I like what you did there. Person made a error but you didn't make him / her look like a fool. Wish I had mod points I could spend here.

Not always AC. Some people have actually read Dijkstra, consider him an extremely important contributor to computer science and yet have the capacity to not agree 100% with everything he said. Case in point, his comments about object oriented programming paint him as a man of his times:

"I don't think object-oriented programming is a structuring paradigm that meets my standards of elegance" (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1284.html)

Let's not forget that Dijkstra was primarily an academic. His search for purity is admirable, but if we all followed his criteria for elegant solutions we'd never get any work done.

Whatever the case, it's the 'X considered harmful' pattern that really diminishes his work. People thrash out blog posts along these lines - including the author of the original article - as if by association their work takes on more authority. The world doesn't need any more of these academic puff pieces.

I think we're in total agreement here. I did read the article - and others on the same site - and know only the quote was from Dijkstra. My beef is that adherents of Dijkstra's teachings tout this nonsense all the time, but I guess it's not surprising considering Dijkstra was primarily an academic (though a thoroughly brilliant one).

I was going to go off on a huge rant about this, but I think you've summed it up. Thanks.

You insensitive clod. I bought one of these recently, in an effort to reflow the solder on my failing Mac Book Pro. Now all I have is a dead laptop and a toaster that smells of Apple.

I think what this article highlights is that not everything Dijkstra said was gold. Nor does slavishly following his missives make you a better programmer.

Upvote. My kids (10 and 14) have managed to make amazing things in what to me looks like a complete toy. Plenty of books and articles, but best of all is the community around it - kids sharing and expanding each other ideas. Teaches the basics (variables, loops, etc) - but best of all lets them find success early.

I'd agree here. As someone who started his career in Smalltalk, and then had to give it up for the lack of programming jobs available (10 years of my life becoming an expert in Delphi I'll never get back) Ruby wasn't so much "cool" as "beautiful". It felt like a coming home - an expressive, easy to read language where the answer to "how do I do X?" is "What's the most obvious way." A language predicated on programmer joy is a pretty sweet thing.

I think the Ruby world can be divided into two camps. There's the "we are nice, because Matz is nice" crowd that were dominant in the early days. When I was a newb I found the community very helpful, very welcoming. Then we got the "DHH is a prick, so we are pricks" bunch. I don't think they were ever in the majority, but they were loud and obnoxious and fit the mould of "hipsters". I don't think this is particular to Ruby though. Every community has its wankers, every community has its good citizens.

I still love Ruby for what it is, and am thankful I've been able to carve out a reasonably well-paying career based on it.

Can we just for once stop using terms like "evolved" as if this thing has any kind of ability to mutate outside of the agency of people - intelligent designers if you will - actually making changes to the code.

Absolutely. And with the code sharing in Scratch 2.0 it also teaches concepts like community code, forking, etc.

Plus there are integrations with Arduino and the like for more comprehensive coding exercises.

More to the point, he *is* from the UK. He was born there, studied there and - though it's been quietly forgotten about - may not be entitled to hold office unless he has given up his dual citizenship.

Ah yes, the AI will probably go through its Nietzsche phase, around the time it starts listening to The Doors and wearing black t-shirts. And like the artificial intelligence of teenagers it will probably sort itself out in the end, but we'll have a rocky few years until it works out that a priori is not Latin for "what I know".

No.. it's "Lego bricks". Lego is the company, Lego bricks are the product. Lego themselves tried to clarify the situation, with a notice on their website (since removed):

But no-one thinks of the innocent contractors, caught in the crossfire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It looks like Epic isn't based on Vista as I assumed - but still uses the same M(UMPS) based technology. A comparison of the two systems can be found in a Healthcare IT News blog article.

Vista has an interesting history. Because it was built using US Federal Government money, the "Hard Hats" who worked on it originally successfully argued for the release of its source code into the public domain. It's essentially open source, paid by the public purse and - despite the M language - a successful example of where interoperability between healthcare IT systems can really work.

We've had decades of development in open standards. HL7 for all its ugliness is a great system and has really driven interoperability. For Epic to "go it alone" seems a real shame. And patently stupid - but then we've had similar stupid in my country (Australia).

MUMPS is pretty special. You can write clean code in it, but the language and culture around don't exactly lend itself to it. That example at DailyWTF is pretty typical of what you see in OpenVista based systems (which I assume Epic uses).