No, the guy you're replying to thinks that it is not necessary to write your entire program in C++. I'm aware of JNI as well. In a distributed environment, however, it's more likely that RPC of some type to communicate with other parts of the application will be used, since it is more portable.

What can I say? I don't forget things. And old, arcane knowledge will have applications in the present day. I don't need to push out "cruft" like how pointers really work, and how memory is really managed to remain current. This is precisely the sort of thing that separates the men from the boys. I don't doubt that you're a good programmer, but the more you remember, the more you can apply that old knowledge to new problems. Memory is as much a part of intelligence as anything else.

Which, of course, is why I haven't written my own in over 10 years. The fact that you have forgotten shows that you didn't find it that important in the first place. C is an excellent language for understanding how a computer works. Managed languages are great because they remove elements that are likely to lead to human error. The tradeoff is that your program isn't as fast. These days, there are ways (CORBA, for example) to communicate performance-intensive code with the easier-to-maintain managed code.

Indeed. Binary, of course, is written in strings of more than 1 bit.

You've never forgotten a single const or free in your code? I'm seriously impressed, and tip my hat to you. I'm not yet ready for the borg implants.

Yes I am. So what?

It is. And that's entirely the point of this story: "from the lowering-the-bar dept.". Because most CS/Software Engineering grads are mediocre, we should accept mediocre programmers? /shrug. It's their money and their loss. There was an age when the "caveman" programmer was accepted, because he did the job. Now companies worry about "team players" and "personality" fits. Intelligent people are excellent problem solvers, but often have personality flaws similar to mine. What can I say? People whining that they can't make the grade don't get a lot of sympathy from me.

I was hired well after the fires started burning. Why keep a programmer on staff when you can hire them for a few months at a time after your development team has completely fucked up?

Yes, that was what I meant. A bad mistake on my part.

I use Java these days. It's a little slower than C/C++, but you can interact with C++ modules via CORBA/IIOP. There are many good Java app servers, and many great IDEs. Still, sometimes a quick-and-dirty script with Perl is the way to go. C and C++ are more prone to the odd human error, which means that it takes longer to write something in C++.

Wow! What an amazing comeback. I'm going to cry for days now.

Too bad you're an AC and probably won't read this, but anyway... Egoless programming is a stupid idea. Do you want the job done, or do you want to have group hugs when shit breaks constantly? I've carried countless groups through school and work, without complaining, because I live to code. Binary is a second language to me and everything else just builds on that. I've put out a ton of fires, because I am as good as I think I am. In the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) "it is just as much a fallacy to underestimate your intelligence as overestimate it." As you'll note, I don't claim to be the best. But I am a hell of a lot better than pretty much any "developer" I've had the misfortune to work with.

I haven't coded a linked list in C in 10 years either, but I could still do it in my sleep. Sounds like you know less than you think you do.

No, they didn't write the search engine. But they outlasted Altavista, Hotbot and Lycos, probably because it indexed more sites and had more accurate search results.

And why not say Google? It is their primary product, after all, and it's been around for a long time. And frankly, I don't hold a candle to the guys who originally wrote the search engine.