This is what the attackers want. They want to erode the freedoms of Western secular societies. The Charlie Hebdo attackers have won.

Couldn't it be that those few are just very far to the right of a normal bell curve or a power curve rather than on an inverted bell?

I think you're conflating "talent" and "higher level of complex intellectual ability", AKA "intelligence". Logic, syntax, and calling conventions can be taught. Some of the things that make a programmer vastly more efficient are specific portions of intelligence: pattern recognition, long-term memory, holding a large working set in short-term memory, juxtaposition of one situation against another, and ability to abstract generalities.

This sounds an awful lot like one part of the group has been promoted to this level of schooling without strong fundamentals important to CS. There's little reason to believe there are people who just "get it" vs. people who don't. There's plenty of reason to believe that some of them have a background that prepared them to understand the material while some haven't.

As a hybrid solution, take shares quarterly along with your pay, and no BS about having to stay there through a layoff to get them vested.

Is this a talent issue, though, or a failure in the foundations of earlier math classes upon which calculus is building? Sure, if somebody never grasps the basics of programming you're not going to want them to program your pacemaker. I don't think anyone is arguing that.

This isn't because there's a natural U-curve. It's a resource restriction, maximizing the talent chosen for further instruction because far more people were accepted into the program than the school ever intended on having graduate from that program. It's not a "rock stars" vs. "useless programmers" distinction. It's that there's a limited number of seats in the 200 levels, so you may as well thin the herd by throwing something hard but useful out as an obstacle.

The camps here are "worthy of further investment" and "we're sorry but you didn't make the cut". Not everyone who makes the cut is at the very top, and not everyone who missed the cut couldn't have been taught the whole curriculum. There's just a need for the school to focus its resources, and the cutoff is arbitrary for external real-world reasons.

Quality online courses and tutoring services may actually help with this sort of either/or selection. No school is likely to want to graduate the 0.2 X programmer, but most would be happy to graduate a good deal many more 1.5 X to 4.5 X folks along with their 6 X to 9 X developers.

Programming is a lot like music. The best composers know which songs are worthy of having phrases stolen.

Rails fell off a bridge. Rails is a framework, though. Ruby's still useful without it. It's no more useful than Perl, Python, Clojure, or Javascript, but it's useful. Some quite useful things that aren't blogs are written in it. Puppet's one example.

I think in the context of the thread AC meant "good UI library that ties in well to the CLR". Sure, there's Qt, Wx, Gtk, SDL, Tk, etc etc. But how well do those tie into C# and let you run on Windows, Linux, and other platforms with Mono?

I agree, but I'd like to expand a bit.

It's not important to know a bunch of languages deeply. I think it's important to learn two or three languages fairly deeply and a few more at a shallower level.

One doesn't really know the right tool for the job until there's some experience with multiple tools. The more different the other languages are from you main language, the better one can judge the best tool. There are lots of different types of languages, and knowing a few types, their advantages, and their disadvantages can be really helpful.

An Algol family language, particularly from the Modula/Pascal/Ada/Object Pascal family or the C/C++/ObjectiveC/Java/D family, is a good choice for getting practical work done. Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Rust, Go, Lua, Erlang, or something else fairly popular and a little more separated from those other Algol-derived languages but not terribly so is not a bad second choice. It's good to be familiar with something from the functional camp: Lisp/Scheme/Arc/NewLisp or ML/SML of NJ/CAML/OCAML or maybe Haskell. Stack-based languages like Forth or Factor can be handy to learn, or something else in postfix like Postscript. Something actor-based or dataflow-based can open some lines of thought. Assembly isn't used directly much anymore, but nobody ever became a worse programmer from understanding it.

Also "M".

People hearing "may I submit you?" are not getting job offers. They are getting recruitment contact. It takes several more steps than that to actually be offered a job in most cases.

EXOS is in Caddo Mills, which is literally down the road from Heath where Carmack lives. It's running without his participation but it's claiming the successes of Armadillo on its web site. They are in old Armadillo facilities.

I think no matter what, there's a lot of Carmack's influence left there. I wouldn't be surprised if he kicks in some funding.

Well, they sure as hell shouldn't be for government-enforced monopolies and escape from market forces considering they're supposed to favor letting the markets work things out.