation and mutual aid are "bad". I just find it interesting when people impose their personal morals on nature.

Not to sound like a jerk, but I would really like to see the math you used to determine that learning one text editor versus another increases your earning potential.

For word breaks? Why are they not important?

I didn't say I picked consecutive words. You'd be right otherwise, though.

I get annoyed when I can't use spaces, because my general password strategy is to click my link bar shortcut to Random Wikipedia Page, pick five or six words and use that as my password. Easy to remember, hard to guess, even harder to brute force. Thanks XKCD!

I use Keepass to store passwords for the various things I use, and even though my hive is stored on a web server (uses SSL and requires a password, of course) for convenience, it has a well chosen, rotated password and a key file that I carry on a USB stick with my keys. I keep a backup of the key file in a safe physical location.

No two passwords are the same and none is less than 16 characters. One nice thing about Keepass is that you can also store URLs and other arbitrary information in the hive. Should anything ever happen to me, my wife will automatically receive instructions on how to locate and access the hive. (automatic email, dead man switch) Keepass also lets you set reminders so you can regularly change passwords.

I think it's probably more on the side of "sad", considering the way I did it. No mods. I wrote a little android app that you could put the words and number of correct letters each try into and it would shorten the list each time you did.

After a while I figured out "the trick" and could do them in my head and didn't need the program anymore. It was a fun little programming exercise, though.

I'm pretty sure the password guesser I wrote to give me passwords on terminals in Fallout 3 would easily give me these passwords.

I second your thoughts about Go. Much like the author of the post, I was really tired of Java and all the bloat that went with doing most things. I was going to get back into C and I had even blown the dust off my K&R. By random coincidence I saw a post about Go on HN and I've been using it ever since. It's a really great language. It does everything I wanted to get back into C for without any of the things I was dreading.

Oh, dear $DEITY, I remember that. Getting the wireless to work meant spending the whole weekend recompiling the kernel and crossing your fingers.

When I first read that you were a "long time linux user" that started with it in 2004, I chuckled, then I realized that 2004 was actually six years ago (a totally legit "long time") and that I am really old. :)

I'll give you that the way Gnome 2 was set up by default in Ubuntu was pretty annoying. I also spent some time "moving in" after a fresh install. I did, however, find that I could get it just the way I wanted it before too long, something I've been unable to do with Unity.

Here's the thing: Ubuntu's primary user base (to this point) is PC users. I'm all for a bright future where Ubuntu runs on phones and tablets and toasters, but seriously, where are they? What problem does Unity solve for PC users that a more "traditional" desktop metaphor doesn't? I can't get past the fact that it's obtuse and annoying solely for the sake of novelty.

To each their own, though. The magic of Linux is that there are plenty of options. Windows users, sadly, don't have that luxury, which is what the original article was pointing out.

I'm not sure who this post is aimed at. I hope it wasn't developers, for his sake. He's basically saying that a) he's only interested in hiring dim people and b) smart people moody and easily bored. Good luck recruiting people with that pitch. Eesh.

I'm curious what benchmarks you're deriving that from. I've not found that to be the case at all.

This is true so long as you don't count the latest version of Ubuntu. Unity is a train wreck because it makes the same set of false assumptions that Win 8 makes in terms there being one interface that will work for tablets, phones and PCs.

A year ago I would have agreed that Ubuntu was poised to take up the slack that a lackluster Windows 8 launch would create. Now they just come off as another vendor trying to copy the success of the iPad. As a person who used Ubuntu as his primary desktop for development, I've had to move to another distro (Lubuntu) because Unity/Gnome 3 actively enrages me. I'm not saying that to be dramatic, either. Every time I've tried to use that thing I feel like I have to wash it off my hands. I realize that this might not be as big of a deal to a completely new computer user, but how many of those are really left?

As an aside (and I don't mean this to start a flamewar) Gimp is not a suitable replacement for Photoshop. Gimp has all the same functions as photoshop (and some more, in fact) but that user interface is so bad that it's not really a viable replacement. Sure, there are plenty of people who disagree with me, but I think you'll find most of them are engineers and not people who work with images for a living.

If you don't believe me, look at what happens when Adobe itself makes the slightest change to any of its products. Its user base is immediately infuriated and threatens to revolt.

EDIT: Fixed typo.

I am. It's pretty amazing. All performance benefits of C, none of the language drawbacks. (No offense to C.)

I have a few apps in production already and I'm only doing new stuff in Go.