This is the future of American police: http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...

Key things to note from the article: 120 military grade surveillance cameras, 35 microphone systems, large and continuous police presence, military grade weapons. Some things not listed in this article: Fines are passed out to people seen walking in the same area multiple times for loitering. People are told to move along if seen sitting or standing on street corners. Anyone "suspicious" is stopped and questioned. All license plates registered outside the area are sent notices that their car was caught in illicit activity regardless of why they were there (no charges are filed against them, they are just mailed a notice).

Drink a lot of cool aid do you? There is no tax problem. Its a spending problem.

We brought in $3 trillion in taxes last year in the US and spent $58 billion on elementary and secondary education. That's less than 2%. I'll pay more in taxes when the government shows me they can spend it responsibly.

And they were all virtually ignored.

This is why I'm not concerned with this practice. I am a good programmer. All of this "talent" they are bringing over can't program at all.

I work for a large company with a dedicated IT team. We also supplement that team with contractors for larger projects (few of which are H1-Bs) and have several affiliates that also use H1-B workers. The quality of work provided by these migrant workers is a load of steaming crap.

Guess who gets brought in to fix it. I have job security and great pay because of these people. Keep them coming. Eventually, these companies may figure out its costing them more to do the same project twice, but until then I'm ok with it.

No need to be such a crumpet

Look at the US. It took less time to bread out intelligence.

Artificial demand, artificial supply, and a bunch of jobless people in the middle. How can this end well.

Out of all programmers, most are intermediate. Just because someone sits in an IT call center, doesn't make them a programmer.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Just because you don't know how to do it, doesn't make it impossible or wrong.

You destroyed your own argument.

By that definition, everything is art. Even my original statement, the quote from breaking bad, is invalid. Life is art. Pumping septic tanks is art. At that point, whats the point of even using the word?

Try more formal university level education. I was being modest and only brought it up because of your continuing slight against my intelligence and qualifications on the subject. Honestly, I have no doubt I am a better programmer than you. You would look upon my work and consider it art.

No the original argument was as follows:

By all of the definitions you provided, programming is a science. The definition I chose was the harder to qualify for.

Take this example: Given a car with fuel efficiency x and distance y, you need to get the car to y. If I say time is your top objective, you'd just ignore fuel consumption and dive all out. If I tell you your goal is to get there the most efficient way possible, then time and fuel come into play. Your bashing of weighted variables just shows your ignorance in both math and science.

Since you clearly have a different definition of art why don't you explain it to me and why your code is worthy of such a title?

Not that you need to know my qualifications. I not only have a formal background in programming but am also an autodidact. I am a professional programmer with a good size company and I continue to take courses and work on personal projects in my spare time.

Whether you believe the article or not, the government has not right to come into my vehicle and tell me to wear a seat belt, just as they have no right to say cave diving or base jumping is too dangerous and therefor are illegal.

Bubble wrapping citizens in the name of safety just makes us less free. That was my point.

Astronomy existed before telescopes, microbiology before microscopes, physics before particle accelerators. These are all just tools that increased measure-ability leading to a more accurate scientific approach. Things like sonar are an initial run at quantifying things like readability and rules compliance and they do a fantastic job.

You can predict with some degree of accuracy what a programs optimal efficiency would be, or did you miss that in your computer science classes? You are right that different languages/environments change the results, and while it adds a large layer of complexity it is still quantifiable. There is and will always be a "best possible solution." I work in an enterprise and not in research, so nothing I do will ever reach that point, but that doesn't prevent it from existing.

Lets take a quick look at the definition of science: systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation. Everything I have said has revolved around this definition, observation and experimentation to gain understanding. Its as if you are intentionally being obtuse.

On the other side art: the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. You don't do whats beautiful or appealing when coding. You do what is right. You don't right a recursive loop when you can do it in a normal loop, just because it looks prettier.

As for memory vs speed vs readability, you can weight requirements making them more or less important and there by altering the target optimal performance. Its simple math.

At this point you are either just a troll or are an incredibly incompetent coder. Do you honestly sit in dev meetings and when asked why you did something respond with "because its art man"?

April Fools! Its only 1%.

The first two are very easy, percent code coverage of unit tests and percent of methods documented. As for additional standards, every language has its best practices.

We are a java shop and use most of the default settings in sonar for best practices. This includes minor things like magic numbers and constant/method naming conventions, all the way to critical errors like dead stores to variables and threading issues. Sonar then takes the number of errors weighted by severity and divides it by number of lines of code. This gives us a nice percentage of code compliance to the defined rules. The goal again is to make that 100%. We also modified a few of the standards in house. For example, we count if statements without brackets against you. That is more of a trivial one, but we as a group agreed it makes the code more readable when working on projects with several developers.

The best possible solution would have 100% code coverage of unit tests, be 100% documented, 100% rules compliance on top of being the fastest, lowest memory consuming solution possible.

Not if your metrics also include readability and maintainability, which mine do. To think there isn't a best possible solution, is delusional. Something like sonar can easily quantify your readability and adherence to coding standards. Thus you can use it as a metric.