I agree that language comes down to preference and usually comfort level. Having +10 years experience with C++, C# and Python each, while roughly a year experience with Java & Ruby, my languages of choice, in order are: C++, Python, C#, Ruby, Java.

I particularly like C++ because of it's raw unabashed power. There's very little magic, and nearly every language construct is straight forward and easy to understand. Granted, there are a ton of subtle gotchas an nuances that will trip up the inexperienced and even the veterans. I like Python because the language itself is clean, succinct and terse (but not perl level terse). It also has the benefit of generally being easily readable by non-Python folks. I hear a lot of complaints about the whitespace, but when it comes down to it, it's a non-issue when you're used to it. If you indent your code well and normally in other languages, your code looks the same, but you've saved having to type the braces. One of the other things I like about Python is how well and cleanly it interfaces with C/C++. It's C object model is one of the cleanest and most straight forward I've ever seen. It is a breeze to interface with and expose C/C++ APIs to. Unlike perl with its abomination of a library: XS. I like C# for a lot of the same reasons: mostly clean language, expansive built-in library and removed a lot of the idiocy of Java (exception specs? ew. Double is an object, double is a value, wtf?

I have very little experience with Ruby, and I'm still learning. It seems a mix of Python & Perl which, I tend to stay towards the more Python-ic approaches in Ruby because they're clearer and make more sense to me.

As far as looking for a job, money isn't everything. A year ago, I left a job pulling in $155K base with bonuses around $40K per anum doing mostly C++ & Python, which I liked. But after a decade at the company, I'd enough of the stress and the B.S. politics, so I left for a job where I'm just pulling $145K base and little to no bonus doing mostly C#, Java, Ruby and maintaining legacy Python code. And, for now at least, I'm happier. Sure, I miss the money, but I still make enough.

Unfortunately, said small black holes often result in consuming the head attached to them, often resulting in what is colloquially referred to as rectal cranial inversion.

I think I'm allergic to Perl. Every time I see it, I have violent fits of sneezing.

Agree about the certifications. The only ones that aren't immediate red flags to me are government issued ones such as Professional Engineer (PE). The reason the government certs carry more weight is they also carry legally enforced responsibility, including, but not limited to, misrepresenting your abilities or competence in a given area or discipline. There are often legally enforceable ethical codes with the law typically deferring to the the discipline's governing body, for instance, for electrical engineers, the state of Illinois defers to IEEE for the ethics code (even better that the corrupt politicians don't attempt to come up with "ethics").

For the paid certs, it feels often as if the person took a crash course on $INSERT_VENDOR_HERE just long enough to pass a test, paid the money and got the cert. A cert doesn't make up for years of hands on experience. I know more about tuning SQL than most DBAs, but I'm not now, nor will I likely ever be certified by any vendor. People that can do. People that can't... get certified, or rather, plaster their certs all over their resume.

Enough said in the subject.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity. 10,000 hours of practice might be better thought of 10,000 hours of experimentation. Each repetition, you try something. If that doesn't work, you vary something slightly, repeat and observe the outcome. You then take that result and make another change, and repeat the whole process. If you just dedicated 10,000 hours doing the exact same thing, the exact same way, you're insane to expect anything other than the exact same result. Athletes don't spend 10,000 hours throwing a pass the same way, taking a shot the same way or swining a bat the same way. They make adjustments based upon (usually) microexperiments. There might be film involved or coaching (for the elite, there is definitely at least those 2 things).

Point is, there is far more to the superficial "10,000 hours will make you an expert" than pure repetition.

For an athlete, once the "ideal" motion has been identified, there is value in repetition insofar as to commit that motion to muscle memory, instinct and passive response instead of actively having to "tell" your body to do some specific set of motions.

Loss to infrastructure? Why did the US interstate highway system get built? It was a direct result of the US Army's difficulty in moving troops and equipment cross country. There are also requirements that every so often they roads remain straight long enough to be used emergency runways. I don't buy loss to progress, either. A lot of technological progress has been pioneered through military research. That I'm able to even post this comment right now was a result of DARPA funded work.

Yeah, and she's not biodegradable...

It's not a monopoly. It's just no one wants to learn reverse polish notation to use an HP calculator.

Naw, we just need to teach them to be vegetarians! Reminds me of this Futurama clip.

I've done 2 non-trivial C++11 projects. While I also like the new shiny, there are some new gotchas in there. One is the implicit capturing of "this" in a lambda. Not a big deal if your lambda doesn't outlive the instance... Another is std::thread calling terminate in the destructor if it is for a joinable thread that hasn't been joined (far different behavior than the boost::thread it was based on). I'm sure there's more, but those are the first two gotchas that come to mind.

Only option? I beg to differ. My preferred method is thermite.

Mine was, too. I ended up having ICL implants, instead of laser surgery. The process wasn't exactly fun, it's basically cataract surgery, but instead of replacing your lens, they effectively add a contact lens behind your iris. The first eye they did, I was blind in for about 2 weeks due to swelling in the eye. The second eye, I could see clearly out of in about 5 mins after surgery. It's been about 4 years since I've had it done, and I don't regret it once.

I went through this at my new employer this month. I started this past December and our code signing cert expired this month. Thing is, I noticed back in around February/March timeline that this was going to happen, so I filed a ticket and added a personal reminder to tick off last month. Took us close to 2 weeks to get a new cert from our vendor (they were questioning our identity for some reason). By the time I got the new cert, it was 2 days before I went on vacation. I thought I had everything setup correctly and merrily went on my vacation. Turns out the wrong type of cert was sent and shit blew up after our old cert officially expired. Unlucky coworker had to pick up the pieces.

So, the moral here is, even if you do plan ahead an try and coordinate these things, sometimes it still blows up, and you still end up with unhappy customers.

I've used VC6, VS2003, 2005, 2008, & 2013. VS is perfectly fine & performs well for C#. 2008 and earlier absolutely sucked for C++ (I've not done C++ in VS2013), because of intellisense, which you cannot turn off. You're writing code, trying to invoke a function, and intellisense kicks in and you're stuck waiting for minutes, while the UI is hung, for it to give you suggestions on what I already know I want to do. To boot: you cannot disable it. The C# experience is quite different, and the IDE was a pleasure to use for that. The debugger, regardless of the language is still one of the best I've used. For C++, give me vim any day.