You know that "You wouldn't download a car" adage? Well, Jesus would and could.

He distributed illegal copies of bread and fish (see, no theft, just copying) depriving fishermen and bakers of their profits and circumvented DRM to upgrade water to wine bypassing the winery and proper grapes fermentation process.

Yes, because "Bah, say when" isn't coordination. Just make them tell you when's re-foobarization scheduled and then say "Great, 7-9AM is free, keep it so, and we'll roll in updates." and write it all down for both sides' future reference.

There are purely technical jobs in IT, but majority is still about working with people. Communication skills is a must. Consider yourself extended man-machine interface, because that's what we are, essentially.

Yes, having someone who can properly rephrase "We didn't finish re-foobarization process because IT does updates" to "This process takes N hours and costs X dollars. If it's interrupted, it has to be restarted, taking N hours and X dollars again. In this month we lost X*42 dollars due to untimely forced reboots. We need IT department to work with us on coordinating this issue" is the value of good management.

People higher up are usually quite good at understanding numbers, as in "losses of X dollars" and "N hours of lost productivity".

Who do you mean by "Call IT"? Calling low-level IT drones won't help you much, they just implement policies - if they're worth their pay, though, they should point towards people who write policies.

If it keeps happening, then you're calling wrong people. Usually, just showing the losses to someone up the chain would be enough for IT management to get instructed (hard and without lube) not to do it again and "Don't touch this system without go-ahead from Anonymous Coward" in big red letters to appear in the policies.

And the reason is that they're targeted at absolute novices in programming and algorithms, as bubble sort, insertion sort and selection sort are simple iterative algorithms and easy to comperhend?

You can always hack together some abstraction, for example storing file index and files in WebSQL database - supported across all mobile and Webkit plus Opera on desktop. This'll let you use somewhere in tens of megabytes on iOS - it asks for permission after 5Mb.

Usually, you're one import('...') away from LINE, PLOT and CIRCLE likes.

Many are just packaged as "game engines". For example, Lua has LÃve - I think it's not much harder to save something like

function love.draw()
    for x=1, 255 do
        for y=1, 255 do
            love.graphics.setColor(x,y,0)
            love.graphics.line(x*2, y*2, x*2+1, y*2+1)
        end
    end
end

to main.lua and run it with "love ."

It's possible, just not on mobile. There's older FileReader API which lets you read files after user selects them through standard <input type="file"> field or drag-n-drops them onto browser window, and there's FileSystem API which lets you request a sandboxed piece of FS where you can do whatever you want.

Neither is available on iOS and only FileReader on Android.

Nope. Same fallacy as with COBOL, "It's just like English, must be easy, right?"

Writing actual code is 10% of programming, constructing algorithms and structures is 90.

Hate to break it to you, but it's not innovation, it's a new iteration of old idea at best. Graphical drag-n-drop IDEs count is in dozens, and they all do and will suck. Just because you didn't see any before doesn't mean it's something revolutionary.

All of them, except for those targeted at kids in elementary school, have the only redeeming quality - good old "code block" element, which - GASP - requires keyboard and typing code. Without it, they're even more of a head-ache than old 8-bit BASICs for anything outside of "Hello, world!"-ish range.

Your "revolution" was done so many times and in so many ways, and it always stumbles into the "make it simple enough for even fool to use and only fool would use it" problem.

Graphical programming scales incredibly bad - doing simple things is OK, but once you step away from trivial 5-10 line scripts it all devolves in colorful spaghetti.

You _might_ get it to in a very specific cases, like when "c = a + b" is a part of basic block where data-flow analysis tells you that a and b are absolutely guaranteed to be plain ints on input.

Even then you still get something like "unpack a and b from tagged value representation, check for overflow, just do asm("add a,b") if no overflow, add_and_promote_to_big_int(a,b) if overflowed, add type tag, store c".

In most cases though you get extra weight like 'look-up JIT cache for this combination of parameter types, jump there if i'm lucky, update counters and interpret it or JIT compile it if not" and so on, and so on, and so on.

You might get decent output in some cases, but in general optimizing dynamically typed languages is hard or sometimes just impossible.

You can, but you can't use it to run external code, just scripts packaged with the app or typed by user.

Nah, their engineers are great, it's just engineers make bad managers and marketers.

Nah, just poke around those sites and audiophile forums. There are lots of hilarious stuff, like "CD finalizer toolkit", which was a device you put your CDs in and it worked it over with special light to make pits more pronounced, which really brought out the nuances in sound.