Carly will be the seventh dwarf.

...the U.S. changed its H-1B record retention policy last week, declaring that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, "are temporary records and subject to destruction" after five years under the new policy. "There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers," reports Computerworld.

"Perplexing to researchers" would not be perplexing to criminal investigators.

Clearly this would not have been a problem but for someone's ignorance of hyphenation. If the intent was to declare the network was free of "Al-Quida", the proper spelling would have been "Al-Quida-Free Terror Network", but someone with that level of sophistication would probably have spelled "Al-Qaeda" correctly as well.

This is the like the difference between "high-school boys" and "high school-boys".

Isn't there a well-established body of law intended to prevent this? Look up the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 - not a recent thing.

So far, I don't think I've seen a single comment here that got the point of the essay.

He's not talking about incremental "improvements" to existing languages, he's pointing out that the common attitude of "we'll make this language easy to learn by making it look like C" is a poor way to achieve any substantial progress.

This is true but everyone who's invested a substantial amount of time learning the dominant, clumsy, descended-from-microcode paradigm is reluctant to dip a toe into anything requiring them to become a true novice again.

I've long been a big fan of what are now called "functional" languages like APL and J - wait, hold on - I know that started alarm bells ringing and red lights flashing for some of you - and find it painful to have to program in the crap languages that still dominate the programming eco-system. Oh look, another loop - let me guess, I'll have to set up the same boilerplate that I've done for every other loop because this language does not have a grammar to let me apply a function across an array. You want me to continue doing math by counting on my fingers when I've got an actual notation that handles arrays at a high level, but I can't use it because it's "too weird". (end rant)

There have been any number of studies - widely ignored in the CS world - going back decades (see this http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/...) - pointing out how poorly dominant programming memes mesh with the way most people think about problems and processes. Meanwhile, the 1960s called - they want their programming languages and debugging "techniques" back - "printf", anyone?

That might be your problem.

Not to troll, but the problem with restricting advertising is that you are restricting free speech. This is a legitimate concern: who makes the decisions and on what basis when you start down the path of "strictly factual"? It's not that simple. Any number of repressive governments across the globe have laws against publicizing "false" statements but these laws are clearly used to suppress anything they don't like.

Without having looked at the post or scrutinized the language, here's a couple of guesses:
1) looks like C: i.e. verbose, vacuous, loopy.
2) has crappy (i.e. industry-standard) array-handling.
3) fails to incorporate any of the decades of research about how people approach problems versus how programming languages do.

...especially with law firms specializing in personal injury.

...coming soon?

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

Not according to the lack of imagination by the posters here I've seen so far.

How much time do you waste with boilerplate crap like this because of nearly clumsy array-handling ideas that date back to the Great Flood?
How bloated is code because of the vacuousness of most common languages that
require
several lines
to do
the simplest
things?

Basing one's choice of language to learn on its current popularity - though this may be economically prudent - retards progress in programming languages almost as much as new languages' emphasis on backwards compatibility and ease of learning for novices.

"Backward compatibility" gives us the backward languages that predominate today. Making things easy for beginners gives us languages mostly only suitable for newbies.

Contrast this novice-oriented, backward-looking orientation with the little-understood idea that a language can be a tool of thought, that it can provide us with useful conceptual building blocks for thinking about computation at a high level.

If you follow the "Risks Digest" - formerly the "Risks in Computing" newslist - now in its 27th year, you'll see that one of the most common themes is the repetition of known bad practices.

"Live and don't learn" could be the official motto of the IT industry.