Even "left wing" in America tends to mean "somewhere a bit to the right of Genghis Khan".

But they generally tend to be able to spell the name of their party properly.

"I'm open to hearing the argument as to why people may think it appropriate." != "I support the idea of homeopathy".

And it's a "submission".

The techniques were from 14% of Fowler's book (10 out of 72 refactoring techniques). One of the techniques that was chosen was "Extract Subclass". One of the quality measures they used was "Depth of Inheritance". Quality went down. Go figure.

I think you posted this on the wrong site, as /. is full of "engineers" who think they know everything. Indeed, the computing industry is full of engineers who think they know everything, which would be fine if not for the fact that computers need to interface with human beings, and are usually piss-poor at doing so. One of the main reasons behind this that not enough "engineers" have read Portrait of the Artist, or War and Peace, or indeed anything other than a scattering of pages from "Professional JQuery". Stay away from education for the time being. Use your English skills to get a "content production" (i.e. writing) job at a web firm of some sort - this will put you in situations where programming / logical thinking are going on all around you, and some of your latent scientific abilities will start to emerge. You will soon find that most of the "engineers" around you know as little or less about what they're doing as you do. But at least you will be conscientious about it, at which point, start looking for a Masters you can do based on your Arts undergrad and industrial experience. An earlier suggestion to find an open source project to work on is also a good one. The best software is Open Source, but the best Open Source software (i.e. about 0.001% of it) has good documentation. Ergo there are a lot of projects out there that could be great but are crying out for some well written documentation. (One that springs to mind that I've dealt with recently is Lucene - last time I looked the documentation was good for V3, but lagging behind after it's last major upgrade from V3 to V4). Don't let the assholes who say "stay away from engineering if you studied english" put you off. They, and their allergy to the realities of human existence, are one of the main reasons why so many IT projects fail (see The Lean Startup for details).

http://www.newsweek.com/assang...

Yeah - working with Schmidt's company is really going to keep your stuff away from the US government... http://www.newsweek.com/assang...

... given I watched "Pain and Gain" yesterday, in which Positive Thinking gobshite is held up as the inspiration behind meatheads torturing and murdering people. (It's a comedy).

London is kind of a special case but you are correct. I know people from London who break into a sweat when they have to go to the countryside.

Brains have not been "designed" to be "wired up" to do anything. Thinking of them in such terms is a pointless over-simplification. If you're struggling to read a book because you've been skimming the web for too long, stick at it, and it'll soon adapt itself back again. That's what it does.

Firstly - I've worked with (indeed I used to be) a programmer that learned through doing. As such, I've categorised such people into two groups: - those that give a shit about getting better, and those that don't. You appear to be in the first category, which is by far the better and much less dangerous of the two. About ten years ago now, I decided that I'd had enough of meetings in which I'd have to muddle through and make answers up as I went along, so I went back to University and got a Masters in Computing; my undergrad degree was in English - then I got sucked into programming via HTML, then JavaScript, then "classic" ASP etc - as I say - it all kind of snowballed as it went along. The Computing Masters was fun to do and resulted in the following major improvements: firstly, nowadays when I'm in a meeting and I don't know what people are talking about, I'm confident enough to admit it. Secondly, I have the research skills to go and find out more about the thing I don't know about. I'm pretty sure I could have gained these skills without doing a Masters, too - but (as several others have mentioned here) it's the confidence that makes the difference, however you get it. Since then, I've been a team lead at a Finance Company and (just about) managed to hold that down. I also came to the conclusion that the brash, "confident" (i.e. egotistical) developers were the dangerous ones, who always seemed to be followed around by a cloud of disaster - their "confidence" was usually utter BS. Also, fundamentally, whether you know "Framework X" or "Foundation Y" should always be secondary to whether you know how to code well in a team - to which end, I recommend that you read both Clean Code and The Clean Coder by "Uncle" Bob Martin. And learn how to write good tests. As I say - the fact that you're being conscientious about this is a good indicator that you'll be OK. Best of luck.

Sigh. Schrodinger's cat is both a member and not a member at the same time.

Read this: http://martinfowler.com/books/... Then realise that all organisations are sitting on top of mountains of crappy legacy code, and developers that can deal with it are the most genuinely valuable people in the marketplace.

Yet another frantic debate about Agile on Slashdot where the word "testing" is only used a handful of times. :(