Oh come on, I don't watch much TV either, but if you've been on the internet for more than five minutes you must have come across the blackjack and hookers gag.

Not everyone lives under a rock either.

And if you are arguing that you've never heard of that Futurama reference before... You are either lying, have been in a coma for the last couple of decades (it's a show from the '90s, bro), are 3 years old, have been in a prison (solitary) for the last couple of decades or in some other way removed from the society in general and geek/nerd crowd in particular.

I'm leaning towards being a convicted murderer who just got out of prison and killed the real cribera, stealing his laptop and now posting on slashdot under his name. It would also explain the trolling. You do that cause you're a sociopath.

Not everyone lives under a rock either.

And if you are arguing that you've never heard of that Futurama reference before... You are either lying, have been in a coma for the last couple of decades (it's a show from the '90s, bro), are 3 years old, have been in a prison (solitary) for the last couple of decades or in some other way removed from the society in general and geek/nerd crowd in particular.

I'm leaning towards being a convicted murderer who just got out of prison and killed the real cribera, stealing his laptop and now posting on slashdot under his name. It would also explain the trolling. You do that cause you're a sociopath.

Oh whine some more, you childish Asperger's super-case. Are you such a twat that you demand that we take your "ant" shit seriously, but everyone else's examples are no good?

Are you 15 years old? Do you have *any* friends? At all? Is "cribera" Portuguese for "Fucking Crybaby"?

It's amazing how many software types are so rigid and ignorant in their thinking outside of their little bit-mashing keyboard punching.

No, your post wasn't "reasoned", what an asshole thing to say. You're invoking all kinds of fantasies and idiocies about "alien races capable of reaching us". What's reasoned about that?

It's a fantasy. There's not a shred of evidence that any such thing is possible. There are no materials or energy sources that will allow anything like that. There just aren't. *That's* why the universe looks empty, not because there isn't other life, but because of the limits of reality.

"And the difference of such alien civilization (one capable of contacting us from a so huge distance), compared to us humans, would be far bigger than the difference between us and the ants."

Again, according to who? How? Your incredible "reasoning"? Your implied shit-eating racism in your "reasoned" post aside, you just invoke a bunch of rhetoric as if we're just supposed to swallow it. Well, fuck you.

Fuck you and your childish self-important egotistical sci-fi masturbation. I got modded higher than you because you're an idiot and I brought your delusional ass back to reality.

Fucknutz.

Because SCIFI. You know... The main topic. You know, those completely imaginary stories, which people imagine around premises like "Maybe A with maybe B equals maybe C... Hmmm... How would that go?"

The second comment is me telling you to go and IMAGINE a plausible story of your own, around that concept or some other. And I told it as a JOKE, which includes a reference to a comical SCIFI show.

Funny thing is, I added the Futurama reference to MAKE SURE no one mistook my reply for something other than jovial. Clearly, that went well.

Easy. Someone else with mod points understood what I said and got the reference.

It's absurd that given what we *know* as FACTS about materials and energy sources, that anyone would think intergalactic (who brought up galaxies anyhow?) travel is even remotely possible.

There are intelligent Africans who live in mud huts, and there are stupendously stupid North Americans driving tanks.

So what does technology have to do with intelligence?

How should I know? They are aliens.

I just gave you a premise. Imagine your own damn scifi alien race. With or without hookers and blackjack.

The existing UFO sightings are consistent with an advanced civilization who observe us, perhaps even tinker with us, but generally stay out of sight. The "high" ones may be the numskulls who crash in New Mexico deserts.

Maybe immortality cancels out curiosity.

It always depends upon the circumstances.

There are times when being a great programmer could be the most important thing, but except in one man/woman operations this is very rarely the case.

It's overlooked because there's a romanticism (sad and geeky though it is) about wondrous programmers being able to leap tall feature lists with a single bound...

Not at all. This isn't some elitist "I'm not a programmer" kind of thing. I am a programmer, but that ability is a subset of my abilities as a software engineer.

Programming is the ability to instruct a computer to perform actions. A programmer is someone who has this skill.

Software engineering is a superset of programming. It includes the abilities of a programmers, plus the skills, the ethos, and the discipline for all the other aspects of building software that are important. The discipline is the most difficult part (at least for me.)

The simplicity of those differences can be seen in the drudgery of commenting your code where appropriate (or, if you know that junior developers will be working in the codebase, documenting it thoroughly), and the complexity of those differences can be in recognizing that the architecture of your solution provides for 3rd party integration opportunities that may be of enormous value to your employer and yet require more work on your behalf because abstraction can also be drudgery.

This doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who consider themselves programmers, not software engineers, that don't have these skills - it means that that they are what would be technically considered a software engineer.

You can pick up a book on learning JavaScript in 24 hours and start programming and even refer to yourself as a programmer if you land a job doing so, but calling yourself a software engineer at that point is ridiculous. Heck, quite a few CS grads don't even appear to be able to call themselves programmers (they do so little of it in the course of their studies generally.)

An analogy, which in my obviously subjective opinion, describes this relationship would be a mechanic and a mechanical engineer. That is a rougher comparison than the differences between MOST programmers and software engineers, but it conveys the basis of what I mean.

They suck. Used them. Hated them.

They're fine for simple if-then-else and loop processing logic, but when it comes to complex code, they suck donkey balls. And most of the code I have to write is complex code; I leave the simple stuff to the junior masses.

Because text based stuff works. All the graphical programming stuff essentially is experimental. ALL of them have major faults. Yes, there are some people who think that everything can be done in UML and then automatically have that generate code, but that requires a huge investment to learn UML (at least as much time as it takes to learn a text based language) plus the code generated is not necessarily efficient. This is a very old idea, people have been working on this for decades!

It is only recently that we've had graphical displays that I would considere good enough for the level of detail necessary. The computer monitors from 10 years ago were not high enough resolution.

And frankly there's nothing wrong with text based programming. After all we are programmers. We all learned calculus (or should have), physics (or should have), we learned all the theory (or should have), we wrote term papers using text, and so forth. So to learn a simple programing language should not be a hurdle to anyone. We're professionals, we should never be saying "this is too hard!"

Graphical user interfaces are not efficient in terms of building something up. Lots and lots of mouse movement is necessary merely to draw out a basic set of blocks and flow control but then you still need lots and lots of mouse movement to apply the correct sets of properties to each box, each line, and so forth (ie, type in variable names, set their type, make them const, place them in the correct scope, etc). Whereas text you just start typing and it is fast. That's why we still use command language interfaces instead of graphical user interfaces for most professionals, they're faster and more efficient. You may think that typing is slow and cumbersome, but I find using tools like Visio and Powerpoint to be slow and cumbersome.

Finally, how are you going to share your graphical program? Do you require everyone who will read your code to also have the same graphical code viewer, no matter what operating system they are on? Sure this may be ok if you're just doing simplistic visual basic but in the real world you can't rely on this. The practical matter is that it will get translated into a textual form just to be shared. At which point you may have well done it in text to start with. Why do we have so many programming languages? Because not everyone agrees on just one language, and of course no language is equally efficient in all problem domains. The same issue will exist in any graphical programming style; no one will agree on just one, and you'll need different variants.

Basically, text based programs are indeed simpler and more robust. Now maybe you don't like some programming languages because they're too verbose and hard to type, in which case choose a language that uses higher level constructs, and so forth.

We're two. That's already enough. There are plenty of '4GL' languages out there, where you draw diagrams and 'write no code' but they're very limited in what you can do. You can only do what the language and tool designers have already thought of. As soon as you need to do anything more complex. you need a write code.