Haskell is on on my list of things to check out. There's a nifty "easy to swallow intro" at: http://learnyouahaskell.com
and I'm hoping to get over a previous slightly abusive exposure I got to it in college. Being young and foolish,
I didn't like the instructor and transfered my dislike onto the language:)

<quote><p>
Programming, I've been doing this for living for two decades, but I have no clue what those things are. Well, except for Rails I did read a bit about.
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Probably all for the best, I'd guess.</p></quote>

Seriously?!?! Two decades and you've never looked at LISP?!?! I've only got a mere 1.2 decades and I've been in the mode of learning like
a son-of-a-bitch on all this stuff after slacking for most of the easy-peasy dot-com boom. Showing up and only learning what you need
for your job is not going to help you see a third decade. But hey, your career man...

O'Reilly might not want to bother...

Check it out: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/

.. and don't even get started on how bad my pictograms are...

As in, if you smash the device into an iPhone, you can kill the iPhone and the device in question will keep working. Given what the G1 and Palm Pre have turned out to be, this is the only true valid definition of the term "iPhone killer" in the market today;)

A number of weak typing language zealots like to point out that Design patterns is simply a way to make strongly typed languages "suck less".
This can be a compelling argument in terms of simplicity and syntax in examples when you take a look at books like "Design Patterns in Ruby" compared with "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". There's also an argument that strong typing is a form of tight coupling and antithetical to half of the Object Oriented axiom, "loose coupling, strong cohesion". Given the momentum in popularity that unit testing across multiple languages and development methodologies has (rightfully!) enjoyed, is it time to encourage language designers and programmers to move away from strong typing usage and substitute better testing practices?

You must have attended a private or EXTREMELY large school. Most US schools are nowhere near the described Netherlands system. At best, you've got three tracks - "honors" which targets the cookie-cutter wrote memory college tracked kids, standard for those who aren't fighting or don't care about math scores WRT university applications, and "essentials" for poor suffering masses who are not picking up or don't care to do the work. This is the situation in Washington State, Kent School district which is the 4th largest district in a High School with over 2600 students. Even this delineation of "skill" is still cranked through the un-inspired compulsory process Lockhart complains about. If you want to know why, check out John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education" (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/).

Saying knowledge comes from a schooling about as correct as saying milk comes from a store. When you understand in both cases it's just simple packaging and processing, you can start asking questions about what it is, why it is, and how you can get it on your own, and how to evaluate the quality of the sources you get it from.

Microsoft still hasn't removed FTP. That's how I did my last install of Firefox on a system with XP re-installed because
I refused to run that IE garbageware for any reason if I can help it.

Check out How to Be Silicon valley (http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html).

Based on the description of the right environment, we're not talking Kalamazoo or Toledo by
a long shot. Besides, didn't people try this crap en-mass before the dot.com bust?

In all seriousness, any process that is so well understood with an unchanging problem domain should be shoved overseas to keep the outsource companies busy and a high turnover of limited skilled coders believing that all software development is mind-numbingly dull:) __PLEASE__ keep doing this!!! That means when the hot-shot business idiot realizes he missed the call, that the problem domain isn't that easy he'll either get the axe or quit and do the same stupid thing somewhere else. Meanwhile, the time and distance, cultural communication problems and the BLATANT conflict of interest between customer and outsource company (e.g. "Oh yes! we will do that feature right away!" - wow.. that's a horrible idea:) these guys will pay us to re-write it because they're idiots! Whoo-hoo!) will make the solution that's no longer working easy to throw away and re-start with a minimum 50-50 local/offshore team. More job opportunities for people who stick around because outsource partners can't be trusted.

If the project can be speced and doesn't fail and doesn't need to change, great! That means it was a crap problem domain with nothing interesting to work through or solve - let the offshore company developers' eyes bleed with stupid feature changes for the next n years. If it does, it's job security for those of us who have stuck through this outsource stupidity (which is only a short-sighted cost savings move - the IT world equivalent of sinking all your money into credit default swaps).

For the past decade, 100% "cheap" outsourcing has gotten more and more expensive and has proved to be a bad idea for fast moving, competitive, REVENUE GENERATING projects. Failures have lead people to keep some level of local skills to address communication and quality aspects that are vital to success. But here's the fun part: how do you become a competent Senior Software Engineer when increasingly all the entry level positions are available in India and China? You don't:) That means I become a rare commodity as corporate America digs it's own human resource grave.

Keep digging corporate America... keep digging...

I don't care if this is personal time and you're gripping from the hotel WiFi. That contract brings in a ton of money and we in middle management will keep blaming techies and throwing them under the bus to cover our incompetence. Now get back to work! I've got hookers and blow to attend to:)

Sincerely,
--Your boss' boss

The key term here is "web apps". I recognize the MVC pattern has been around for quite some time. It's a question of when they bothered to bless something in web application stack. Also, given the nature of MVP (model-view-presenter) example you cite (User Interface Process Application Block) relying on small state interaction it seems like a complete and total mis-application of the pattern to the domain of web applications. Unfortunatly, I should know: I've worked on a code base that used a home grown MVP framework in Java. It sucked. I hope for the sake of those poor ASP developers they're not touting MVP on the web as a reasonable way to build applications....

Yes I have. And dear dog, do I wish I were lucky enough to have used it professionally. Although it looks like Seaside has been around longer than that the web site says:

So out of sheer luck in speaking in broad generalisims, I'll stick with my 2004 number:)

Glad to see Microshaft is on the cutting edge of software development practices as usual...