If you have a weeks-running job and it isn't fault-tolerant, you're doing it wrong, period. As long as it's fault-tolerant, it isn't a big deal where it's run.
That said, if you have a job that takes days to run on a single computer, it'd be a good idea to either invest in a compute cluster or get some time on one.
Debugging has always been a problem. One of the other posts here suggested using CLANG because of it's better error reporting. Thats right now, after 25 years. Let's face it, C++ is legendary for the obscurity of it's compile and link time error reporting. Beyond that, it's not like the run time debugging environment is any better. All that it supports is the kind of break point debugging that was in C. No value added beyond K&R.
I started development in C++, but have since done quite a bit of development in Java, JavaScript, Go, and Python. I've really come to miss Clang's expressive compile errors, though there are other things about these languages that can be nice. Java is okay. JavaScript is abominable. Go is nearly as good as Java. Python is pretty terrible. As far as compile errors are concerned, anyway.
The other languages have other things that are good and bad, but C++, especially C++11 is great for just getting things to compile. One other cool thing about modern C++ is that it's easier than ever to force more and more errors to occur during compile time, instead of waiting for a runtime error to blow things up in production.
To make the most of C++ really requires good programming practices, though. For that I highly recommend Scott Meyers' "Effective C++" books.
There really isn't all that much difference, so that once you get comfortable with one you should be able to switch to the other without much difficulty if you need to. But I'd lean towards C++ because the tools are more mature.
Two other tips:
1. Use Clang (part of LLVM) as your compiler. The error messages are vastly easier to interpret, which should cut down on both learning and development time. Note that Clang supports both Objective C and C++.
2. If you do go for C++, make sure to start learning on C++11 or C++14. C++11 significantly changes quite a lot about the language, and if you start with older C++ books, you'll have to unlearn a lot of stuff if you want to develop modern C++. C++14 has mostly just minor fixes to C++11.
Yes, it is mostly for cable, but some locations only have one DSL provider. And yet many cities do have exclusive franchises for cable Internet.
You can quibble all you like about it being a "franchise agreement" rather than a mandated monopoly, but to the consumer they're exactly the same thing: there is only one choice of provider, and that restriction is maintained by the local government.
As for the local government being "stupid", that's up for debate. It could just as easily be that the local government is corrupt (which can be difficult to avoid given how much money the large cable companies have compared to the local governments), or that they've fallen for some bad ideology related to "natural monopolies". Either way, the cable companies are absolutely not innocent here.
This isn't accurate. Many municipalities do indeed have ISP monopolies which are mandated by the local government. Typically they require specific regulations (such as price controls) in exchange for the local government enforcing the monopoly.
Such government-mandated monopolies aren't ubiquitous, but neither are they terribly uncommon in the US. There's no such thing at the state or federal level, of course, but there is at the local level.
This doesn't mean that the $1.2 million that Soon received from the fossil-fuel industry had no impact on Soon's outlook.
It doesn't help that it is a ridiculously terrible paper. His argument boils down to: "Using a small, cherry-picked subset of the data that has known errors that we aren't going to correct for, we can see that incoming solar energy is correlated with temperature, and therefore CO2 doesn't cause climate change." This argument is equivalent to say that because sugar intake is correlated with weight, exercise has no impact on weight, in addition to the horrible treatment of the data.
Either Soon is utterly incompetent, or he's a cynical shill for the fossil fuel industry. I'm not sure which is worse.
There's no reason to believe that there is actually significantly more piracy of apps on Android. This is one story from a single developer using customer service complaints as an estimate. I have yet to see any real data that has investigated the relative piracy rates in detail.
I'm sure that there is some additional piracy on Android, because the ecosystem itself is far more attractive to hobbyists that would like to hack their devices. But there's no reason whatsoever to believe that this one developer's claim is representative, that a 95% piracy rate is anything close to the norm for Android. I'd be willing to bet that for most mobile developers, piracy is a non-issue, whether working on Android or iOS.
Clearly you didn't read my post, but it's just factually incorrect that public school (or private school) is uniformly horrible and soul-crushing. There are good and bad things about schools. And there are good and bad things about homeschooling.
Personally I just wish we would properly invest in our public school system so that there was no question of students doing better in school than at home. Homeschooling can be a reasonable personal decision for some people in situations where their schools are poor (and I would consider failure to deal with neurodiversity a sign of an extremely poor school). But as a society we should strive for an educational system where it isn't necessary, as well-trained professionals will always be able to do a better job at teaching than amateurs, given a sufficiently-supportive environment.
Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.
