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Comment Re:Ego (Score 4, Interesting) 344

Exactly. I'm a professional UI developer and I used to contribute to open source software quite a bit back in the day. I don't contribute much these days mostly because of lack of free time to do so, but this was a major point of contention for me.

The biggest problem is that the programmers have trouble accepting advice for changes to the product they've poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. I've found for the most part that many open source projects are over complicated. One of the best ways to improve the usability of a product is to simplify it. You need to remove or conceal the features that are rarely used. Unfortunately, those features tend to be the hardest to implement, so the person who implemented it wants to make sure people know about it. It's not unexpected that they wouldn't be happy if you suggest that it be removed.

Comment Re:you keep dry and sit around all day (Score 3, Insightful) 844

Indistinguishable? Really?

I have yet to meet a non-graduate with who I can discuss a performance problem in terms of time and space complexity. Big O notation? What's that? Some kind of cheerio?

That's not to say that there aren't some very intelligent people without University degrees and some very stupid people with them. I've just found that most people with a passion for their profession are those with degrees. They did have the drive to spend 4 extra years of their lives going to school after all.

Comment Re:NetBeans? Really? (Score 1) 151

You should consider giving it another shot. NetBeans, in my opinion, is by far the best free Java IDE out there right now. As everyone has already pointed out, Eclipse is a plugin nightmare. The NetBeans UI is incredibly polished and while it might be slower at doing some things (e.g. autocompletion), it has a few features that I can't live without.

Check out the "Find Next/Previous Matching Word" keyboard shortcuts. I think it's bound to Ctrl+K and Ctrl+Shift+K by default. I never have to type more than 2 or 3 characters per word in my code. It's almost a complete replacement for the slower Ctrl+Space autocompletion. I really only use Ctrl+Space for reading Javadocs these days.

Comment Re:Yeah, but javascript sucks (Score 2, Insightful) 500

I think you missed the point. The API is not the language. The language is the language. To put it in words that you will understand: The API is shit, the language is not.

Yes, the DOM is not great and it's implementation in IE is worse. But jQuery and other libraries do make it much nicer to work with, which is what the original guy was trying to say.

Comment Re:Yeah, but javascript sucks (Score 2, Insightful) 500

Mod this guy up. I'm really sick of people bashing JavaScript when they really mean to bash the DOM and its inadequacies and cross browser woes.

Please, if you want to sound intelligent when talking about the problems with JavaScript, make sure you're talking about the language, not the APIs available in the browser. That part is called the DOM.

Comment Re:Yeah, but javascript sucks (Score 4, Insightful) 500

I was ready to jump on you when I read the title of your post, but you're right, mostly. JavaScript is actually a really nice language to develop in (for small projects). With features such as lambdas, closures, and functions as first class objects, you can write some very elegant solutions with very little code.

Even with those features it's still stuck in the dark ages when compared to other modern languages. Prototypal inheritance, while cool, doesn't really offer the power that classical inheritance gives you when you're creating large systems. There's no such thing as super in prototypal inheritance, which gets annoying after a while.

Lately I've been looking into Flex and ActionScript 3. AS3 is basically what EcmaScript 4 was going to be before Microsoft derailed it. It's basically Java with a different syntax, a few extra features (lambdas, closures, namespaces), and no equivalent to abstract. It's really nice.

While I'm all for HTML5 and open standards, I highly doubt that it will ever be able to keep up with proprietary solutions like Flex. There's always going to be that big asshole in the corner who refuses to keep his browser up to date with everyone else. I've written large programs in JavaScript and its just far too stressful trying to keep IE-compliance. Until Microsoft or IE are dead and buried, I'm going to have more fun writing Flex apps that run on all browsers and all platforms without any platform specific code.

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