You treat her like a sex toy.
Just pulling her out
when you need a quickie.
She’s not like that you know.
She wants a real relationship
and she’s more than capable
of supporting one.
But that’s all you ever see her for…
A quickie. A little bit-o-feel-good.
You pop her off to get the job done
but turn your nose up at her
when you catch a glimpse
of how kinky she’ll let you get.
Justin Jamesasks why nobody seems to care about performance anymore. He talks about how the performance hit you get from using a “slow” language directly translate into increased hardware and electricity costs just to maintain the same kind of performance you would have had if you’d used a “fast” language or spent more time optimizing your code.
All his points are good, but they’re also all irrelevant. You see, for most applications the performance hits you get from slow languages or non-optimized code just don’t matter. Your system will still be responsive enough that no-one will be bothered. People don’t care because it just doesn’t have any noticeable effect on the end product and some languages make coding far more enjoyable and productive. Their productivity gains far outweigh performance hits that are almost unnoticeable by end users.
I’ve been programming in Java professionally for years now, and while I’ve become good at it, it’s never grown into a language I’ve been passionate about. It’s powerful, has tons of good libraries and tools but… It’s like going out on a nice date with someone but having no desire to ask them out for a second. You wouldn’t mind another dinner with them, and since you’ve got a common circle of friends you probably will, but you’re never going to get the butterflies in the tummy when you think about seeing them again. I’ve met a lot of people who’ve been out on a date with Java, and so far none of them seem to have tummy butterflies either.
One
of my favorite places in Boston is one of it’s best kept secrets. It’s
not obvious how to get there, or that it even exists, but secreted
within the bowels of the Boston Public
Library
is a beautiful courtyard. It’s a wonderful, quiet, relaxing place to
spend an afternoon reading. There’s even a little coffee shop just
before one of it’s entrances.
This afternoon I went on an excursion. In my quest to expand my mathematical knowledge I bit off a bit more than I was ready to chew with The Nature of Mathematical Modeling.
A reader commented that
…the syntax of Perl is so hideous and mysterious it produces unmaintainable code (I know having maintained a multi-tier Perl webapp).
And, sadly, he’s not the only one that shares that belief. Perl has been written off by many talented developers because essentially every piece of Perl code they’ve ever encountered is, well, crap. But, when you get right down to it you’re basing your opinion of a language based on what people write with it. It’s like saying that the English language sucks because there are so many vile and crappy things written in it.
I’ve just clicked send on my letter of resignation. Doing it in person wasn’t an option as my bosses are in NJ and I’m in MA. It was scary as hell to click that button because today was the end of a long stretch of serious mis-communications related to verifying my past employment and a significant portion of my brain is in a state of denial that the job offer is finally finalized. Because a few of you still haven’t heard the details please allow me to explain what has been happening over the past few weeks. If you don’t know me and don’t care about the problems I encountered getting my new job because of HireRight please just take this simple piece of advice and then stop reading: ALWAYS keep some pay-stubs from your past employers. ALWAYS keep your w2s / 1099s and ALWAYS keep in touch with your past managers.
In the not so recent “outsourcing” episode of 30 days the American whose job has been outsourced to India goes there and comes to a number of interesting realizations including this:
“Knowing that probably like 16 people are surviving off of my one job … it’s almost like charitable at that point. They need the job way more than I do.”
Your thought exercise for the day is to answer this question: What can you do as a developer to justify yourself as being more valuable than sixteen Indians?
O’Reilly has just agreed to assign
…the full copyright in the book “Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials” to The Perl Foundation. The text is out-of-date, but can be updated much more rapidly than it can be rewritten from scratch.
Three cheers for O’Reilly. I wish more publishers would stop being so damn stupid when it comes to the copyright on old books that they have no intention of reprinting. Especially geek books which are frequently outdated and no-one would want them if they were reprinted (not rewritten).
Have you noticed? Geeks don’t touch. I noticed this in myself a while ago, and have since been watching other geeks to confirm my theory. I was at the Boston Ruby User’s Group a week ago and essentially no-one touched. When two geeks are introduced, unless it’s a somewhat formal introduction like an interview, we don’t shake. When we encounter each other, or go our separate ways, there’s no casual touching. Many will actually wave at each other in greeting from a few feet apart so as to avoid the simple touch that normal people would expect. I think this is a byproduct of the fact that so many developers are autistic regardless of if they realize it or not.
If you’re reading this blog there’s a fair chance you’re a programmer and that means that from time to time you’ll encounter people who want advice on leaning how to program. Unfortunately, it’s hard to point them in the right direction because we generally don’t want to spend the time to teach them ourselves and even if we did most of the learning to program books just plain suck.
So, I’d like to recommend two books. The first is Learn to Program by Chris Pine.This is the best intro to programming that I’ve ever seen. It’s not concerned so much with how to do things in a specific language as it is with teaching people the basic principles of programming although it uses Ruby to do so. It’s based on a series of tutorials that are still online but have been improved on, and expanded upon greatly in the book.
