Oh sure, there will be automation (which is why my comment went on to discuss scripts), but my point was that sometimes the thing you have to do requires a task to be done that's much better left to you than to the sysadmin. Additionally, another, implicit point was that requiring everything to pass through the sysadmin in every case hobbles the developer and bothers the sysadmin. I don't suppose you're saying that developers shouldn't automate repetitive tasks by themselves just because they might involve acquiring new binaries.

As part of a brief assignment I'm currently in a position where accidentally wiping out the database can happen daily. I can only do backups locally from the database/web server, its hard drive is very tight for space and there is a strict policy to not move the data to any other machine as they contain sensitive data, so I can't even move the backups to my own computer to swap space. The main production database *is* the development database, and the production web site *is* the development web site. It's so dysfunctional I only wish I was making this up.

I would love to have version control and a separate test database, but the policy prohibits this because it would give me too much power over my own surroundings and we can't have that. It is naturally completely possible technically since it's the way every other company does it. What's important to this company is locking everyone down and playing balance sheet politics, such that acquiring the software necessary, even if it's open source, requires a purchase from an installation service and impacts the bottom line.

I am a contractor on this assignment and it's the worst thing I've ever seen personally, although anecdotes on stack overflow and some The Daily WTF articles informs me that there's still a way to go until the bottom of the barrel. I should have asked five more questions during the interview and told them I wouldn't be taking it because I couldn't guarantee the level and pace of my work in such a constrained environment.

This sure as hell has to do with seeing IT as a cost rather than a valuable resource (this company is probably among the top 500 biggest in all of Europe), but in this case the attitude of the IT department isn't helping. The sad thing is that being such a large company, they're still probably serving 99.9%+ well, and whoever takes over after me will be another one in a relay race of the mysteriously disappointing consultants and the system will never actually improve.

It's possible that this has happened to you. My own anecdotal evidence says that it has never happened to me or the people I've worked with. I'm sure there are some dolts that are willing to point the finger at the IT department and disassociate themselves from their own responsibilities at the earliest convenience, but it may be the case that they are not widespread.

And what if your job is compatibility testing; making sure something works across a "zoo" of different environments? Having a "competent sysadmin" do something is well and good when it needs to work reliably in the same way for a number of people and be included in some sort of guarantee. The trick to IT management is to recognize which battles to fight.

Let's say only you required those things. The best thing would probably be for you to be given appropriate rein and to build it yourself. Being a developer doesn't lead you to be a security expert, but it means that you are probably more likely to bump into the limitations put in place to keep most people secure, and you shouldn't be constrained from doing your job.

Let's say five people required those things. Someone of the five could probably work out a way that would work, but that script or workflow doesn't have to be authored by the IT department because it's not the job of the IT department to write every scheduled task but to maintain the basic upkeep of the system and the environment. They shouldn't do it by default for the same reason that they don't write Excel templates for the accountants. On the other hand, depending on what kind of restrictions are in place, maybe the IT department and the developers will need to work something out to make sure they can run what they can run. It shouldn't be so tough to not trash the environment that the IT department is willing to support that only a sysadmin can deal with it at all.

Who said the Pirate Party held a green position? (And for that matter, who said greens were universally "against urbanism"?)

They're currently in the Green group in the European Parliament, because they presumably were most willing to agree to vote for the Pirate Party's positions on their core issues. In return, the Pirate Party votes for the green bloc's position in other places. That's how it usually works, except that when I voted for them I knew exactly which of their issues they'd be trading in (none) and what they'd vote for in return (according to their bloc for issues outside of their agenda; I would have preferred if they wouldn't have, regardless of bloc, but I'm happy to trade it for the leverage).

Now, now. I respect the right of anonymous people to be misinformed, even loudly. There's no need to call them names.

I have voted for them every chance I've gotten and I download everything I possibly can from iTunes, to the point of getting a US account. I also don't have a Spotify account since I don't like the pittance that the artists are awarded in contrast to what the labels themselves get for zero work. At least with radio, they send people out to bribe radio stations (which I'm against, but they *do* something). I can afford to, and am willing to, pay for music, movies, games and so on, and if that's what it was all about I wouldn't be writing this. I don't think that I'm a complete anomaly in the Pirate Party voter base. The current party leader is a publisher.

What voting for them is about for me is to put an end to compromising civil rights and democratic tradition in order for some industries to supposedly stay afloat. It's also about stopping communication surveillance that's almost completely useless and at any rate remarkably disproportionate and ineffective. (Search for "FRA law".) And, yes, as part of the party program is a plea to make sure that non-commercial file sharing is decriminalized because every possible (and quite a few impossible) obstructions are either contra-productive and/or violates basic laws or rights more severely that warranted. The whole green party bloc in the European Parliament has adopted Christian Engström's positions on this issue.

I suppose it's easy to just short-circuit to "I WANT FREE MP3S PLZ", but there really is more to it than that.

First: I said high-speed. Many thousands of times per second. It didn't have to do with 50 kHz on mains power, but of drawing in such small amounts so fast that not much power was lost and allowed to heat up. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply ) No one did it before for computers and everyone did it afterwards for computers. If that's not having an impact or blazing trails, I'm not sure what is.

Second: If you narrow your focus to only celebrate the first people to invent something fundamental regardless of its varying applications later on, your list of approved inventors will be very short and we will have stopped inventing for many years. The web and the Internet themselves won't have been new since their constituent technologies were mostly around before. Both C and UNIX were derivative; C from assembler and ALGOL and UNIX from Multics. All of them, despite maybe not adding many fundamental first-ever inventions themselves were big milestones because of their groundbreaking work establishing platforms and putting existing stuff together in a better way. Do you really want to stick to your earlier criteria and say "good lord, assembler syntaxes have been around since ages before C"?

Read the Steve Jobs biography and you'll see a few things that are direct results of Steve Jobs' ideas. The earliest example I can find is of his insistence on the fanless design of the Apple II which lead Rod Holt to create the first high-frequency switching AC power supply, but there are others.

I'm not defending the outpouring of support for Jobs as proportionate, but I think it's interesting that a guy who could turn around an industry from creating products that appeal to people like you to creating products that apparently lead people to have deep emotional connections to those products, the company that makes them and the guy who made the company, is not regarded as having had made a contribution to that industry.

I think the world of both Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs for very different reasons, but they both made history by building on the past. If Braun design is shamelessly recycled, how come you don't say Multics was shamelessly recycled?

GLaDOS.

Sure, but I meant the compiler when I said that, which I thought was clear from the third paragraph.

The Mono C# compiler can't do all this stuff, and that's completely fine because it's almost impossible to do by accident. I don't fault them for not having done it by accident. If anything, they should be commended for being able to whip up the REPL so easily; that shows commitment to solid design principles.

But that also means that just staying where they are thinking that they have parity, or someone proposing that they should do that, is unfortunate. They demonstrably don't "do this already" and they shouldn't settle for what they've got.

Really? I like the REPL, but I wasn't aware that they had fixed the entanglement issues.

Thanks to Roslyn being designed explicitly for these kinds of scenarios, it can give you helpful information from nearly every stage of the compilation progress. You can get syntax trees! Not only that, you can feed it an invalid program and you'll get back a syntax tree that says that it's invalid, but knows when it stopped parsing, what kind of token it expected and can be stringified to the exact text you fed it. You can do flow analysis. There's a solidified model for how C# works in a REPL or scripting environment outside of everything-is-in-a-class mode, which admittedly it was never up to Mono to define.

csharp-repl is a very good REPL and the mcs family (which now seems to be merging into a single compiler) are very good compilers with source readily available, but I think it takes something that's designed from the start for reusability and being a library as much as a tool to get you these things.

The "dynamic code execution" just builds on top of support that's already there. You could build a string of a C# program, feed it to a compiler and run it dynamically previously as well. This just makes the compilation part less of a headache.

Rigging GCC (other comments have already brought up clang) would maybe be more dangerous because arbitrary C code could do anything. Arbitrary IL code can be hamstrung by some security layers. Of course, the differences between managed and native code pale in comparison to what permissions they are executing with, the robustness of any jailing or sandboxing that might be in place and so on.

If you worry that people can compile programs into executable code, you're not worrying about the right thing. You could write a C compiler in JavaScript or QBASIC. You should be worrying about what happens when that code executes.

That was the announcement of the release. This was the actual release.

I'm not about to debate anyone on the Visual Studio segmented pricing, but Anders Hejlsberg has gone on record saying he'd like for Roslyn to be open source, by which he likely means Ms-PL. If they do that, they could indeed close it later, at the cost of an enormous shitstorm. (When Microsoft has stopped providing open source before, they've stopped developing the software (see: Rotor). This is the new version of the C# compiler and its IDE integration so that's not going to happen.)

There are already APIs to emit IL or to invoke a C# compiler built into .NET and the security systems built into .NET give you a way to prohibit them. There's no additional risk exposed by Roslyn. Rather, it's a way of getting at the juicy knowledge about the code that the compiler builds up before it exits and that libraries have been written to poorly piece together. That's a good idea that I'd like to see accompany more official language compilers, static or not.