We've been building buildings for a very long time: thousands of years. After a while, there was arose a correct way to build things. All the certifications and apprenticeships and oversite as to the practice of building buildings (etc) is the end result of those thousands of years.

I'm willing to bet that there weren't as many certifications and degrees for building bridges in the 1st century.
We've been building software for 60ish years. There isn't one right way to build software. There aren't many wrong ways either - that we could all agree on.

The way that we build software has changed so much in those 60-odd years that I wouldn't expect it to be the same 40 years from now. Hell, we might not even need software in 40 years. We might just be able to tell some general system what we want in natural spoken dialog and it just does what we need.

Convince the career politicians.
Step 3. Convince the tax payers.
There is no step 4.

.. is a recipe for busted keyboards, peeled off mouse buttons, broken monitors, and bloody knuckles.

That's because Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy don't:
1) Indoctrinate young children to believe they're superior to non-believers.
2) In exchange for their fealty, offers an answer to what happens after death.
3) Provide a set of rules to strive to live by.
4) Give absolution to those with the foresight to repent before they die.

Because Cosmos is a science show.

As opposed to what? A manager?
Fuck that noise.

Programming is fun. Being able to wield the power to create whatever is on my mind is fun; I can't imagine needing a game to make it more so.
These programming games all make me think they're encouraging people who have no business programming to program.

It's almost like they're saying "Hey, you, kid, this is just like a video game! Come play it. Programming is like a video game."
It's not like a video game. It's something so very much more. I think true programmers, the ones we want writing code for the next 30 years, wouldn't need this shit to get interested.

This reminds me of what Richard Feynman went through while investigating the Shuttle Discovery disaster.
They made a movie about it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt24...

For posterity, Google's DNS is:

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

I love technology. I'd like nothing more than to spend all my time on my computer. That being said, I think it's pointless and more than a little tasteless to focus on hacked websites and downed mobile phones when people are literally dying in the streets.

Why not talk about the origins of the crisis? Last I checked, getting really deep into politics and history is nerdy too.

I'm using 2013 now. They smartened up and added more color to most of the icons. It's an improvement but still no VS 2008.

The reason desktop sales has slumped isn't just because of competing devices and the cloud. It's because there hasn't been a compelling reason to get new hardware for a long time. The reason is simple: game consoles. In the last 13 years, PC games have taken a very different course than the previous 20 years. For the better part of the 80s and 90s PC games were targeted solely at PCs. For the last 13 years game publishers have targeted Xbox[360], Playstation[2/3], as well as the PC with the very same titles. This caused them to focus on the lowest common denominator hardware; consoles. This had the unhappy affect of holding back their developers from writing games to fully utilize the PC. Therefor PC gamers didn't need to upgrade their computers with the same frequency as they did the previous 20 years. This caused a gigantic PC sales slump. I see a very large increase in PC sales in the next few years due to new lowest common denominator: Xbox One and Playstation 4.

I'd guess that C was in style back in '91. It's not about style. It's about there being better tools for the job in 2013. It's about unreasonable adherence to old standards because of pure ignorance. I'm talking C++/11 and 14 not JavaScript. I'm saying if you want to pique the interest of college kids, let them write in the language they learned to use in school - C++.

I'd have to learn a code base developed by near-religious zealots, written in a language 20 years beyond chic only to be treated like a small minded idiot when I make mistakes? I've quit *well paying* development gigs because they met only one of those criteria. There's no way I'd go through that for free. Not for all the resume fodder on Earth.

A distant second to development time estimation is when I'm working for a place that requires class and or worse, pseudo code level design. I would almost always rather do a functional spec or similar higher level design then just start cranking out code, making changes as needed.