If closures and lambda expressions were so easy to implement using basic inheritance, Java would already have it. Java 7 has no lambda structures or closures. Anonymous inner classes are a hacked on incomplete poor mans semi-closure that provides just enough to get you almost what you want, but not quite. Last I checked, JCP (or related) had this as a work in progress. And will it be a first class construct in Java or some kind of pre-compiler/interpreter/VM? I am not sure, but hopefully the former.

Java makes many things easier, but functional programming constructs is not one of these. Once I (re)learned how to use the more functional approach (it has been a long time since my LISP days) I really started to (re)appreciate the power of it. Some may wax poetical about elegance, simplicity, etc.. but that is really what it felt like to me. It sure made it harder to swallow some of the limitations that Java has without these constructs.

I am definitely not a javascript fanboi, and absolutely agree with you (and the 1E6 others) that hate the toolset for developing with it, but I do appreciate the programmatic constructs it allows. And these constructs are definitely not in Java yet (cause boy, could I have used some of them on my last project!)

That's the nice way of saying "The REAL wtf is..." :)

I took an extra year (post-sophomore fellowship) in Med school to make it 5 years. Standard path residency is 4 years, but most people do 1-2 years subspecialty training after that to make it 6 years total. It took me 2 years of classes at night while working full time to get all my pre-reqs in for med school.

I took an extra year in Med school to make it 5 years, residency will end up being 6 years, and it took me 2 years of classes at night while working full time to get all my pre-reqs in for med school. Md-Phd would have been interesting, but I like reading about bench research more than I like doing it!

Actually pathology. It's an overlooked field (only 2% of med students go into it) but great for tech minded people. The hours are not bad, even during residency (some rotations are 8-5, others, well, aren't). The paperwork is a function of how good the business workflow and technology use is -- one place I was at everything was electronic, template driven, and once you had the meat of the report, it took about 1 minute of checking some billing boxes. The back end behind that I can't speak about, but my part was definitely not onerous. Reimbursement wise -- not sure where that will go in the future, but at least from a salary comparison right now, on average it is well compensated (academically) and if you are private practice even more so.

Of course, you get to do things like determine that people DON'T have cancer (when everyone else thinks they do) which is great -- some of my best days have been figuring out that the abnormal lung PET scan was a mild self limiting infection and not small cell carcinoma.

Also, we get the strangest stuff (1 in 100E6, literally) so no one thinks they have seen it all. Even faculty who have been around since dirt was clean still get excited about the rare stuff that comes in

Why would anyone?

I am 8 years into (medical) training that will take 13 years total (not counting my 4 years of undergrad). Even if I won the lottery, I would have a hard time throwing away all the work I have done to get to where I am (one of the top training programs in the country for my field). So I would probably stay to finish things off, even though the hours are long and the days off are few. I make a big impact on people's lives everyday, I see things that most people only ever read about, and I enjoy the constant intellectual stimulation.

Of course, if I had $$$E6 tomorrow, maybe my perspective would change. If anyone would care to give such an amount, we can make a study/paper out of it :)

Modded funny, but as someone who just recently moved to BalDimore from the midwest, this is more insightful.

My wife and I relied heavily on our GPS units to find places when we first got here. We would joke that the software seemed to have a "get crack" option enabled, as it routed us through some fairly scary neighborhoods.

I also forgot to mention the extreme irony of the nickle

I see what you did there.

...once a project forks, it never goes back...

This happened to Christianity in 1054, with another major fork happening in the 16th century. I guess it had a lot to do with questions regarding the disagreements with management of the code base and who is best able to do that (or something like that).

Now it seems like there is a fork every week or so. Who can keep up with the versions? No wonder we had to develop distributed version control, since everyone seems to want their own local branch to work with. Merging it all back to the tip (or trunk) it pretty much impossible -- the devil is in the details!

FYI - egoless programming is talked about in the book Code Complete (Amazon link). This is a great book for beginning programmers (and heck, even those whose neck beards are getting longer...) I read it early on in my career and it left quite an impression, the concept of egoless programming being one of the more lasting ones.