341–350 of 368 posts
Was the bit about PHP standing for Personal Home Page a joke? I always thought it was "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor". The coolest thing about PHP is the infinite recursion in its name!
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You're living in a pretty isolated world, my friend. I'd say 90% of my friends would be the audience for this. I've been coding 20 years, most of my friends are successful, grad-degree educated people in a variety of fields, and some of them are even my coworkers. Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's edu…
I think that Parent made the observation that it is sad that in our information society people (in responsible positions (regarding ICT)) don't know about the fundamentals of the information society. At least, that's what I took from it and I concur. We, as a society, should have started integrating computational thinking (Wing, 2006) as a core competency in the k-12 curriculum from the late 1980s onwards. We didn't.…
The day Netscape 1.0 came out, the teacher had us all download it from a few of CDs passed around had burned after downloading it on the class modem. The classroom was networked (coax) and figured out how to get Trumpet Winsock to work over the next few weeks to share the network with the computer with the modem. By 1996 we had a frame relay connection.
There was no curriculum other than what these two teachers could envision and sell to the achool board. Pretty thankful for that.
Watch it when capitalists pushing incessantly people to learn coding. They're trying very hard to cut the costs of their input "materials" and they will do everything that they could to devalue us in every way possible. So, if you're a talented and competent dev, be super aggressive with these predators and take everything your hands can grab before they have the upper hand and show us their true colors. Happy Coding…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre... "...the balance of power between investors and entrepreneurs that marks the early, frontier days of a major technology wave (Moore’s Law and the Internet in this case) has fallen apart. Investors have won, and their dealings with the entrepreneur class now look far more like the dealings between management and labor (with overtones of parent/child and te…
Money continues to be available, and often lots of it. It's available on better terms than most others in most other professions can even imagine receiving.
To put it bluntly: in most industries you are meat and own nothing and never have any chance of owning anything. This has been the condition for nearly all human beings who have ever lived, today and in the past.
There are also more alternatives to VC today: larger angel rounds, crowd funding, etc. It's also easier to bootstrap since everything (but people) has fallen in price. Those two things together have made the funding environment more competitive for VCs -- they have to offer more value or compete at the higher end.
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Let us keep the sacred arts secret, brothers. EDIT: Just being sarcastic. You are clearly incompetent, coasting along in your job, and afraid of someone with 6 months of experience being better than you.
Seems to have worked well enough for doctors and lawyers. They're unionized (through the AMA and ABA), upper-class professionals who command much more respect from the general public than we do, and whereas our salaries tend to max out at around $150k, theres can easily exceed $500k (in the case of medical specialists or law firm partners).
I do, mind you, think it is a good idea to encourage programmers to improve their negotiating skills and understand a little about business and politics.
This is supposed to be an introduction just to the abstract concept of code, yet it includes a section that asks the reader to take a test on whether or not they agree with the author on the effectiveness of domain-specific snippets of JavaScript ( http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod... ) - one that replies to your selections with obtuse references to the code's use of promises and callbacks.…
Are you sure that's what it's supposed to be? I mean, the author didn't supply unit tests, all we have to go on is the specification, which was that the editor of BusinessWeek asked Paul Ford "Can you tell me what code is," and Paul Ford said "No", and instead wrote this.
It's 2015. The audience of this article shouldn't even exist. The reader, as described in the article, is a VP who has so little understanding about what it is his company does, that the only meaningful abstraction he can mentally picture is that of his employees "burning barrels of money". Imagine an auto company VP who says "I don't know anything about engines and drivetrains and all that technical stuff. All I kno…
What an ambitious and beautiful piece! A story like this is probably dangerous - it touches on so many ideas everyone will find something to gripe with, and it's hard to make a comprehensive and consistent story. The last time I read something that so awesomely bridged high level abstractions and low-level implementations with a human touch was Godel, Escher, Bach (albeit with a very different feel). Well done.
Interesting, I wouldn't put this anywhere near the level of Godel, Escher, Bach. If you've read GEB and do software development, what actually did you find interesting and beautiful in the article? I've just finished reading the whole piece and I don't think I've learned much at all. Presumably as someone who already knows programming and theoretical CS I'm not the target audience, but then I'm also surprised why thi…
I get the GP's point about this being reminiscent of GEB, not in the sense that it covers the same topics or is at the same 'level', but in that it describes an intangible idea by approaching it from different angles and describing that same core concept from the shadow it casts in different directions. In GEB that core concept of self-reference was tackled from multiple perspectives so that an image of this common theme emerges as you read these different views onto it. Similarly, this article tries to conjure an image of 'code' as a cultural artifact, by portraying the shapes it casts in different directions - on the people who create it, the people who have to fund it, the tools and artifacts it generates. And it does so, like GEB, with wit and intelligence.
baby don't hurt me baby don't hurt me no more