Ick. Then they'd both go and there would never be peace on Mars.

Well, if you consider the web site, the repository, the Apple employees on the filesystem and kernel sides, and the macosforge branding as "the project" then they can certainly kill it.

But you're right, we've got copies of the open source code, so in the sense that the code is the project, it lives on.

Why don't they just make a $250,000 submersible to go and find it?

Eurasia?

A few short years? Warcraft I was released in 1994. Diablo II was released in 2000, the expansion in 2001. So there's six or seven years. Those seemed like awful long years to me at the time. You completely left out WarCraft III and its expansion between Diablo II and WoW.

I'll certainly agree that the focus on WoW has probably delayed SC2 from being started and released by a couple years, but it's been an attention-leech, not a money leech. If anything, WoW makes them a ton of dough. Anyway, I don't think the argument that Blizzard has "died" stands up in the face of their simultaneous Diablo III and SC2 development--both of which look like a lot of fun!

Parent post should be modded insightful or something, not funny.

Terry Lambert is an actual Apple employee who, if I'm not mistaken, could quite honestly hire people like Alan to work on the "unix" portions of OS X. He's quite active on Apple's Darwin Kernel mailing list.

Well, it doesn't sound like we really disagree very much. Python is a different tool than Java, so they don't generally compete head-to-head in my experience.

True, my requiring Python for my department doesn't cause it to be much more prevalent in jobs across the globe. On the same note, your not having seen them doesn't make them less common.

Still, I'm being objective when I say there's lots and lots of python jobs out there. Here's an example of a few dozen (hundreds? I didn't count them) Python job listings from just one site:

http://www.python.org/community/jobs/

I'm not saying that there's not lots of Java jobs too, because there obviously are. And I'm not claiming that there are more or less of one or the other, because I have no idea what the ratio is.

On the "quick programming" note, I'm surprised you state you don't understand it and then give an example of how you use Python (not Java) for a calculator (an example of "quick programming")! That's exactly what I'm talking about. The ability to fire up the interpreter and instantly be in business, without ever creating a file, a class, or anything. I'll often want to crunch some data quick and dirty, or do some parsing that's a little too complex for command-line tools, and I can do it by just firing up a Python interpreter and having at it. My comment about Java was really just to reflect that (as far as I know--I'm no Java guru), no one fires up a Java interpreter and starts making stuff happen right then and there without at least creating and compiling a file.

You can also make fairly sophisticated command-line utilities with very few lines in Python, which I was also thinking about as quick programming.

I _have_ used Java, Matlab, and Python.

Python is quite likely to be used in a real job. In fact, I require python skills for the development positions I hire for. My department uses it every single day.

If an applicant or employee chose "Java" or "Matlab" to implement a "quick program" to try to solve the tasks we tackle at my workplace, I'd throw them out on their ear for choosing an inappropriate tool for the job. For example, creating a secure, asynchronous communications network with Matlab would be very difficult. Another example: automating system administration tasks across a variety of open-source OS's of various ages and architectures would be unnecessarily complex with Java and difficult to make portable due to the incompatibility of various Java versions, while a python script works quite nicely and portably.

Mind you, there are other domains where Java or Matlab are the appropriate tool for the job (I mean, c'mon, who wants to process matrices with Java or Python?). I'm not saying they are useless. They're just useful in other domains than we are in at my workplace. There is definitely a place for Python in this world. It's quite often used in real jobs.

I disagree that Python is an appropriate educational stepping stone to C, but that's just because my personal opinion is that things ought to start with the nuts and bolts and then taught upward (for example: binary, then machine language, then assembly, then C, then scripting languages).

What you are describing is called a "Lebanese Loop"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_loop

What I'd like to see is the youtube video of someone pulling this out in a highschool sports game to take pictures of the game while standing right next to the local policeman...

The problem with that is that you still have the performance hit of calling the ROT-13 function times four (twice for encryption, twice for decryption).

I'll sell you my ROT-52 accelerator card for $50,000 which will do it all in one function call, and hardware accelerated to boot! Did I mention it supports unicode?

Given a choice between the Germany of today (ban violent video games!) or the Germany of 70 years ago (Genocide! World wars!), I'm not going to lose any sleep over their current extremes.

Just an opinion.

But is it snappier?