Crusade : Babylon 5 :: Frasier : Cheers

Babylon 5 ended at the finale of season 4. Not sure what you're talking about :)

I think you're confusing "other stories set in the same universe as the show Babylon 5" with "addendums to the story of the show Babylon 5"

Right, most programmers aren't that great; there's a bell curve. When you encounter a poor programmer who dooesn't have a degree, you might be inclined to think that's why. I'll see your anecdotes and raise you one: I once saw a guy with a PHD in comp sci write a single 10,000+ loc function.

At some point in your career, everyone is their own snowflake. I'm never going to compete against a candidate that is my equal in every other way but has a degree.

I'm fortunate to be a programmer, though, because it's one of the few industries that has woken up and seen what a worthless institution our higher education system has become.

Cleaning the grounds out of a french press is awful. The aeropress completely fixes that problem.

My intention wasn't to be partisan at all, actually. I just noticed how goofy political "philosophies" seem when we set them aside for a minute. It didn't come across in my post, for sure. I should really edit before I submit next time.

As someone who also happens to be a liberal, I applaud the amount of critical thinking and self examination in your post. In fact, if such wisdom were inherent in all humans, perhaps anarchist philosophies inherent in conservatism would actually work. Now there's a funny thought.

But you're supposing that you're paying for consumption. That's a very reasonable ideal.

Netflix is paying for content, which is one step towards turning them into any other "content provider," which is exactly where telcos want them to be. They want to be in between us and Netflix so that Netflix will scratch their beak.

The end game is not you or I paying for tiers of "bandwidth," it's getting us to pay for tiers of "content" -- we should resist this rather forcefully.

Ruby is alive as long as people are willing to program in it. Also, it's very easy to find employment as a ruby programmer. I don't know what you're definition of "dead" is, but ruby certainly fails to meet mine.

Now, if the popularity were to decline to the point where no one was hiring ruby programmers anymore, then I'd obviously have to learn whatever displaced ruby. I'm going to assume that whatever displaces ruby will be an improvement. So I win either way.

You're sounding positively curmudgeonly... or maybe I'm not reading you right.

I started ruby (and rails) in 2008. I really, really loved the community around it. Back then, very, very few programmers were into ruby, since there really weren't any jobs out there. Of course, there were a lot of php programmers who adopted rails because it was so much better than php, and they often wrote awful code. But by and large most rubyists were the kind of people you wanted to work with because they made you a better programmer.

To me, the big shift that turned the community into a giant wasteland was things like CodeAcademy -- the idea that rails (and therefore ruby) would be a great platform for people who want to learn to program for the first time. Then you suddenly just started seeing codebases pop up all over the place written by very inexperienced programmers with no clue what they were doing, or any experience with software design in general.

I really, really love ruby, but I often grow tired of the community around it. I take issue with your final paragraph -- there are a ton of great ruby (and even rails) codebases out there. Your personal experiences may be artificially depressing your opinion.

I started with C, and I absolutely loved it (and still do). I also grew to love ruby's mix of OO and functional programming -- C features neither of these. Go figure.

I'd say becoming a good C coder flexes certain muscles that are essential to being a great software designer/programmer in general, but it doesn't flex all of them.

If you, falling into the "actually need it category," are the exception to the rule, then I don't see how your personal story fits in with the larger discussion about the value of electric vehicles.

Sadly, my impression in the average slashdotter has degenerated so much over the last decade that it didn't even occur to me that the OP wasn't being sarcastic.

Actually, emacs and gcc are pretty triumphant pieces of computer programming.