Tomorrow: Researchers Blame "Not invented here" mentality.

Instead of using tested standard libs, developers constantly reinvent the wheel.

Alcohol and tobacco are good enough for this purpose. The gains from other drugs would just cut into those profits. And you would miss the opportunity to implement piece by piece the tools of a police state. Come on... child porn and terror carry only so far and don't really fill your prisons. Without drugs something else has to be found for this purpose.

...if its goal was to prevent drug usage.

If they can grab money with that, then it is right what they are doing. Making money is the first and foremost task of a company.

No problem. As long as he is at least gay.

This is done exclusively as a gimmick to attract audiences of feminists and the obsessively politically correct.

Yep. And I like it. If they really can attract so many feminists and obsessively political correct one, that the loss of normal readers, who hate this change, is at least compensated...Then those normal readers don't deserve better. Marvel can make a political statement or Marvel can make money... If they really can make both is totally up to the majority of the buyers of this title. And this majority is most likely male. Easy solution: Don't buy and in a few month this joke is over.

Easy solution: Don't buy the books. I would guess, the overwhelming majority of comic book buyers are men. Let's see if the male readers can make a sufficiently large bump in the profit Marvel makes with the Thor books, so it cannot be compensated by the three additional female readers Marvel might get through this move. If not... you deserve not better.

The notion that common ordinary folks can't pick up programming today is ludicrous.

True, true, but it can't be picked up by common ordinary and lazy folks.

I don't think it can work this way. At best you can get standardization and license requirements for extremely small and extremely well defined problem domains. A bridge is a bridge. The physic is the same for all bridges, the materials are the same, you know their properties. When you learned to build bridges, you probably can also apply this knowledge to build houses. Software is different. You cannot apply 'real world' solutions to bits and bytes. Software is extremely more flexible. And additionally many of today's software projects are still 'first of their kind'. The 'best practices' are far weaker then those for sticks and stones. Licensing requirements can never be flexible enough in the software world. When you can code the controlling software for an x-ray device, you might not be able to program a car computer. You would get an unrealistic explosion of standards or licenses. Software just does not work this way. What you want has been tried. The classical waterfall model tried to apply typical engineering methods to software development. Except for rate cases it failed miserably. And even in those rare cases the results were not always bug free.

I don't think it makes much sense to ask where programming should be made easier....Because it can't. Yes, you can get better tools, which give you more programming power. The result? Harder problems come in reach, which would hardly be feasible without those tools. When I started to code in the early 80th I needed a deep understanding of data structures and all kinds of algorithms. In memory relational databases? You are kidding. As an example, in the 80th I needed to know how to code a quick sort, or merge sort, or whatever sort. Getting all this together to even start to solve the actual problem was quite a task. Today? At best I need to know their best, worse, average behavior and when to use which. Implementing a sort algorithms myself? Am I crazy? I don't make fire with two stones either. So is coding easier today? Hardly. Today I might write my own video encoder, or play with voice of IP... things that were totally unthinkable ~30 years ago... at least for me. The 'brain investment' is roughly the same.

The problem is, designing a building, pulling a tooth, or fixing a toilet is relatively easy. There are not so many different ways to do it. The problems are perfectly understood. There are long tested procedures. Testing knowledge in areas like this has some worth. Software development above a certain level is research. There are a few ready made building blocks, but they carry only so far. Programming in itself is not so difficult. What is difficult is to understand the problem domain. If you only want to have licensed programmers, you would need to test the coding skills, and you need to test the skills in a certain problem domain. A programmer, who is licensed to code software for car computers would not be allowed to code for a plane. A programmer for bank software would not be allowed to work on a medical survey software. I don't think it can or should work this way.

Interesting. Are Question 1 and 2 exclusive? I have several programs in sourceforge. A few in the Google play store. Mostly happy customers. But I suppose I could fail miserably on question 2. I do... apparently I do good... but when it comes to explain... you would not believe that I know what a loop is.

There are as many bad HR people as there are bad programmers. The problem.. bad programmer write only bad programs. But bad HR people are doubly bad: They hire bad programmers. And they don't hire good ones.

.... Brain Surgery.

And that is even worse. While I can learn software development on my own. Make good money if I find someone who believes I am good enough.... I cannot become an autodidact brain surgeon. Heck, I am not even allowed to pull a simple tooth without a proper license. If that is not a real scandal....

Why? For a police state this is surprisingly low.