As a long-time PHP dev, I recognize that it's very popular to hate on PHP, and has been for some time. And there are some valid criticisms of PHP, particularly from the domain of purity. PHP is a brutish language, with lots of warts. Whether it's the lack of any sort of parallelism or threads, or the random_underscores or the random(haystack, needle) ordering of variables in functions, there's plenty to complain about.

But PHP has its strengths, too. Its translation of strings to integers to hexidecimal numbers is "good enough" for most cases. Embedding variables into new strings works "good enough" that it's highly useful. It is extremely stable - I literally cannot remember a single incident of unexpected crashing. It's array/hash thingie is a highly convenient way to organize data from semi-sanitized sources, which is largely the norm in embedded, "enterprise" development and/or vertical stack software development.

And despite these strengths, PHP offers some interesting angles that are pragmatic (non-technical) in nature:

1) There are lots of PHP application templates and starter apps that work as a starting point for new start ups. The PHP community is generally very forgiving of newbies.

2) It's uni-thread model is simple enough for beginner/intermediate programmers to comprehend easily.

3) It's already installed on every 2-bit website hosting provider's servers.

4) You can get a tremendous amount of "real work" done with PHP. You could rather easily run a US national census by website using a small cluster of PHP servers.

Once, long ago, I was a beginner programmer, and I chose PHP for largely these reasons, reasons that have sustained me well as a developer. My company, founded on this technology, has grown rapidly and well, meeting the needs of our clients.

How can I not thank the PHP designers for the free gift that I built I career out of?

What I find interesting is that despite the popularity of Android apps written in Java, Java was included as a "legacy" language by the article.

Apparently the writer of the original article thinks "legacy" means that you have to maintain and enhance existing applications instead of developing new ones.

To me, "legacy" means that there are no new applications being developed in that language, and the only jobs available for it are maintaining and enhancing existing applications. .Net and Java are certainly not "legacy" in that sense by any stretch of the imagination.

And a pilot who loses an eye does so well without it's sensor, right?

That presumption seems to be precipitated on the theory that a computer intelligence won't "grow" or "learn" any faster than a human. Once the essential algorithms are developed and the AI is turned loose to teach itself from internet resources, I expect it's actual growth rate will be near exponential until it's absorbed everything it can from our current body of knowledge and has to start theorizing and inferring new facts from what it's learned.

Not that I expect such a level of AI anytime in the near future. But when it does happen, I'm pretty sure it's going to grow at a rate that goes far beyond anything a mere human could do. For one thing, such a system would be highly parallel and likely to "read" multiple streams of web data at the same time, where a human can only consume one thread of information at a time (and not all that well, to boot.) Where we might bookmark a link to read later, an AI would be able to spin another thread to read that link immediately, provided it has the compute capacity available.

The key, I think, is going to be in the development of the parallel processing languages that will evolve to serve our need to program systems that have ever more cores available. Our current single-threaded paradigms and manual threading approaches are far too limiting for the systems of the future.

Neither does he!

How *dare* they entice us to click a link and read an article before commenting! I won't hear of such a thing!

Newton's laws also don't handle compound interest on a loan well. So what? There are other equations for taking friction into account. Use the right laws for the right task. It's not Newton's fault if you don't know what you're doing.

KDE on Debian or any other distro tends to provide the most "XP like" user interface that I've seen. You just need to enable double-click mouse behaviour instead of the default single-click, add a few of their favourite apps to the desktop, and they're good to go.

If you're on an old system, you'll want to disable the file indexing daemons as well, as they can consume a lot of CPU and slow the machine down. If all the main user does is email and web browsing, they're not going to benefit from the indexing.

I download about 30 hours a week, but I don't actually watch any of it. I just archive it in case I'm ever bored so I have something to watch should I ever actually want to numb my brain.

And most of what I actually do watch isn't new material, but stuff that's been off the air for a few years -- like Red Dwarf.

Here's the problem: most open source software isn't owned by US authors. So the software is developed and maintained with absolutely no concern about anal-retentive American military "requirements." You can hardly take a global project and demand that people from certain nations stop contributing so that you can ship the software to a US market without getting into trouble for "conspiring" with those nations.

Quite frankly, the law is asinine anyhow. There are no shortage of places around the globe to download and access the full code and binaries of "restricted" software from those nations, because there are other nations who participate in open source projects that don't kiss American ass.

So as far as I'm concerned, RedHat is doing what is necessary to continue using open source software.

To truly meet the American legal requirements, they'd have to rewrite and lock down an insane amount of software -- including replacing the Linux kernel.

Depends on your county :)

We had 'em in Los Angeles Co., and also here in Montana. Here it comes thru about every two months.

Well, aren't you feeling a bit superior?

My wife is in her mid 40s and is in her last semester at grad school. Turns out that (at least our) Universities can actually somewhat *prefer* older applicants because they have enough life experience to not mess around and they "get the job done". Result? My wife is top of her class. She also graduated with honors as a Bachelor.

I took up flying lessons at 37. I learned it just as fast and effectively as when I learned to program at 15.

Which I think sounds like a really good idea, either way you do it.

And if it just hoists the whole to a VM, no need for config dumpster diving for individual programs that may not play nice with Wine.

Or, why running Win9x is pretty durn safe. Malware that expects XP-or-later networking just gets confused.