What little part did you grab onto without reading the whole post? That's right, the very first sentence.

Read the whole thing. It's about balancing speed of development with other factors, including performance of the code.

Nobody's talking about blazing fast, careless typing into an IDE. The biggest cost in software development tends to be the software developer. Making the software developer more productive saves money. Most of us don't have unlimited budgets.

People who code in Python, Perl, Scheme, JavaScript, or whatever rather than assembly aren't all "sloppy" developers. They're producing code that does a lot more work per source line than Assembly does. If they produce the same number of lines, then they're more productive.

Assembly can call C libraries on most systems. Then again, so can Perl, Python, and Scheme.

The best reason for avoiding assembly is that it's almost never the fastest way to get the programming done, and with a good C compiler it may not be the fastest way for the program to run, either. Assembly is great for bootstrapping a compiler or OS and inside tight loops. It can be handy if your hardware has an advanced feature not yet exposed through a library for a higher-level language. Not everything needs it, though.

Even C or C++ is often not the fastest way to get a project done. Sometimes there's a pretty big runtime penalty for using something that enables faster development, though.

There are lots of cases out there of Lua, Python, or some other language being used to wrap around a small core of C or C++ with maybe the most time-critical parts in assembly. Sometimes a higher-level language is the right tool for the situation, but sometimes not.

In the Midwest it's common for a city or town to draw from the nearby major rivers like the Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Des Moines, and Ohio then treat that water for the tap. Then they take the sewage, separate out the solids, treat the liquids, and release that downstream.

I'm not sure I'd bitch so much about drinking what my own city or county was purifying on both ends. In the Midwest people are drinking what's been treated for drinking by their city, town, county, or water district but which was treated as wastewater by whoever was upstream. In the spring, sometimes the sewage treatment plants upstream flood. (A few cities and towns even continue to get fines from the EPA for their stormwater and sewage drains combined, so that flash flooding brings sewage up into their own streets.)

It's worked for decades elsewhere to re-treat wastewater as drinking water. California's supposed to be the progressive leader on this sort of thing. It's time they caught up.

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?