Wow. What was I thinking this morning? These opinions are crap.

On second thought, I just made a pretty good argument for more training in domain-specific languages. I still don't think that just plunging in like a mid-90s cowboy coder generalist will work anymore though. Those days are definitely gone.

I think that you're making the mistake of perceiving a mindless code monkey to be tantamount to someone who is a seasoned computer scientist with a solid grasp of theory and a fair understanding of software engineering principles/design patterns (or a super competent software engineer with a fair understanding of theory). Code monkeys will not make real discoveries or do real work- like it or not, for better or worse, only the super-talented will (yeah, reality's a bitch). We've also reached a bit of a ceiling effect in science and tech more generally in my eyes- all the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, so the discoveries that remain to be made require much more effort and interdisciplinary teamwork than ever before. Getting more people trained to code won't change that.

The other point is that most programming languages these days are becoming more expressive anyways, which lowers the entry barrier to coding significantly so that most people will be able to figure it out at one point or another anyways- you don't need to be in the IQ > 120 club anymore because you don't need to really understand pointers or assembly code or any of that mess. Domain-specific languages are becoming mature enough that a statistician won't necessarily need to learn C and can most of his or her work done with R; ditto for the scientist who wants to use Julia or SciPy (without delving into any of the non-SciPy libraries available in Python). Syntactic sugar has been added to web languages like such as Javascript (e.g., Coffeescript) and even HTML/CSS (although goodness knows why these needed syntactic sugar). Perhaps I'm just coming from a privileged standpoint where I already find it simple so I can't see how other people will continue to find it hard, but I really really don't think that the simpler aspects of programming are going to be out of reach for the masses that much longer.

One last point is that a lot of the progress I've noticed in the tech world right now seems to be in the world of DevOps, which is what I believe is being referred to in point 2; a minimal number of systems administrators and developers are needed now to due to advances in deployment and debugging automation. Case in point: Google's servers broke and fixed themselves. Do we still need workers to do these tasks now? Definitely. 10 years from now? Not so sure, and flooding the job market with a bunch of "coders" certainly won't make matters better.

No

Perkele.

Care to explain how this is true? I think I have an idea, but using "a healthy combination of certain areas of comp-sci (databases, machine learning, NLP, AI), statistical methods, and, quite often, improvisation" seems to be an even more obtuse approach than going about it the old-fashioned way. I'd much rather hear that people are using what we already know or (still better, but probably not as plausible) the latest mathematical advances regarding nonlinear systems rather than just ad-hoc'ing methods because... computers! I believe that this is at least partiallly Nassim Taleb's objection to the entire field of data science as well. How many 'results' coming from data science are the product of sound and rigorous methodologies, and how many are just due to chance/data dredging?

Correction: Science is not an Elsevier publication. Seems like I'm slightly naive as well...

Nature was established in 1869. Science in 1880. To state that it "would take a while" to beat that prestige comes off as slightly naive (I offer a litotes to your understatement).

Mais maintenant j'ai Google.

But what Amazon is doing is not free market economics- they are using their previously accumulated profits to artificially distort the market by selling at a loss and not taking a profit. This doesn't encourage competition, it stifles it. The French government is essentially reacting to ensure that some semblance of a well-regulated free market is preserved by compensating for Amazon's chicanery.

Parisian book stores (Gibert Jeune, Shakespeare and Co) are not ridiculously expensive. When I was a student at Paris 3 I was able to buy all of my textbooks for under 100 euros (compare to prices paid for American textbooks; also note that some of those textbooks were unnecessary supplements that I bought out of curiosity). Most individual books range between 5-10 euros, and, scaled for the cost of living, most bouquinistes (you know, the people who sell used books) had decent prices (especially considering that some of the books in their selection were rare and/or out of print). The used bookstores that you speak of very much have an analogue in the bouquinistes.

If you want to stay out of France, France will not miss you.

Whatever. I'm personally a fan of a lot of the hip-hop coming out of the Bay Area these days. It's definitely qualitatively different from the stuff you find in New York though- I would never really compare the two. This stuff's pretty good. Same with the Crown City Rockers.

Namely Donald Trump. Who is revered by American society for... absolutely no good reason whatsoever.

Okay. Maybe it's not always *directly* funded by the US government, but I wonder where most of its other clients get *their* funding. I know MDA for sure has won some major contracts from NASA in the past, and they definitely get quite a few contracts for the CSA. How many of these SpaceX missions would continue to exist feasibly without funding from NASA, the CSA, and the ESA? Maybe SpaceX is not a contractor for a single government, but I can easily see it working for multiple governments (in the same manner as Lockheed Martin).

Bell Labs being part of a government-supported natural monopoly that has languished miserably in the post-Ma Bell world. Not the example I would choose if you were trying to make the case for private enterprise. The Bell system seemed non-governmental in only a nominal sense.