This.

I've written services/daemons using Qt simply to make it easily extensible because the framework I built was multi-process with IPC and each process could be heavily multi-threaded.

Qt abstracted away a lot of things that would have made the project difficult to build on many *nix platforms.

One of the overlooked advantages with using Java on the server/middleware side is that long running processes in real production environments often have to deal with memory fragmentation, with C++ this is often a very serious, and sometime virtually impossible situation to deal with (writing a pre-allocating memory manager is a non trivial task and you have to worry about people misusingit.) In Java (which I don't personally enjoy working in, but can appreciate), this issue is, for the most part, gone - and in those rare cases where you have to directly intervene, it is trivial to do so.

Given the skill of the average "I work at a bank building IFX/OFX software" developer, I'd rather they stuck to Java...

Personally, it sounds like you want to be as sloppy as you like... Nobody should be protecting you from null pointers except yourself.

I don't particularly care for Java primarily because it really is verbose, but the reason Java is so prevalent is that it is an excellent middleware language solution that made it possible in the late 90's and early aughts for companies that would never have managed to build these systems with C++ (just not enough C++ people who don't hang themselves and your company 5 times a day.)

You could argue that if they couldn't do it with C++ they shouldn't have been doing it anyhow, but there'd be hundreds of thousands fewer jobs in the software industry as a result.

Wait... is this in lieu of 'Federal pound you in the ass' prison? ;)

You cynical old bastard ;).

I know what you mean though. It is incredibly difficult to assess the valuable from the detritus.

Apparently wisdom doesn't come with age...

Atlanta too.

That's like saying that the way to learn how to swim is to dump everyone in deep water and see who takes to it naturally...

Ours was first semester of second year, computer engineering and assembly language. We used an old MIPS chip. Started with 27 people including 3 women, finished with 6. I had the highest grade in the course, a B-. It was rough, but not necessarily because of the topic - more that we covered so much so quickly.

I think the scariest API doc I ever read was the one for Word's *.doc format. The stuff Microsoft has/had to support for the sake of backward's compatibility was simply astounding.

You had me at Bacon...

Honestly, from reading the translated article, I get the feeling that a lot of the issues were because other agencies outside of Munich had difficulty interacting with them and this translated into Munich user unhappiness.