Wasn't that the other programming language whos users would look down on us Basic programmers? My good friend from school was one of those. Now he's a teacher and I'm a software developer.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

OK, jokes aside: Seriously, who cares how a PL is "rated" - whatever that's supposed to mean. How much it's used and how it gets the job done, or, more precisely, how much do I get paid for using it is what counts.
Example: I love Python. I'm measurably more productive in Python. But I do PHP at work. Why? Wordpress and Typo3 are built with PHP. Python only has Plone and that has almost no market here in Germany.

Its that simple.

And to be honest, there are many neat exotic programming languages out there - all of which I would love to have the time to look into, but don't. Pascal definitely isn't on that list.

My advice to anyone today would be to let go of Pascal and however it is "rated" and learn some other flash exotic language - perhaps one of those countless new ones that run on the Java VM (Scala, Closure, etc.), no?

My 2 cents.

Seriously guys, this is fucking outrageous! I' writing my first post on my brand new tablet just a minute ago and you're abysmaly flaky mobile version double posts again. So it wasn't android 3.2 after all.

And why can't I turnoff ads in the mobile version?

Rob, what's going on? .... You guys need to get your shit together man - it's 2015, mobile web is standard now. Get with the effing programm. ... Do you need help?n

Perhaps you need help? I'll build a professional mobile version for credit alone.

(Please don't mod down - this needs attention folks. Seriously.)

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux.
Really, it's that easy.

Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways than one, but it's worth a try - and it does look really cool. Seriously.
Suse and Redhat are hassle-free to install aswell. All three are definitly more hassle-free than any Windows installation you can do thesse days.

I've got Ubuntu 14.04 on my ThinkPad. And while it can be anoying (which OS isn't?), it is way ahead of Windows in usability and you can get tons of books and free info on the web for it.

Other than that I'd recommend Mac OS X or Chrome OS - but since you already have your laptop I guess that's ruled out.

Welcome to the camp. Enjoy.

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux. Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways the one, but it's worth a try. Suse and Redhat probably are hassle free aswell. All three are way easyer to install than a fresh Windows.

Video NLE on Linux or, more preciseley, in the FOSS department, is lacking. In recent years there are some tools that have become feasible - Pitivi comes to mind - but Video Editing has always been a high-end specialised market. Anybody doing video editing professionally has a full-time job already and no time to programm software on the side.

On top of that, there has been a huge consolidation in the Video NLE market, with vendors and products dropping left, right and center or simply entrenching themselves in their established niche of mostly gouvernment or conglomerate funded media - such as Avid or Media 100.

The climax of this development was Apple sewerely screwing up final cut pro as they switched to App Store versions only. Lots of much needed pro features broke or disappeared without a trace and the people moved to Adobe Premiere Pro in droves.

Then again, that premiere pro and final cut where the last big players in the field shows that there's been quite some cleaning out.

With 3D it's a little different in FOSS, because we have Blender. But let's not forget that Blender is a very fortunate exception. It has a little built-in NLE and a very neat compositor, but still is mainly a 3D toolkit. It used to be a commercial tool and we managed to buy it free for 100 000€, keeping the lead developer at the same time (Ton Roosendaal). Despite being in active development, Blender still has tough competition in the professional field, although they've been feeling the heat from Blender free offering vs. their 900$ - 6000$ range of products.

What we need in video is a programm like Fusion or Shake going full FOSS and the lead developers staying with the product, funded by a foundation or something. Or a crew like Pitivi actually getting through and sustaining with their crowd-funding model and adding in all the pro features people want.

Personally, I'm going to look into Pitivi this year to see if it holds up on simple to mid-range video tasks. They appear to be very ... avid (no pun intended) and active. Maybe it's even matured further. But I don't expect miracles. If you want to do non-trivial video work today, you need tools like Fusion, Avid and the likes - and those are all closed-source.

Android has matured and leads in apps. And it's freely available for a wide range of devices already. I don't see anybody coming close to the package Google can offer, tie-in services included. Apple sells hardware - their services are a loss. MS sells business software, subscriptions to MS Office, Consoles and now tablets. AFAICT they are behind in comodity computing now.

Google makes money selling *you*. They can give away all their stuff for free, including their services. As soon as one vendor has to pay extra to adapt Tizen, there will be a strong incentive to look into Android again. Or Chrome OS as the case may be. All Google needs to do is perhaps offer a few cheap-and-easy co-branding options for their OS.

Google wants to bring the second half of humanity online, along with any hardware vendor that cares to emphasise the bottom line.
I think they have a very good chance of succeeding.

My 2 cents.

Genau!

Genau! Achtung! Verboten! Halt! Gesundheit! Fahrvergnügen! ... Did I miss any cliche German words? :-)

What are *your* experiences.

Way better than yours in German. Promise. ;-)

An easyer solution and way more fun :-):
Hawk vs. Drone: 1 - 0

Apple still has one thing going for it: Predictable hardware. Even after 15 years or so of OS X, the range of devces is fairly overseeable. If a crew gets Linux to run on a mac, they've like also gotten the drivers and all the extras to run halfway properly.

But that's about the only reason to get a mac to run linux. Besides, I'd pick up this device these days. Awesome project - deserves every support they can get.

Bottom line:
You buy a mac for the awesome hard- and software integration and their sleek product design. Using a mac without its OS isn't that smart, IMHO.

I've read once that it takes roughly 8-10 steps for live to happen and evolve into intelligent life.

Language, abundant extra brain power and limbs that become free to use tools are among these steps.

The fact that we walk upright and have our front paws free, have a parallel and a sequential brain-half both working together and against one another (i.e. doulbe-checking each other), opposable thumbs and a super-flexible larynx are quite awesome and are the thing that give us the edge and let us win the cosmic lottery.

How awesome that is you best notice when you watch other animals. Apes, squirells, birds or some other vertebrae animal I find works best. Kea's and Crow's for instance, are amazing creatures. Incredibly smart up to the point of being a real nuiscance despite being under protection - have a Kiwi (New Zelander) tell you stories about Keas to see what I mean. Organised raids on food-storages with seperate groups doing decoy operations to distract humans at the same time and all. Crows and Keas have been observed vandalising for fun, independantly indulging in complex playing (sleigh-riding for instance - search on youtube) and are something like a mere two steps away from us when it comes to developing language and notable abstraction.

On the other hand its amazing to watch the same animals not being able to hold a memory for longer than a few moments - a power we humans posses. Along with the ability to sustain supression of instinct and affect for notable periods of time. Give a creature that, and it will automatically develop a complex language in its tribe, all else would be completely nonsensical.

Bottom line:
We got lucky but we are creatures of nature all the same, just like all the others. As a whole, we should act more accordingly - no matter how exactly our language evolved.

TFA is a bunch of blabbering from someone who has no idea what he's talking about - void of anything useful.

To get this out of the way:
Node.js is a serious contender to topple PHP off the server-side, for the simple fact that we would then have one PL less in the entire webstack, which is way to
complex anyway.

I myself have been pondering trying out Node for larger non-trivial projects. I'd be the first to switch if it were possible.
I haven't yet - Node is just not quite ready for prime-time.
Why?

1.) The tools don't exist yet and Node seems to gather the same problems Rails has: A bloated, instable and unreliable mumbo-jumbo of countless libs, tools and extensions - various package managers included, each built on a whim and powered by a neat logo and a 6-week fad that sweeps the community and adds to the mess already there. In short: The Rails problem of to much navel-gazing and not enough of solving real world problems.

2.) Callback hell.
In fact, its Node/JavaScripts callback hell that made me realise a thing that is so great about PHP: What you see is what has been made, for you, for that specific request. LAMP is such a bizar solution no one in his right mind would suspect it could work, yet most site on the internet run on it. The stack is so vertical it actually makes any Java solution look like an ADHD driven Visual Basic School projekt in comparsion. And I mean vertical right down to the way it actually works!

Try building anything like Joomla or Wordpress with other solutions such as JS and you'll end up with problems that completely leave the domain of your work. The simple fact that a PHP request is dead and gone when its finished sending its request reply and all the rest it offers is custom built around any strange problem the

Any concern you have right at the moment when developing for ther server side web PHP has neatly covered ... ok, forget I said neatly, ... but covered and everything else is put aside. PHP is born out of a template engine, and as bizar as it sounds, that's its advantage. Any problem the Web domain can come up with puts PHP in a very strong position. Serverside things PHP just shrugs of with some strange custom internal function has JS and Ruby tripping and falling flat on their face with no chance for rescue.

3.) PHP is 10 years ahead of the game. No joke.
Try finding a product like Typo3 or Wordpress in Java, Node, Rails or any other backend runtime you fancy. Won't happen. It take me 5 minutes to download Typo3, 2 hours to set up - mostly because configging Apache and setting up T3 is an arcane science unto itself - but then it's there. Everything I would ever want for a web product.
Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and co. are even way easyer. The only other contender holding up is Pythons Zope/Plone. All else is a decade behind at least. Rails included.

Bottom line:
As soon as Node gets their shit sorted out and offers a serious upside vis-a-vis LAMP, PHP is going to continue to rule. It gets the job done. Node and Rails don't. End of Story.

Is it not? ... I wish people - especially those with enough brain-power to put computers and networks to creative use - would use more precise and less inflative wording.

I'm beginning to think that Android has a real fragmentation problem. The recent things happening with Cyanogenmod alone make my head spin.

It would be best if Google focuses on offering a top-notch Android experience and - at the same time - alow for Geeks to fiddle with their devices, root them and such.

If Google implements a fixed release cylce and does end-user marketing whilst catering to the geek crows (opinion leaders) at the same time, then they can
leapfrog the vendors messing with their own versions of android and allow for more seamless updates. In fact, I think they should offer customisation services for every vendor who want's their own visuals in the launcher and specifically support vendors who stick as close as possible to the mint Android experience.

Whatever they do, they have to put some effort into curbing fragmentation, because that's the number 1 thing that bugs Androids attractiveness.

Likewise, if Apple sticks to they minimised choices and manageble line of systems and devices, they'll continue to have the edge in that department and maintain their market, no matter how powerful Google gets in the low- and midrange global markets.

My 2 cents.