I can't get the exact breakdown from microsoft's investor site, but my best estimate is that MS makes between 23% and 43% of it's revenue from OS sales and licensing. Office eats up another big piece of the pie, but together appear to still be less than half of total revenue (according to this site. MS has most assuredly has diversified and considers itself to be a "service" company these days (hence the push to the cloud and the huge increase in open source of code).

I often seek out debates over closely held beliefs, to the extent that I can have a conversation without ruining the evening or pushing the boundaries of civility. I find that for myself, If I feel flustered in the heat of the moment I might respond with an over the top response, but will mull over the ideas later and perhaps see the other side a bit more.

It seems as though there's no other way to have these discussions. My thought is that people need to be more willing to get in a heated discussion and then walk away and think on it without having permanent scars.

And yet the first image in that article you link shows that conservatives have the stronger echo chamber, and is exactly why consistent liberals are more likely to get pissed off and un-friend people: https://img.washingtonpost.com...

Thanks for that cutting edge news. Ballmer's "developers developers developers " trojan horse incantation was beginning to take hold. I'm sure glad Sun was able to keep java firmly in their grasp and not let some evil company get ahold of it.

True, you can version control the stored procedures. I don't think that takes away from my point though, pl/sl is a horrid language to write advanced business logic and I'd wager more than a little business logic is tucked away in the rows that store the "data". In peoplesoft's horrid incantation I worked on 7 years ago, there are large strings of javascript and html containing non-trivial extensions to business logic, just sitting around in rows. Try code reviewing that mess.

Ah yes, the beauty of non-version controlled code stored as giant strings in the bowels of a database with the most powerful of languages (pl/sql, of course) to grease the gears. I bet it's a complete joy to use.

I recently had a would-be boss who was trying to recruit me say he was looking for a developer with "a servant's heart".  I couldn't tell if this was an awkward attempt to woo me with a religious reference or if he really thought I envisaged myself a slave.

While much of your comment is correct, I don't think you can correlate the complexity of sculpting or painting to using technology (at least, complicated, integrated technology).  I can't foresee a sculpting project where you find that your scalpel is incompatible with the version of clay, so you're going to have to go dig up clay on the back yard or use a butterknife instead.

            Dim numsToClean As New List(Of Integer)
            For indx = 1 To 3
                If Not AquireResource(indx) Then
                    Cleanup(numsToClean)
                    Return
                End If
                numsToClean.Add(indx)
            Next

            DoStuffWithResources()

            Cleanup(numsToClean)

I can't disagree more with this perspective. Anything that can be considered boilerplate (I think getter/setters on properties are a perfect example of this) should have a default implied behavior and be explicitly overridden when suitable situations arises. I gain nothing from having boilerplate code taking up mental and screen real estate when there's nothing out of the ordinary about how these elements will behave in a given context.

I guess our problem is that CS isn't a stepping stone to jobs in medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, or optometry. Look at the employment breakdown for jobs in "chemical engineering" and you see an 88% male dominated field. But please, tell us more about how we have gender problems.

But is a non-credible threat suspension worthy? There were very few suspensions back when I was in school, and only for severe infractions. These seems incredibly over the top. I'd put this in the category punishment of detention, maybe a trip to the principal's office. Certainly not suspension.

Growing up with ranchers, there was always something that needed to be fixed/southern engineered. Perhaps a deer stuck a horn through the high-flow intake manifold on your front end loader or it isn't quite managing the amount of dust in the air, and all you needed to get by was to weld cover and perhaps reinforce the hood with some diamond plate steel so that future deer might not be able to wreck your engine.

Similarly, I feel like there's a good deal of coding that falls in between changing the oil and manifold design.

If you're talking about VB.net It does look like both tail recursion (compile time) and anonymous functions made it into the 4.0 framework (neither of which will probably make an 'intro' course, I would imagine). I think the best reason for choosing vb.net is how much more linguistic it is. Using things like "Function....End Function" or "If NumberA > NumberB Then .... End If"" Would be quite helpful to a beginner just learning to parse code. Combining this with an extremely helpful GUI like visual studios would make teaching much easier. In my view, the tooling is nearly as important as the language. However, I'd probably have to recommend Javascript just as highly, since the tooling there has gotten so much better. But I hate javascript too much to do that. I personally think VB.net doesn't deserve 1/100th of the reputation it fields in this forum, especially for an introduction into programming. It won't segue as easily into learning C or assembly, but I think for an intro course it beats a lot of the alternatives.

calling us "misogynistic whiny manbabies" throws cold water on the argument that a "toxic" environment exists in tech. If you're at all interested in convincing thinking people that you have a point, try some logic and evidence, not name calling.