Comment Chicken chicken chicken, chicken! (Score 1) 137
Thank you for that! I haven't laughed like this at an academic paper in, well, a really blooming long time.
And as a bonus, I've given the folks here at the coffee shop something to stare at.
Thank you for that! I haven't laughed like this at an academic paper in, well, a really blooming long time.
And as a bonus, I've given the folks here at the coffee shop something to stare at.
The example above illustrates that; it is way more conventient to combine pathnames with such a non-portable string concatenation than it is with the right approach.
To me the correct, portable code looks easier to read and write. You don't have to check if directoryname already has a trailing seperator, for example. The Path APIs will also handle
In practice there are only a handful of things you need to know to write portable code in
It really does not make any sense.
I totally agree. I've conducted dozens of interviews for software engineers. I couldn't hire a black developer if my life depended on it -- I've never had a black candidate. I know the recruiters aren't to blame -- they're desperate for qualified candidates. There were no black people in my university classes either. The dearth of women in IT gets plenty of headlines, but I've known lots of women programmers, including 3 bosses over the years. In my entire career, I've only ever known one black programmer.
It must start long before high school.
Employer's have no incentive to care whether or not their employees are bored
That is just categorically wrong, in any industry. It's laughable in the software industry where getting and keeping employees is one of the biggest challenges.
You obviously don't work in the software industry. Employers not only tolerate all kinds of non productive things, they actively encourage them. Software engineers are treated like spoiled, geeky royalty.
The moment you, as an employee, start arguing that you should invest the employer's time in something that is less profitable but more interesting, you will be replaced.
OK, now I know you don't work in software engineering. Or any engineering. Trying to convince our employer to do things that are less profitable but more interesting is what we do.
C is not going anywhere any time soon.
I think it's a myth that people aren't learning C. I interview a lot of devs, many just out of college. Most of them know C/C++. They may be more comfortable with Java/C#/whatever, but they at least know C++ syntax and understand the memory model, etc. It would make no sense for universities to ignore C/C++, if for no other reason than the huge amount of code out there in those languages that you may need to understand. Kids in CS these days are still writing their own compilers, toy OSs and memory managers.
High level languages are more productive, no doubt about that, so it makes sense to learn them. But lower level knowledge is not made obsolete. You're still better off knowing C/C++ and some machine-level things, at least enough to read the code, understand a stack trace, memory dump, single step through compiled code, etc. So learning the high level tools is in addition to the traditional tools, not instead of them.
Anyone who thinks that programming is getting easier due to automation isn't a programmer.
I'll second that. I've been coding professionally for almost 20 years. Even done some assembly. Yes the tools are much better and more is automated, but the amount you need to know is only growing, and the expectations have never been higher. I don't think the automation is even keeping up actually. Making software is not getting easier.
our brains are not "like computers" in how they work
True enough, but that says nothing about what kinds of processing can be realized in either. There are so many layers of abstraction between the brain and the mind that it doesn't make sense to say that minds are made of neurons. Minds are made of abstract things which are made of abstract things, (which are... etc, etc), which are eventually made of neurons. But they could eventually be made of transistors, what does it matter how the bottom few layers work?
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan