Shifted the problem from volatile to non-volatile memory? Give me that any day.

The undo command ''can'' be made persistent between applications; there's no technical limitation why it shouldn't. In fact, version control is exactly the undo feature that you want. Using that, there's no rational reason to not want to save your changes.

Except most people cannot do all of those either.

Sure they can. No one required those to be good, only that they look human in order to pass the Turing Test.

the Turing Test. cannot do all of those either?

Even people who only want to write software in their basement can benefit from some people's knowledge, as long as they want that software to be used by someone else

What good is creating "solid, clean code" if it solves the wrong problem, because you didn't know how to ask people what problem they need to solve?

s/wall/bridge/

When the client starts as "we want to build a wall", your first step is to reformulate it as "we want to go from side A to side B of the river". This way, you can notice that the right solution is to buy a ferry boat.

They fully expect you to know their needs and usually have a very hard time communicating them because a lot of things that make no sense to you are obvious to them because it's their daily bread and butter. And hence these things will be sorely missing in the specs.

That's why requiring a big upfront whole signed specification is useless. Users may not know what they want exactly, but they're very good at knowing it when they see it; they know exactly what problem they want to solve.

Your job is to understand the problem well enough to build a solution; and showing the working result to the user is the only way to know if you understood the problem, and if the solution is good enough. That's why iterative design works, and waterfall doesn't.

you find a small yellow star with 8 or 9 planets

I see what you did there

Why does the single comment that hit the spot go unanswered? There's a reason why programing tools are called ''languages'' - before problem solving or building architectures, programming is a form of *communication*: we try to express the ideas in our heads in a form that needs to be interpreted, either by the machine, by your fellow team programmers, or the system users. All them need to be able to make sense of the program's effects (at different levels), even though their understanding will be different.

There's no right way to write a program, because programing is not as much writing "a" solution to "a" problem as saying new things about the world. Until developers understand this, they will remain flabbergasted, wondering why their project's requirements change so much.

since the comment is not executed, there is no guarantee that it reamains correct

As the purpose of comments is to explain *why* a part of code was created (and why it was written in that particular way), it not being executable shouldn't matter much, as completely repurposing a bit of code rarely happens. (Generalizing it yes; abandoning the original purpose of a routine or function is uncommon).

The best comments are those targeted for the programmer reading them, not the machine that must execute the code; and letting fellow programmers know why you needed that piece of code in the first time is invaluable, even if what the code does changes over time.

Return your geek card (and your low ID at once). Calligra has been talked about many times at Slashdot. It's a fork and renaming of the KOffice suite, the original KDE clone of MS Office.

Plus, the human brain is massively parallel, much more than anything we know how to build, yet it learns as a single global epiphenomenon. If you split learning in separate niches, what makes you think that the computer would learn faster than the brains of the whole human race learning in parallel?

It's plausible that a pure information thinking system, once freed from the constraints of chemical processes on top of which our brains process information, could work much faster than our nature-evolved brains. But such system wouldn't resemble anything approaching the design of current computers.

Are you sure the algorithm won't learn much more slowly than humans instead? Learning happens by relating what you see to what you already know. So the more you know, the more it takes to add new facts. You can see that process in children, which learn much more quickly than adults.

We are not talking of merely recording events and dumping them into databases, but of building knowledge from them - that task could turn to be essentially non-parallelizable if you don't want schizophrenic computers.

That's because logic is unambiguous, and it allows us to clarify our own thoughts. Otherwise our brain gets ridden with misconceptions, prejudices, and lousy thinking. The need of pure logic is a testament to our brains' messy nature, not any characteristic of the workings of the world.