There can actually be surprising gotchas regarding portability. Good examples:

• - dereferencing pointers to multi-byte values can cause errors on some processors when the pointer address isn't word-aligned, but will work just fine on others
• - you can't make any assumptions around native word sizes without risking portability issues. This means being very explicit with your types (including <stdint.h> and being super careful about explicitly casting while bit shifting
• - ... you get the point

That's definitely not to say that you *can't* write portable code, just that C libraries may not be as plug-and-play as you'd like, often in surprising and dangerous ways.

Personally, I like Ruby.

In all seriousness, arguments along the lines of "very few people are competent C programmers" in my experience can be generalized to "very few people are competent <insert any programming language here> programmers". Yes, C is a more challenging language because it requires very strict discipline to do well, but 8+ years in the industry has shown me that good coders are the exception.

My condo association just signed papers to get Fiber access in each unit before the end of the year. While I can't speak for the rest of the community, Comcast will definitely lose me as a customer, and almost certainly a few others as well.

Fiber would have to cost a LOT more than Comcast before I'd consider NOT switching.

I think I found the right link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

It seems like the only linked article is relevant to the Slashdot story immediately preceding this one...

I know genetic engineering is still a little green, but this situation appears ripe for genetic experimentation. Call me a fruit basket, but I think it's time we peel back the shroud around genetic engineering and produce new varieties of disease-resistant bananas and diversify that genetic tree.

Just to clarify, did you mean free or did you mean government-funded?

This is the most insightful/funny comment I've read on any discussion board in a very long time.

Yep, plus Windows Vista/7 UAC, and pop-over ads that require people to click "x" before being able to read content on the screen...

Come to think of it, clicking past warnings and pop-ups is actually quite pervasive.

I replied to another comment later in this discussion sticking up for my former employer against this hit piece. :-)

Further, I said that (I'd imagine quite a few current and former Amazonians feel compelled to say something.) in response to the implication that current employees are being compelled by the company to speak up, and to the implication that them speaking immediately after the article was written is equivalent to "working on the weekend."

I don't even work at Amazon anymore and feel compelled to stick up for my former employer after this hit piece. It really got under my skin (kudos, NY Times trolls!), so I'd imagine quite a few current and former Amazonians feel compelled to say something.

Yes, rahvin112, I read every word of the article. :-) It was very well-written if not for the fact that it was extremely misleading. The article DOES make it pretty clear that they want to imply that what they describe is the norm rather than the exception.

I don't doubt that there are places within Amazon where management sucks. I socialized quite a bit while I was there, and, like any large company, there are places with poor management practices (demanding long work hours and burning people out, etc).

But yes, if what the article claims is true did or does actually happen there, it would greatly surprise me. I do know that some of the claims are outright lies, though (paying for our desks? unreimbursed travel pay??), so I'm skeptical of the rest.

As a former employee, this article really changed my view of the NY Times. I guess I expected more from such a well-known, established news source. But, this lengthy "expose" was clearly written by two authors with an agenda, and to what end? Readership?

I loved my time at Amazon.com. Yes, it was challenging. My time there forced me to grow as an engineer when I knew I was at risk of stagnation. But, I worked very reasonable hours (~7am-4pm, by choice to avoid traffic) and only very rarely (once very few months on average, typically leading up to Black Friday before all our deployments were locked down) worked nights of weekends. I traveled twice for Amazon - and had no trouble expensing the flight, hotel, meals, and transportation to/from the airport. I never saw anyone cry at their desk. Everyone who worked there was very civil.

I left for opportunity more than anything - an opportunity to both advance my career and be closer to my family on the east coast.

But yeah, I really have to wonder why the NY Times is busting Amazon's balls. I feel like a dope for not being more suspicious of them before now.

In Soviet Russia, God created US in HIS image!

The OP is still correct about Java. "Non-trivial" is not the same as "large project." Small applications can be written in Python, Ruby, Perl, and C without an IDE, but writing a small application without an IDE is really difficult task in Java (and C# or basically any other .NET language, fwiw - Java's not alone) due to the strong dependence on boilerplate code.

Further, you do *not* need an IDE for large projects regardless of language. I've seen a number of large projects (tens of thousands of lines of code) written in C and Ruby where more than half of the developers did NOT use an IDE. In fact, for the C projects on which I've worked recently (last 10 years, including those with tens of thousands of lines of source), the primary code editing tools used by the developers were exclusively text editors like nano and vim - there is no IDE during development.