Is it accurate, or more about the popular myths? Just the title seems to be building on the myth. People want to have some sort of science/tech god out there, and we first invented Edison as the god and didn't look closely at the reality, now the pendulum is swinging again and people want Tesla to be the god instead and also ignoring the reality.

"Advanced Placement". These are, I assume, equivalent to the older "honors" courses except that they prepare you for a test you can take to skip a first semester/quarter freshman class in college. In that sense of being an honors course, I don't see what the fuss is about. We didn't even have this stuff when I was in school, and we certainly don't ever hire anyone based upon whether or not they tested out of a course. I have however seen people from top high schools who had difficulty and shell shock at the university because they tested out of a class and skipped straight to a much more rigorous second class. Sure having a student in an honors class is not necessarily a bad thing, but no one should be shocked, alarmed, or even concerned that not enough students are taking them in CS (sheesh, if you were going to take one of these classes, take it in something important like math, not a wannabe thing like highschool level CS).

For an engineer or developer or programmer, I would think that a student who is efficient and organized would not be taking AP classes and instead conserving energy. There is no advantage in the long run and a hell of a lot of stress in the short term. Besides, getting a tiny number of college credits is pointless for math, science and engineering students who have more than enough credits to graduate.

I actually interviewed with him, and he seemed sane. I agree that really it could have been simplified; all rules are left justified with no leading whitespace and all command are intended with one or more whitespace. Works identically, is backwards compatible, and remains readable.

I don't use one. The one's I have to use for a particular purpose are just plain awful. They don't get along well unless the entire project (build, regression, etc) are along for the ride as well. When used in a group context they often screw up badly when used with a source code control system (ie, someone wants to check in a new file to the project and they end up checking in their personal preferences as well because the IDE didn't separate things into separate files).

Yes I'm sure there are better IDEs but I've yet to see them. (don't mention visual studio, I'm not on windows and it was indeed the one that screwed up the source control and I had to regularly fix up its project files using Emacs)

I also want to see an IDE that is not a single window MDI interface. I want multiple source code windows at once sitting side by side, not merely multiple tabs, and interspersed with windows for other tools. If the tool does some great refactoring then that's good but it all gets undone and wastes my time when it's a lousy editor.

The peace prize is not a life time achievement award. It is often an award for that particular year, as in who did the most in that year to stop wars or promote peace, etc. Thus they give the award for the peace process that occured rather than wait a decade to see if it actually holds over time. I think the committee was just genuinely glad that it looked like progress was being made and the two sides actually talked to each other.

Literature prize might be partially political too at times.

First language I used with whitespace for blocks (before Python was invented) had that problem also, and with the vi editor I used at the time I didn't know how to prevent it from automatically converting whitespace to tabs (yes, I never even typed in the tabs the editor just decided to be unhelpful). After some baffling debugging sessions I had to seek out a vi expert to figure out what settings to use.

8 characters for tab is the worldwide computing standard that was set in place before IDEs even existed. All the early terminals used this, all the early editors that did not allow adjusting them, and all the printers that would take straight up ascii. It wasn't even until people starting using other widths that rules of no-tabs starting being added.

The vast majority of coding styles I've seen in the wild will dicate that tabs never be used, ever, even in languages with delimiters, and even if some personal favorite IDE refuses to use spaces.

The major problem with using tabs and defining the indentation as however the user wants is that it does not translate to other programs and tools or users. For example, trying to print out something that looks nice in an IDE may end up with half the lines falling off the side of the paper.

Most of the people who argue against coding styles for projects or teams often fall back to the same idea that their personal editor is the best ever and can't everyone else just adapt to me instead of me adapting to you?

Coding style standards in the workplace. Use them. This is not just a problem with Python. I've seen this problem in C. Yes, in C you don't have to worry that indentation screws you up, but if every member of the team is allowed to use their own indentation styles then you end up with an unreadable mess. I've been there and seen it. If the coding style says "4 characters and no tabs" then you follow that style even if you hate it. It's more important that the team work together well than to satisfy personal egos.

As for whitespace, Python didn't invent this and is one a unique oddball, it just happens to be the most popular language that does this.

Actually I never even heard of 'duck typing' until a few years ago, and I've been programming for decades and have been in academia. If there's one thing to be said about computer science is that we invent new words for old ideas on a constant basis.

We did learn from BASIC in the 80s to never touch Visual Basic in the 90s.

Not requiring delcarations is one reason Python is a scripting language. It is indeed reasonable that a scripting language be allowed some shortcuts otherwise we may as well write those quick and dirty utilities in C++. Yes, this can cause bugs. But so what?

For indentation, I still get the impression that people think Python invented this or is the only language to do so. It's not like just one language designer got a stroke of insanity one day and decided upon this, there were quite a lot of people who thought such things were a reasonable idea.

The story is hyped up. If they win the lawsuit, the chimpanzee would not be "freed" and allowed to roam the streets, instead it will be held in captivity in a chimpanzee habitat/sanctuary.

How does this different from any other potentially dangerous disease, most of which kill many more people? Things like bird flu.