I used to think all programming languages were more or less the same, and this opinion was based on having programmed in a variety of languages, and noted how easy it was to understand the gist of a new language pretty much immediately upon seeing it, and coming to understand any nuances involved without too much further study.

Then I ran up against OCaml. And I was humbled. I didn't really realize that there could ever be a computer language as hard to approach as learning a new spoken language, but OCaml showed me the error of my preconceptions.

My favorite moment was when trying to read and understand some gnarly OCaml code (is there *any* OCaml that isn't gnarly to some degree?) and asking on an IRC channel how I would go about figuring out what the "types" were of variables I was seeing as inputs to procedures and used as local variables within procedures. I was surprised by the answer: you can't. It was recommended that I install an OCaml IDE environment and then have the IDE tell me the types. Why? Because it is more or less impossible to know, from inspection, what the type of anything is. I guess the concept of 'type' is a little to gauche for the OCaml crowd.

I never thought I'd run into a language where, in order to read and understand the code, you literally have to *implement a virtual machine in your head and run the code*, but then I ran across OCaml.

I wonder what the brain of someone reading OCaml code would look like under an MRI ...

Oh and to your point ... I don't know where you work, but I think your view is a reflection of your particular experience and not necessarily true across the software development profession. I've been in the industry nearly as long as you have and I haven't noticed any correlation between fluency in multiple spoken languages and programming skill.

When I first came out of college and was young and naive, I thought a great software developer was someone who was really smart, really able to solve complex algorithmic problems. But years in the industry have proven to me that while such talents are important, and people like that are needed, those talents are vastly overshadowed by the more important skill of being able to coordinate with other developers, and to manage detail. The hard part of software development is not on the scale of problems that a single developer faces in daily coding tasks; the hard part is taking 100 developers and figuring out how to produce software that is even 50x as large or complex as that which would normally be written by a single programmer.

A single developer will never be able to compete with an entire software development company in building large or complex software. Competitiveness between large groups of developers is where it's at, and the skills and experience needed for that is an entirely different thing than individual programming genius.

Too true. Although, honestly, in most cases the criticism is justified.

Of course when you go back and look at your own code a few years later and think the same thing ... then you have problems!

I am a programmer and have a degree in Math/Computer Science, but I always scored better on language related aptitude tests than math ... did significantly better on my SAT and ACT tests (in 1989! I'm sure they've changed alot since then!) in language related areas than I ever did in math. Luckily I still got into a good computer science school, got my degree, and have had a pretty good career in software development. I never realized that my skew towards language skill may actually have been a boon for my career choice instead of the disadvantage that I thought it was ...

What about games where the player is stationary? Like sitting in a base shooting down aliens come at you from all directions. I admit that it's a much more limited subset of gaming than most people are looking for, but I am curious to know if such a game would alleviate the nausea problem.

I am one of those people who can't read while riding in a car, I get nauseous, so I am very pessimistic about my ability to enjoy a VR headset.

There is a pompus ass here, but I'm pretty sure it's not the O.P. And I don't think it's me either ...

Understood, and of course people have a right to make money however they see fit.

Won't stop me from trying to plant the seeds of thought though. I'd be happier if there were fewer people operating from greed and more people trying to enrich themselves and their surrounding in more creative ways, so I don't mind trying to make the point and see if it resonates.

Why not go do something useful with your time, try to make money by creating actual value in the world, rather than surrounding yourself with get-rich-quick schemers, scammers, and thieves in the bitcoin world, hoping to score big?

I personally have tried a Mac. After 18 years of nearly Linux-exclusive computing, in 2012 I was wooed enough by the new retina Macbooks and tired enough of dealing with Linux suspend/resume/hibernate nightmares on laptops, that I decided to give a Mac a try.

Long story short: I like it, and nearly love it, but am disappointed in many aspects. The hardware is definitely a high point - I can honestly say that I have never owned another laptop with even close to the same quality of hardware design or manufacture as my 15 inch rMBP. And I say that despite having to return it to the store once to fix the image retention (at the same time getting a mainboard upgrade to fix the video flickering problem that was common on this laptop), again to fix the wireless that they somehow broke during the first fix, and finding that about 6 months later I killed 4 or 5 pixels on my own when a small grain of sand got onto the display and I closed it (the retina displays have literally *no* protection of the LCD surface and it is easy to pit/scratch them - my fault for taking the laptop on vacation I guess).

Mac OS X has impressed me with how well it integrates with its hardware, how nicely and seamlessly the UI functions, and how good the video drivers are. Also Apple's Objective C implementation and libraries are an interesting mix of weirdness and awesomeness, with the very best documentation I have ever read for any programming environment hands down (Microsoft's widows documentation is a complete and utter joke when compared to Linux man pages, let alone compared to the incredible documentation that Apple has for its APIs).

However - the Mac is still a let down in some areas. Printing is surprisingly difficult and bad. I am amazed that a company that created the desktop publishing market and that sold the first Laser printer, can have such an awful print dialog. It's inconsistent between apps and doesn't let me WYSIWYG the printouts whatsoever (I print alot of coloring pages for my kids and it's amazingly hard on the Mac, no matter what program I use, to get an image centered and fit to a page for printing). Also, some of the UI misbehaves sometimes - I've taken to completely disabling the wireless status icon in the menu bar because it tends to freeze up the entire menu bar functionality whenever it's searching for networks or otherwise unhappy. Which happens just about every time the laptop comes back from sleep.

Also I cannot stand the fact that Apple cannot give the user the choice of whether or not click-to-focus or focus-follows-mouse. Oh my god the number of times that I have been unable to interact with a program while looking at a web browser or somesuch because they overlap and I have to fidget and fuss with window positioning and size to be able to do my work. On any other system without this ridiculous flaw, I can type into my emacs buffer while observing some web page with documentation partially on top of some part of the emacs windows. But on Mac OS X I often just have to give up and copy-paste into a text edit window, save that to a file, and then open that within emacs because I just cannot manage to get the stupid windows to overlap in a way that lets me get what I need to do, done.

I think if Apple would not be such fascists about some UI policy, the Mac OS X experience would be alot better.

But overall, I'm like 90% happy with Mac OS X. Definitely beats the living hell out of Windows.

It's not the dropping into a recovery shell that is the problem; that is something that I would expect to happen (and always happened under init, as well).

It's the fact that the systemd recovery shell is nonfunctional. It doesn't accept keyboard input. I had this happen under Arch Linux, then switched to Fedora, and had the same thing happen. And thus concluded that it's endemic to systemd since it's hard to believe that both Arch Linux and Fedora independently managed to screw up systemd's recovery shell in their patches to or configurations of systemd.

When I lived in New Zealand I found their approach most sensible. Cash payments are always rounded to the nearest 10 cents.

Of course, they don't have dollar bills, only dollar coins (and two dollar coins), which is ridiculously annoying - you end up with a pocketful of heavy, clunky coins when bills would have been easier to deal with.

Not sure whether this supports your argument or refutes it; mostly I think it's just anecdotal evidence that doesn't really say anything either way.

However, just for fun, I grabbed every penny I could easily find in the house and counted those older than 1982.

Result:
Pre-1982: 17
Post-1981: 110
Undentifiable: 1 (had been flattened by one of those flatten-a-penny amusement machines with a Sydney Opera House scene)

It didn't take long before I learned to identify the pre-1982 pennies pretty much on sight (although I double-checked the date on all pennies, I didn't rely on visual inspection of the appearance). The copper ones were all uniformly brown, in a way that was distinctive even from the few post-1981 pennies that were browned (most post-1981 were still shiny to varying degrees).

This is good because it will get systemd onto even more systems, which will hopefully be a forcing function for improving it so that it's more usable.

The introduction of systemd into my distros of choice (I was a heavy Arch Linux user until this year, when I switched back to Fedora after a ~8 year absence) has caused me more problems that any other single change to any part of the Linux operating system in my history of its usage (and I've been using Linux since 1994).

I'm at the point in my life where I just want things to work; and I found that systemd has in many places not worked well. I wholly believe that the problems are generally due to the implementation of the individual services, and not bugs in systemd itself, although I suspect that the 90 degree turn taken by systemd and its associated complexity are the genesis of the problems in the individual services themselves.

In particular, I've found that systemd on Fedora cannot properly start up an NFS server. I have a post-start up script that I run manually to start NFS because no matter what I do, it does not seem possible to force systemd to start all of the requisite NFS services. systemds tools for figuring out what could be going wrong are, I am sure, complete, but very impenetrable to a person who wants to understand the minimum necessary to fix a problem.

Additionally, it seems to be easy to break systemd's boot scripts in a way that prevent systemd from being able to boot the system (it's happened to me over and over again through what seemd like innocuous user actions), and I have never successfully gotten systemd to boot into its recovery shell. I can get to the recovery shell but I can never type anything into it, it seems like there's something borked with the way it handles keyboard input somehow.

In summary, systemd is much less mature than init ever was, which, combined with its tendency to reimplement everything and thus de-evolve much of what used-to-work into no-longer-works-easily, has resulted in whole system failures at a rate that I have never, ever experienced before under Linux.

All that being said, it's pretty clear that lots of Linux distro maintainers are more excited by the few advancements that systemd makes over the old init system, than they are put off by the lack of maturity and quality of systemd; therefore, systemd is an inevitability, and I'm glad that debian is taking it now, because it will mean even more developer effort towards fixing its problems.

In short: more pain for other people, making them more likely to fix my problems for me. So I'm happy that debian is doing this to their users, for my benefit.

"Low 6 digit number". Cute :)

markey -> market. Obviously.

I work in Silicon Valley, probably the ideal markey for electric cars, so of course this will not be representative of all places at all times.

But the long row of Nissan Leafs at my work every day shows that lots of people find them worth the money. I've ridden in one many times as one guy who tends to drive to lunch drives one, and it seems like a fine car to me.

Our company provides free chargers which must provide much of the appeal, along with the car pool stickers. Still seems like a fine car if your daily commute is short enough, which I believe for the vast majority of people, it is.

I also test drove a Model S at the Tesla factory a couple of months back, and it was fine too. I'm not a huge car person but it seemed like a nice enough car. The smugness of the test drive attendant was a little hard to take, though. But nothing against the car. I also took a guide tour of the factory, it's not exactly what I expected, but the only other car factory I've ever been in is a Mazda factory in Japan. Those guys really have their sh** together, the Tesla plant seemed quite a bit less well organized in comparison, but whatever; the Tesla technology and design is more impressive than anything.