jchan

And you're not some sort of "intellectual" idolizing ghettos? I have to go in and around one very often, and hearing "learn to appreciate your local ghetto" from some Random Internet Dude is almost farcical.

I agree with the vast majority of your comment, but please stop saying that North Korea is communist and that "communism can never produce a high standard of living." the former is patently false - North Korea is a Juche (which is not communist) dictatorship that uses communist theory as a carrot to keep its population hopeful. Read the Communist Manifesto if you doubt me.

The latter is unknown, as there has never been a true communist country (this isn't a "No True Scotsman fallacy" - a true state of communism is pretty clearly defined in the Manifesto).

I don't consider myself a communist (if anything more of a socialist) but reading this sort of FUD about communism is almost as painful as reading about blind hate for socialism in America.

It seems to me like a lot of the "required coding class" idea is based on a misguided desire to increase the competitiveness of our country internationally. Learning to program is good, yes, but to be honest, what goal are you trying to achieve? The article suggests that the goal might be to allow people to enter the job market more quickly.

The fact is that "programming" in and of itself is just grunt work. Forcing an entire generation to learn how to put strings together to do stuff won't help any of them when they go to a job interview and see a hundred other interviewees with the exact same proficiency for copying snippets from websites.

Problem solving is the much more important thing here, and that is already focused on in high school (remember word problems?). Programming allows students to explore problem solving more interactively, yes, but requiring schools to teach programming won't help in the long run any more than emphasizing a more comprehensive and intuitive approach to solving problems - I'm sure there'll be enough of those by the time these guys graduate to last forever. :)

Heh, that's not entirely untrue - the majority of people on lowendbox and lowendtalk seem to have some sort of strange fetish for running things on as little resources as possible. I've seen some people there that actually use the LEBs for things like cheaper redundant hosting, etc., but they're the exception.

Use a Comparator. http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Comparato...

Since it seems like you're talking about visual activity now instead of visual clarity, I agree that Java will be more "hard to read" under your definition. But aside from the two lines for the class declaration & method declaration and the other two for the ending brackets, there really isn't much bloat.

All that you have to implement for a simple numerical sort is some logic if a > b return 1 else if a == b return 0 else return -1.

My name is J. Chan, and I forgot the password to my other account. Thanks for making fun of my name.

Perhaps you should consider a different field of employment. https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4736156

(Pardon the tabbing, I don't have that much time to waste on uneducated comments like the above)