It's not a spin at all. In order for Microsoft to prove to governments that their software does what it's supposed to, they are willing to share the source, because that's the only way you can really trust software. It's not spin to say that you cannot truly trust software unless you can see the source (and understand it, and be able to build it, etc., etc.)

Microsoft isn't implying that. They trying to convince customers they don't have NSA backdoors. ... by opening the source to their products (to certain parties). In other words, you cannot trust software unless you can see the source. It's a pretty clear implication to me.

Yes. That is just such an appropriate thing to suggest to an Apple user.

"You know that company you use because you are a n00b or just lazy? You now need to become a network admin to deal with the stupid stuff they do."

Well, Microsoft users have been dealing with this for 25 years.

I'm sure you're right. Tailgaters too.

I've been doing C++ on and off for more than 20 years (mostly on) and just for that, I'm going to have to friend you.

Wow, so one of their major goals is to release something people actually want to upgrade to.

Way to set your sights low, Microsoft.

Perhaps you should admit that Metro was nothing other than your executives suffering from collective lust explosion over Apple taking 30% off the top of every app sale and hoping that MS could force Windows users into the same situation.

We have all that, but not the automated tests for the stuff I'm involved with (other departments probably do). It's something my manager has been making a push for in the past few months (and I'm totally on board with), but it's going to take a lot of time because of the sheer amount of legacy code.

Then there are all the incentives to make traffic worse... stop light cameras that generate revenue but don't increase safety because the yellows are too short. Or the urban legend that shopkeepers push to get lights timed so more cars are stopped out in front of their shops, an idea that's believable, although I don't know if it's true. Then of course, there are bad driving habits, and the fact that one tailgater or one slowpoke can cause major cascades that lead to huge backups (and I'm not talking about accidents).

I'm a developer. Honestly, I've never worked anywhere that did much in the way of automated testing. It's something that's always bugged me and something I've always pushed for.

As a former violist, I heartily endorse your comment.

Heh. I'm tempted to say that with C++ you can get a huge unreadable mess of error messages, but with Java, the huge unreadable mess you get is the code, but that's not fair to the language.

I've been doing C++ on and off (mostly on) for 20 years. I'm on the fence about whether or not it's great. I definitely like it, and I think the right subset of C++ is great, but the right subset changes over time (e.g., you couldn't have paid me to use templates and STL 12 years ago), but now I couldn't live without them, and it definitely changes for different people.

In fact, it really is the language's problem. C++ in its entirety is just too complex, and therefore, depending on the code, it can be way too hard to deal with. Of course, Java is a much simpler language and you can hardly do a Google search without seeing someone complain about how so much Java code is like dealing with the Soviet bureaucracy (an accurate description in my experience). I guess C++ makes good developers better and bad developers worse... and that is because of the language.

My language of choice these days would be Python and if I do anything for fun, it's with Python. I think Python is a far more elegant language, as well as simpler than C++, but doesn't lack the ability to be really expressive, usually with much less code. There are obviously issues with Python, too, it's not my intention to start a flame war, but as much as I like C++, I think a lot of its problems _are_ the fault of the language.

> Misplace a semicolon in a non-trivial meta-program or dsl in C++

Well, I see one obvious problem here...

Programming is math, I agree. But doing anything productive with code someone else has written is most definitely an art.

Science, industry - or is it really an art?

I've been doing it for more than 25 years... I consider it a vice.