Why would you say such a thing, by the way? It's so insulting to everyone on the planet except maybe physicists.

Because (a) generally speaking I've found it to be true, and (b) I was trying to encourage him/her to not be daunted by the learning curve ahead.

In this situation, it wasn't very relevant to me whether or not other groups might be offended.

I really loved that series for the first N books. Then at some point I concluded the story was being unnaturally dragged out. I eventually stopped reading the series before it was done. Which sucked, because at first it was the best series I'd ever read.

Consider my whole sentence, though: "So I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially w.r.t. web programming."

Imagine I used "about" in place of "w.r.t.". Then my sentence would have been: "So I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially about web programming."

I was concerned that the duplicate use of the word "about" would indicate that the "web programming" was an amplification or clarification of the referent of "that". I.e., I would have been indicating that "web programming" was somehow an amplification or clarification of various topics in theoretical science. Which is most certainly not what I was trying to communicate.

That's why I chose "w.r.t." over "about". If I hadn't used "about" earlier in the sentence, I would have been more willing to use it in place of the "w.r.t.".

FWIW, I had "with respect to" in mind when I wrote "w.r.t." above.

I'm reading the Bible and books about it, to try to figure out whether or not it's fiction.

I've spent about 20 years refining my programming stereotypes. I think they fit the data pretty well now. Here's my take on you, simply because you're an EE:

* You're smart enough to pick up pretty much any CS concept, from the simple to the arcane. For the most part, only physics majors will simply be smarter than you.

* Your code will look like crap, until you put effort into writing more idiomatically and until you learn the design patterns that help programmers use to tame complexity. Your code will, generally speaking, be harder to read than that produced by CS and physics majors, until you put some work into it.

* You mentioned having only a fragmented understanding of CS theory. I think that's true for most of us (I have a PhD in CS). There's just so much of programming for which good theory has been developed: type systems, parallelism (concurrent sequential processes, deadlock rules), user interfaces (kind of), system complexity, static / dynamic analysis of code, relational algebras, parsing, the expressive power of various languages in the Chomsky hierarchy, graph theory, complexity classes, etc. A lot of these theories can be useful for solving problems, but most programmers muddle by without putting them all together and remembering their implications. Heck, most programmers probably don't know about half of the things I listed.

So I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially w.r.t. web programming. But it can be very satisfying to to learn more about them, and may in some cases let you solve some problems that other's can't. If you want to get better at some of the brainier stuff, I'd suggest getting a master's degree in CS from a decent school. But that my be overkill for bog-standard web development, I'm not sure.

If nim has that much going for it otherwise, we could always create a new language, nim++, which is just a front end to nim and translates { and } to proper indentation. (Assuming nim doesn't use { and } as tokens)

President explained he's pushing tech immigration reform hard and using executive action to help address tech's "urgent need" for global talent.

Seems to me we need to teach people to vote better.

Ah! Well if you're not willing to dot that, you're clearly not a team player with skin in the game! Good thing they weeded you out during the phone screen!

Isn't copyright infringement a civil offense?

Democracy my ass.

But the first link was great - thanks for that.

I suppose it is. So perhaps my lessons-learned are only helpful to people whose kids just coincidentally both have AS and are introverted.

But given that kids with AS tend to get overwhelmed by sensory overloading, and social interactions can add to the sensory overload, I wouldn't be shocked if there tends to be a positive correlation between having AS and being introverted.

I can't believe Slashdot managed to land an interview with someone from Dice! Time to make some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the fireworks!

Funny, but what you don't know is that I also have a vicious case of ADD which interferes with my ability to effectively proof-read my own posts.

You insensitive clod.

My experience with my moderately Asperger son is a bit different. He can definitely handle the deep end of schoolwork, intellectually. He's a sharp kid.

But there are some areas where treating him like a normal kid would be disastrous. In particular, many kids with Aspeberger Syndrome can become overwhelmed by sensory input and/or frustration. And when they do, they get emotionally "stuck" in a way other kids generally don't. Normal persuasive / coercive methods of dealing with those states are far less ineffective that on other kids, and so using them can be pointlessly cruel.

Long-story short, maybe throw them in the deep end academically, but perhaps not socially.