I didn't say a C# console app - I specifically said Visual C#, in response to people discussing having the Visual* IDEs generate the UI for the programmers, then filling in the back end.

Using the IDE simply as the debugger/programming environment is fine. But building UIs is putting the cart before the horse. Unless a programmer understands what happens inside the app, they'll never really understand how to make those things hook, affect, and respond to a UI that was just dropped on top of some code.

For anyone suggesting VB, or Visual C#, or any of the other "Click to build the framework then fill in the back end", this is the worst possible thing an actual beginning programmer should be looking into.

I would assume from the OP that we're talking about people with no programming background. Taking someone like that, giving them a button to click to generate a UI, then having them fill in the blanks is #fail. They don't already know how to program. It would be like asking someone to complete a puzzle, in a dark room, where they don't know what shape the blanks are in the puzzle, or what colors they should be, or even where the front or the back is.

Interface builders are nice for people that already know how to program, because while creating UI's is tedious, it's also about the 10th thing to be done when building a program. People who have been programming for years can work backwards (Yes, UI to logic is backwards in all cases except for programmers-who-specifically-design-UIs, but that's not what we're talking about here) from the UI to the underlying program logic and the flows between UI elements, but someone new shouldn't be developing in this direction. They should be understanding how the logic behind the program works, in many different variations, before they go putting a pretty button in front of that logic to show the result in pretty graphical ways via some rendering library call..

BASIC, Lisp, Perl, Python, Java (not javaw or AWT), all are useful for the basic understanding of what a program is, what control and input and output logic is. As people have mentioned, Python and Java both have graphical toolkit extensions that can eventually extend your development to pretty pictures and not input/logic/output. If you really want some sort of "visual" developer to put in front of this person, go look into some of the "Blocks" development tools, like Google AppInventor, for example. These use interfaces analogous to puzzle pieces to represent the code in the application, and you can drag and drop inputs and outputs to hook into control statements to do things - sorta like the virtual programming equivalent of everyone's favorite Radio Shack 160-in-1 Electronics kit.

For the love of god, though - don't "teach" someone to program by putting them in front of a framework generator and having them "go at it".

That wouldn't have been "his school", that would have been just about every high school during the 40's to 70's. Women took Home Economics (a.k.a. Cooking) and maybe Typing if they were on a "career track", and men took Shop.

Of course it look ridiculous for things to have been that way, looking at them 30-40 years in the past. That's because society changed.

Now we all know that you have to "sudo make me a sammich" to get your women to get it done. :)

But you do have Goblins on Dinosaurs on Sharks with Laser Beams....

http://pc.ign.com/dor/objects/24939/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm/images/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm-20100813113214236.html?page=mediaFull

This is getting close.

Meet NELL, the Computer That Lears From the Net

Maybe all of the editos should get one of these, and le tit lear spellign.

As was I (though 32 years, not 59...).

Happy birthday to me, time to kick some Deathwing butt.

ORLY? Is this a dare? Someone in Marketing didn't talk to someone in Technology, methinks.

I'm starting my egg timer now.

He's on "facts".

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=14560

As of 2006, VA care was on a 6-year run of outperforming private health care in customer satisfaction. In 2006, it was 10% higher in satisfaction, so this isn't a sampling error.

Tort reform, to reduce doctor's malpractice insurance and the practice of overdone preventive testing to ward off lawsuits.

Almost every halfway independent study of this suggestion pegs such savings in the low to mid single digits of %.

Promote Health Savings Accounts

Works wonderfully...for those people who actually have enough money to be able to put some of it away in a place that's untouchable for anything but health care. For those people who have to make decisions about fixing their car or taking their medicine, or buying clothes for their family when the season changes or kids grow up, HCA's are of little use, because they do not have the flexibility in their income to be able to (in reality) lose that money to other expenses.

Streamline the regulatory environments so that insurance can be bought across state lines.

This is perhaps the dumbest idea I've heard in the entire debate recently. Please point out to me a single industry or market where regulations were relaxed, markets were opened further to small groups of monopolistic companies, and the result is that the product got better? The HI industry is already ruled by 5-6 companies who oversee something like 90% of the entire insurance spending in this country, all D.B.A. various licensees of the BC/BS name or some such front. Removing interstate restrictions will do two things. First, all those subsidiaries may collapse back on WellPoint/Aetna, HCA, and such, so that we will see that it's just those 5-6 companies. Second, it will set up a race to the bottom, focused on the states with the least protective and cheapest coverage. Prime example? Delaware, with it's structure in place to the benefit of credit card companies. Just about every major credit company now resides in DE, because Delaware has made it nearly impossible for people to declare bankrupcy against companies.

There are already protections for pre-existing conditions

Only when applied to group policy coverage. There are no such provisions if you were to have gone and bought individual insurance coverage on the public market.

Yes, the US Government will spend $960,000,000,000 ($960B for the comma-deficient) to manage existing and new health care costs in the U.S.

The other option is that this bill does NOT pass, and we spend 1,090,000,000,000 ($1.09T) to provide exactly the same health care services we have now, to what ends up being a smaller population. (That's the cost you outline, plus the CBO's estimate of $130B savings over 10 years. That does not include the CBO's savings estimate of an additional $1.2T over the second 10).

Yes, they're big numbers. The question isn't if they're big, the question is which is more cost effective. Unless math has changed since I learned it, there is no argument to be presented that shows that providing health insurance for an additional ~32M people at $130B less money than would be spent anyway is not more cost effective than what we're doing now.