5 minutes is a lot of time for the people who go around spouting hatred and ugliness all over internet forums. This is why the don't register, because it's not worth the effort - especially when they get banned - especially if that ban is by IP.

Doesn't it require a valid e-mail address and confirmation first? It certainly used to.

Because it's a pain to do so. It helps cut down on the DB anonymous posting. You can quickly discern if they're schills, flametards, et cetera.

I agree, I post on occasion as AC when I'm on another device, and like I said, I never had any problem with people posting AC until the past few years when people seem to be using it to simply spam /. with total garbage, or hatred, et cetera.

Pseudonyms exist to protect people from the rabid - like yourself.

Think about the stupidity of comparing the establishment of a pseudonym to posting your SSN? LOL.

Wow, I guess the guys who built /. who thought AC should stand for "Anonymous Coward" didn't know that "Desler" knows best and that and AC and a registered user are exactly the same thing. Wonder why they bothered with creating the AC system? Idiots. Really. I mean, they should have just asked you obviously.

Ignoring the rest of the stupidity of what you posted, maybe you could come to realize that the difference between AC and a registered user is that registered users can develop a reputation for their behavior; i.e., a user that posts stupid things like

can become known for being an ignorant hothead.

They're called "Anonymous Coward" for a reason.

I've never had a problem with it until the past few years when it has been ritually abused by idiots who can't be bothered to create shill accounts (God knows there's enough of those...) to spout hatred and ugliness.

I'm no sub-continent apologist by any means, but all this anti-India crap is just ridiculous.

Lol, true, but in the spirit of altruism - I hope today's Comp Sci grads are being forced to actual write software not just implement problem sets. There's so much they could learn from the full life-cycle at University.

We had courses on declarative languages, another on imperative languages, and special topics courses on specific languages and topics that were hot at the time (Java, OpenGL.) Some classes taught using Lisp, the majority using C, one was all assembler, intro courses were Pascal. Basically we learned that the language itself isn't important, what that language offers you (the benefits and limitations) is...

Things have gotten a little better in the past few years, but for a while there in the early aughts you couldn't find a recent graduate who knew anything other than Java. The were helpless without libraries - LOL.

...they point out to the students all along the way that they should learn other languages, toolsets, and operating systems if they want to be useful when they graduate/drop out.

Subjectively I would recommend they start with C specifically because you can hang yourself but it has few ropes to do so than C++, and then different languages for different aspects of Computer Science after that. There's virtually nothing in an undergraduate Comp Sci syllabus that should prevent you from learning a new language for your course if you've learned the fundamentals of how these languages work.

You're not going to be making use of exotic features of the languages in question unless the purpose is to use them.

Let's see how the python thing works out, it'll be nice to see kids coming out of school insisting they're senior software engineers for a different reason other than "I used Java for 4 years... at school..." Lol.

Good luck :)

It always depends upon the circumstances.

There are times when being a great programmer could be the most important thing, but except in one man/woman operations this is very rarely the case.

It's overlooked because there's a romanticism (sad and geeky though it is) about wondrous programmers being able to leap tall feature lists with a single bound...

Not at all. This isn't some elitist "I'm not a programmer" kind of thing. I am a programmer, but that ability is a subset of my abilities as a software engineer.

Programming is the ability to instruct a computer to perform actions.
A programmer is someone who has this skill.

Software engineering is a superset of programming. It includes the abilities of a programmers, plus the skills, the ethos, and the discipline for all the other aspects of building software that are important. The discipline is the most difficult part (at least for me.)

The simplicity of those differences can be seen in the drudgery of commenting your code where appropriate (or, if you know that junior developers will be working in the codebase, documenting it thoroughly), and the complexity of those differences can be in recognizing that the architecture of your solution provides for 3rd party integration opportunities that may be of enormous value to your employer and yet require more work on your behalf because abstraction can also be drudgery.

This doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who consider themselves programmers, not software engineers, that don't have these skills - it means that that they are what would be technically considered a software engineer.

You can pick up a book on learning JavaScript in 24 hours and start programming and even refer to yourself as a programmer if you land a job doing so, but calling yourself a software engineer at that point is ridiculous. Heck, quite a few CS grads don't even appear to be able to call themselves programmers (they do so little of it in the course of their studies generally.)

An analogy, which in my obviously subjective opinion, describes this relationship would be a mechanic and a mechanical engineer. That is a rougher comparison than the differences between MOST programmers and software engineers, but it conveys the basis of what I mean.

You are clearly demonstrating your lack of understanding about how to make software. You seem to think that software engineering is about "chart bubbles" and "design documents." It isn't at all. That's like saying that being an excellent race car driver is about how nice your car looks. It also isn't about how well you can drive a GoKart or a Formula 4 car, it's about your ability to drive anything necessary to accomplish your goals, your ability to make decisions, to mitigate risks, et cetera.

Talented programmers are sometimes good software engineers.
Talented software engineers are often good programmers.

You not only display your lack of understanding what software engineering is, but here you demonstrate your lack of realization that there are more independent software vendors in the world than just cash strapped startups who have to hack together whatever they can in order to begin generating revenue.

Amazing. You really don't understand that software engineering is the discipline of creating software properly. You seem to conflate it with architecture design documents and waterfall planning.

Software engineering is critical for any project of ANY size.

It is about decision making, risk mitigation, and proper use of resources.

People who think the way you are exhibiting here are the reason with why so much software is just garbage when it doesn't have to be.

...but I would argue that software engineering is a far more important a skill than programming.

Which thing is ultimately more valuable, the ability to write JavaScript (or C++, or Objective-C, or whatever) better than anyone else, or, the ability to architecturally scale a big data solution along swim lanes or using an AKF cube (or properly design a secure inter-process communication system, or whatever)?

I'm not trying to demean raw programming ability, because that's always a valuable skill, the problem is that people seem to venerate it above what I believe it more important to the creation of good software.

Anywho...

Would you care to explain any of your reasons why? It seems to be vastly superior for client side work in comparison to everything else right now. I wouldn't use it on the backend (that's still C++ territory in my opinion), but it and/or Java work well on the web services side of the backend.

Writing a bytecode platform is exactly what using C# would do in any case (I guess I should have been clearer.) I don't care if the actual language on top is exactly C#, or something else, just let it compile to a bytecode platform that takes all the best of Java, C#, and other THICK CLIENT application languages because the state of the world today is that people are trying to write thick client applications in the web browser using languages never intended to be used in such a fashion.