Maybe you missed this part of the heading (not even TFA):
"Nearly half of the software developers in the United States do not have a college degree."

That isn't just saying not a "computer science, engineering, math, or physics" degree, it's saying any college degree at all. So, presumably a lot more have college degrees with other majors.

So how exactly is almost half plus every programmer with a non-STEM degree "The Exception"? It seems to me the STEM majors are the exception.

Shoot Slashdot ate the greater than sign in my title. It was supposed to be "Is Coding > Computer Science? Of Course!"

Let me rephrase that question: "does knowing how to do a job outweigh knowing abstract theory about that job?" I think the answer there is pretty obvious: *of course* coders who actually know what they are doing are more valuable to an employer than some kid with a CS degree and no idea how to actually do a programmer's job.

Right, so you can interpret that as "Google's going to become America's ISP", or you can take it as "Google's going to try and poke/prod the industry to change by doing its little experiments in a select number of cities and demonstrating what's possible". Based on what they've said outside that quote it seems to me like the latter interpretation is correct.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes when people say something about someone else, it winds up revealing more about them than the person being talked about?

Here's what your post seems to reveal to me:

1) You think insulting (and not even cleverly at that) random people on the internet is a good use of your time
2) You think that there is no legitimate reason to support open source software, and therefore all support for it is "ass-kissing"
3) You think Slashdot posters are motivated to post what they write to try by "forum points", not their beliefs
4) You think that someone getting a flamebait vote is some kind of great kharmic vengence

I'd encourage you to challenge those assumptions; in my view none of them are true.

I'm not either, but that's hardly the point. Let's say something isn't documented properly and doesn't work the way I expect: just being able to read the source code can be extremely helpful.

But it goes even beyond that, because open source software naturally forms communities around it. Even if I were to never even look at a single line of the source, the fact that it's availble to others adds value for me. I can go download a patch someone else wrote that fixes a bug MS hasn't bothered to fix. I can ask someone who's read the code how it works on Stack Overflow. Or when someone uses that source as a basis for an entirely new and improved version, I can switch to that.

Ummmm ... it's closed source. I'm sure there are lots of other good reasons, but do you really need anything more than that?

Sure, because it's *so* easy to create a successful online bookseller. Gee, why didn't anyone think of that before? Those Japanese people must be idiots. Baka yaroo.

PyCharm (ie. IntelliJ), Chrome, a music program (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) a chat program (Pidgin, Hipchat, etc.), GIMP for image manipulation ...

I have no beef with the emacs/vi folks, but some of us think that development technology (like every other kind of technology) has advanced since the 80's, and we want an OS that looks like it's from this decade to run it on.

Right, but you're missing the point: why would you want to hassle with virtual machines just to support two distros, when you can share one distro between both and avoid the extra work?

Well, it's a good thing we all live in the world exactly as you see it, and not, you know, in reality.

Here's one example: how do you track packages? If every developer in your company is using apt (well, or brew for those Mac people, but let's ignore them because the server is NOT going to be a Mac), then it makes sense to compile a list of apt packages right? So then when you go to deploy the sysadmin just has to sudo apt-get those packages.

But if you're server runs Red Hat, somebody has to translate that list of apt packages to yum packages. Not a huge deal, but why would you want headaches like that, even if they are minor, when nothing prevents you from having the same distro on all machines involved?

Another thing to consider is debugging. As a developer, you want to debug on a system that's as close as possible to the machine where the bug occurred. Obviously it's easier to be sure that your environment is the same as your server's (and that you're seeing the same problem the server saw) if the two run the same distro.

From the summary:
"Ask her developers what they prefer, however, and it's Ubuntu"
"Given that developers are the new kingmakers"

The whole point was that developers influence the choice of distro on the server, based on their preference for a development distro. I'm not quite sure how you missed that.

Grrr, /. swallowed my angle bracket. That's supposed to be "Mint *hearts* their community", not "Mint 3s their community".

I think you're kind of missing the point. Developers don't think "hey, I know Ubuntu/Mint, and it works great for me, but yum just got a little bit friendlier? Forget everything I know, I'm installing Red Hat."

People change distributions with a purpose. For me personally the odyssey was:

Mandrake: because (I kid you not) it came on a CD in a Linux magazine
Gentoo: because of the performance gains
Mandrake: because (unlike Gentoo) you don't have to spend half your life compiling
Ubuntu: they did all the annoying stuff (eg. making Flash work) for me
Mint: Shuttleworth gave the middle finger to Ubuntu community vs. Mint 3s their community

The point is, no one is going back to Red Hat unless it offers something significant that their current distro doesn't (besides just yum). Making Red Hat one distro instead of two doesn't give me a reason to leave Mint. Making yum friendlier doesn't give me a reason either. At best changes like that might help stem the tide of departing Red Hat users ("why do I need Ubuntu, Red Hat finally got friendly") but if Red Hat ever wants to become a dominant distro again they have to offer a compelling reason to switch.