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The idea that some coding languages are more Serious than others is a myth that needs to be disproven. "Why so serious?"
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Quote: Ruby’s Goals: “beauty, simplicity, and developer happiness.”
That's a joke; not a serious goal.
Quote: Because execution time is easily measurable (and people love optimizing things they can measure), ‘fast’ languages like C tend to sit at the top of people’s mental hierarchy as the most ‘serious’ of programming languages.
This is the myth
I agree with that; it's not about speed.
Quote: Languages like Ruby allow programmers to do more with less code, making them faster for the developer. Increased developer-speed means it’s faster to find out whether anyone wants what you’re making, easier to add the features users request, and easier to finish your project with fewer developers.
Getting closer; but that's not it either.
Quote: This diversity of needs, then, makes a strong argument for the importance of a diversity of programming languages with diverse design goals.
Also true, but that can only help us group languages and then determine the seriousness of languages within a group.
Quote: The whole purpose of coding languages is to help anyone build or accomplish cool things more easily. Use whatever language helps you accomplish this most quickly and most completely.
No, "more easily" is not truly the goal (although I do appreciate how C# makes things much easier than C, C++, and even VB). And I certainly hope he rolled robustness, maintainability, and stability into "completely".
To return to the discussion of the benefits of high level languages over machine code -- developer speed is actually a side-effect, the real benefit is in reduced maintenance cost, including the portability that was a primary goal. Increase portability, readability, add strong data typing, and you improve maintainability, which reduces the coding burden on the developers. Please don't take the following out of context: "Speed" is distance-through-time. Rather than focussing on decreasing the time used for the distance, it's better to decrease the distance, and reap the savings in time while achieving the same speed.
In fact, I don't think "seriousness" is really an attribute of the language itself, but of the practitioners -- is a language "for serious developers" or is it a toy, a learning language, something for quick Proof-of-Concept development?
To expand on that, and to relate this to the quote about "developer speed", you need to bear in mind that code is generally written once and read many times. "Developer speed" can lead to unreadable code. Whereas a language that lends itself to discipline and clarity of thought can lead to lessened cost of maintenance.
Relevant adages:
A stitch in time saves nine.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
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Are you afraid to write code? Does the thought linger in your brain that somewhere out there somebody has already done this? Go ahead, write it. You know you want to.
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Way ahead of you there.
I've spoken out on that as well. If you can* roll-your-own, then you should definitely consider it, the exercise is good for you if nothing else.
* I wouldn't try to write a compiler or a word processor, but I need to have the skills to write things that don't exist yet.
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Microsoft has announced version 5 of ASP.NET and seems pleased that the 15 year old technology is alive and well - but is it? I guess someone has a lot invested in Web forms
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This is a parody, surely
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If upheld, verdict would be largest yet for a patent assertion company. More like a patent leprechan with that much gold
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Someone hit the lotto!
If you ?steal? that much money do you keep trolling or quite while you're ahead?
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.0
My goal in life is to have a psychiatric disorder named after me.
I'm currently unsupervised, I know it freaks me out too but the possibilities are endless.
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... because when they kicked it out from under the bridge, the real trolls said they'd eat it if it ever tried to slander them by calling itself a troll again.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Microsoft’s Office team has recently launched a new initiative called the Collective Project, which aims to empower students and change the world. "Jai Guru Deva. Om Nothing's gonna change my world"
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Although smartphones are commonplace in the developed world, there are still plenty of people who don’t yet own one, and they are still far rarer in developing nations. Or one guy owns 2 billion of them, can't tell
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Now we just need to connect them all into a single conciousness --- A singularity if you will.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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After lots of perseverance from smartphone makers, wireless charging is finally starting to make an impact. Assuming you assemble them correctly
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In Plos Computational Biology, Feb. 26, 2015: [^].
imho some excellent thoughts about continuing self-education in a time of ever-accelerating technical change.
«I'm asked why doesn't C# implement feature X all the time. The answer's always the same: because no one ever designed, specified, implemented, tested, documented, shipped that feature. All six of those things are necessary to make a feature happen. They all cost huge amounts of time, effort and money.» Eric Lippert, Microsoft, 2009
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I found this clicking links from another article posted today and thought it deserved some attention of its own.
And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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And then Google said, "Does the world need a new browser?"
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Right, and now IE has abandoned the MSIE convention and is masquerading as a gecko. (IE 11)
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Yup, the article does need updated for Sparta(n) Madness .
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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How a hashtag lit the nerdy world of project management aflame — or at least got it mildly worked up. Uncertain developers unite! You have nothing to lose but potential customers!
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Microsoft's latest future-concept video features software, services and hardware that are all about productivity. Sure, it will never happen, but I want that roll-up tablet
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Indeed, a future where kelp farms provide the majority of the world's food.
But remember, all that stuff is programmed with a keyboard and a mouse. Now that's what I'd like to change[^], I guess all I need is some elevator music instead of my droning voice, hahaha.
Marc
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How may we infect you today ? [^]
Please to advise if this post failed to offend; I am always trying to sharpen the necessary.
«I'm asked why doesn't C# implement feature X all the time. The answer's always the same: because no one ever designed, specified, implemented, tested, documented, shipped that feature. All six of those things are necessary to make a feature happen. They all cost huge amounts of time, effort and money.» Eric Lippert, Microsoft, 2009
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I seem to have a very good PUP detector, and download.com is a big no no for downloads.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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In an interview, Google's product head, Sundar Pichai, replies to Tim Cook's criticism of Android. And by 'irresponsible' he meant, 'hugely profitable'.
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