Software engineering has a tendency to enshrine ivory tower principles, that - although sound and logical, can end up making your project large, slow bloated and excessively encapsulated. I'm happy that NASA and the DoD both use it, those things need to be rock solid, but it just doesn't make sense for a lot of businesses where being first to market is more important than any code refactoring issues you might have 2 years down the track. Being slow to market might mean you don't even have a business 12 months from now.

Good programmers know when to lay on the engineering and when to pull out the stops and slap something together that does the job "just good enough". That's part of what makes it an art, not a science.

Pretty sure you're asking a facetious question but for those who don't know (like myself prior to Saturday night, walking through N4 with my brother): Hotblack Desiato is the name of a North London estate agent (Realtor for the merkins), which was adopted by Douglas Adams for the name of the frontman of plutonium rock band Disaster Area.

As is Ford Prefect, which was the name of a Ford car in the UK (1930s-1960s). It's not, as most Americans think, a purposeful mis-spelling of Perfect.

It was written for UK audiences, and poorly Americanized. Half the jokes in there only work in the UK because of cultural issues.

"Of course, all of this was done in software designed by people without any engineering experience at all...go figure."

You don't need to have an engineering degree to write a price of software that implements calculations and algorithms that are needed for an engineering project. Programmers turn math, algorithms, business methods, ideas and the like into code. That's our skill, understanding your needs and expressing it in a way a computer can understand.

The problem domain isn't "monitoring plants with only an AA battery for power" though. It's a host capable of running Linux and assorted toolchains for embedded software development. I know that there are systems for all kinds of applications and the power envelopes they prescribe. That's not the issue. The issue is that someone proclaimed that "electricity is expensive. Douche bag." And that's not true. Electricity is cheap. Cheaper than hardware which is incredibly cheap itself. And that holds true even for the very low end, where a tiny amount of energy is sold in an expensive package, but a finished system will still cost more than the batteries it takes to run it for a couple of years before it is replaced, yet the hardware is sold at prices which almost make the devices disposable. For perspective: How many smartphones does the average person buy per year? Still think a low to mid range quad core desktop system is expensive?

There's a different between learning to build a basic house and a skysraper. Only the best civil engineers are ever going to do the latter.

Somebody didn't read the article:

Our goal was to allow regular people without extensive training to easily and quickly build useful software. This was the spirit of languages like COBOL, Visual Basic, and HyperCard. Elegant tools for a more civilized age. Before the dark times before the web."

"The web is just an enormous stack of kluges upon hacks upon misbegotten designs. This Archaeology of Errors is no place for the application programmers of old: it takes a skilled programmer with years of experience just to build simple applications on today’s web. What a waste. Twenty years of expediency has led the web into a technical debt crisis."

I don't think you understand how schools and their curriculae work. Nobody is holding a gun to the collective and independently-operated heads of CS departments to demand which language they use for beginner courses.

Java was historically chosen because it was a safe option; used widely in industry, decent documentation and tools, it supports good programming practices, and it provides reasonably powerful options while being relatively beginner friendly. Java largely replaced C and C++, which are not beginner friendly.

Didn't airbus get yelled at for not stopping the pilot from ripping of the vertical stabilizer.

That's not how it works at all.

Airliners pretty much since the jet age have had at least some measure of "envelope protection". In the 60s this was pretty simple - just a stick pusher to prevent stalls since stalls in many airliners can easily become unrecoverable. Airbus's envelope protection is much more sophisticated than just a stick pusher.

However when there's a systems failure the Airbus systems will automatically drop to a different control law that effectively works like basic stick and rudder flying.

Boeing uses fly by wire now too by the way.

I know both SAS and R, and I think that for people who've never programmed, the GUI-based version of SAS wins on end-user usability because end-users can click together (simple and limited) analyses on really big datasets. This has far-reaching consequences for the learning curve.

For R there exist attempts at GUI's (like e.g. R-commander) that offer point-and-click functionality but they're more sketchy.

I think that giving non-programmers access to R will result in a flood of help requests because they really do need some notion of programming to use the R language. With SAS that's more in the background because the GUI tool is relatively well done, and use of the butt-ugly, antiquated and clumsy mainframe-style SAS language can usually be avoided.

I think that statisticians, real analysts and data-scientists will soon feel constrained by SAS and will prefer to use SAS to prepare a dataset for analysis, and then carry out any actual analysis in R.

Last but not least, R is still an in-memory analysis program, which practically limits analyses to what you can be fit in core. There are packages that try to extend R in this direction, but I consider them to be poor quality and cumbersome.

Python on the other hand is aimed squarely at programmers, and nobody else.

R has an excellent gui in RSTudio: www.rstudio.com I would recommend it as a much better interface to R.

KDE and Qt are synonymous with C++. They prove that C++ is the best language around, because the best apps and GUI frameworks around are built using C++. KDE 5 is fast, it's stable, and it just plain great software to use, all thanks to C++.

Then there's Gnome. They're still pissing around with C, JavaScript, and their homegrown Vala poopfest. And Gnome is a total disaster these days! That's what happens when you use inferior languages instead of a professional language like C++. C++ means your code is good, which means that your libraries and apps are good. Other languages mean that your code is bad, which means that your libraries and apps are bad.

There's one lesson here and that is to use C++ if you want to have the greatest software known to humankind. C++ is where it's at, baby!

Ah yes, the user is wrong. Well, do as you see fit anyway, this discussion would have been useful a couple of years ago. Your side with the 'user is always wrong, lets change it anyway' has won, and now KDE (and also Gnome, with the exact same reasoning) has become irrelevant for all but a handful of users (actually, I am one of these users that still uses KDE 4 daily, mostly because kioslaves is great). Hope you enjoy your victory!

The TSA is probably thinking that if the battery in your gadget doesn't work, it might not actually be a battery...so, just to be on the safe side....

Most likely, this is tied to the announcement of the discovery of explosives that don't trigger the standard explosive detectors. So the battery really could be a bomb.

So the thing is... this isn't really new. I can remember back long before there even WAS a TSA, back when laptops were the hot new portable device . . . And security would often ask you to power it on. And if its battery was dead, you could plug it in first. I agree it can be a bit of a problem because batteries often get used up in the course of travel, and I'd be interested to see how security actually handles it. I traveled just a few days ago, and they certainly weren't requiring EVERY passenger to demonstrate their devices. Also: When first going through security, I very rarely have a problem with my phone being dead because, you know, I'm just STARTING to travel, not after a long day of it. (Although I won't say never. It has happened)