Yes, but CNN did it in the summer! With the car on a U-Haul! Downhill!

I understand you need the right arm for something else...

Initial poster was rightly noting that the program is not about technical stuff but about pushing papers. Your worrying about the perception of managers and the desire of readjusting poster's perspective misses the point badly. "Tweaking the outputs"??? You're picking on the style of delivery instead of thinking of the problem. The problem, let me remind you, is the lack of STEM education. The program doesn't come with a solution, but perpetuates the problem. Maybe this clarifies a little...

meh, not sure about that. You keep forgetting that you don't have to write the whole program in Java, use the JNI and you could implement the parts that really need to be fast in C/C++... Java has some obvious advantages when it comes to portability, out-of-the-box supported libs, database connectivity, even some GUI, which might leave impression that it should be used everywhere. As you pointed out, it doesn't have to, but also the reciprocal is true, one shouldn't dismiss it just because it doesn't do well or fast enough certain operations.

I'll try to be as unbiased and fair as I can.

First, I would not take someone with no experience in programming into any of my projects. I expect the projects I'm working on to be, at every level, as thorough as they can be, and this will not happen with a completely inexperienced person. IF I would decide that there is a small part completely isolated and replaceable (and re-writable by an experienced person in a couple of hours), which would not effect the performance and security of the product, then MAYBE. But, in general, would be a no.

Second, the fact that you assume that's the language that counts makes me see how inexperienced you are. Is not enough to know programming languages, one should know basics about how a computer works (some OS understanding), how certain networks or protocols work, what algorithms should be applied and when, basics about transactions, files operations and sharing, possibly databases, and frankly some parallelism and multi-threaded programming. I wouldn't be worried if one doesn't know that should use a "repeat/until" instead of a "for", but I'll be worried that a highly-used table in a database will be locked.

In conclusion, define a problem you'll personally like to solve (same way that youtube, facebook, twitter and myspace started), and bang in it until it starts looking like a "product". Consider it a serious project, think about source control, backups, test harness to check the performance and security, and it will give you enough insight to give you the experience you want... With a project done (or sufficiently advanced) at your belt, you should be a lot more marketable.

Good luck

appreciate your answer. Don't appreciate Slashdot posting a story two-three months after I propose it. Because, as you noticed, Viliv is already on sale at Dynamism and I ALREADY OWN ONE. Not going to give too many details, but the software keyboard is fairly obnoxious. Otherwise exactly I wanted...