HolyHaddock

All of the projects I've done over the last few years have been "agile" - the company I work for actually offers agile training.

Officially, all projects are written using TDD, and all estimates for all tasks should include time to write Acceptance and Unit following the suggestions in "Growing object oriented software guided by tests", along with any integration tests with external software that may be required.

Even unofficially, I've never seen anyone consider a story "complete" until there's sufficient automated tests for it, and there's been at least some manual testing.

Another thing we strongly encourage (and do) as part of Agile is regular retrospective meetings on our software development process. If our testing strategy (or lack thereof) was causing Fear during refactoring, prod bugs, or difficulty during maintenance, this would be bought up during such a meeting and addressed.

I'm not saying you're not "doing Agile", but your experience very strongly does not match mine.

Silently inferring List[Any] is like a null reference. The error that you get told about is in a different place to where the problem that you need to fix is. In this case, the static type system could have been more helpful.

There have been attempts to fix this - WartRemover specifically has a Wart for any uses of Any for example.

Output should be measured by saving costs or new revenue, not lines of code written.

> this is on top of the other obvious benefits of ORMs, such as abstraction over my storage engine. I can write a single 'query' that be be executed against a variety of SQL servers, Salesforce, MonoDB, an in-memory cache, or whatever else I want to do with it.

This is a trade-off, not an obvious benefit. In programming to a lowest-common-database API, one loses the ability to use any actual features of the specific database technology being used. It would be very interesting to know what proportion of projects need to smoothly change the underlying DB technology (it is of course debatable whether ORM's actually let you do this), vs what proportion find themselves hampered by the less-powerful-than-SQL database manipulation API offered by an ORM.

Seconded.

I'm currently using it as a beginners Javascript book and find it extremely accessible.

Purpose and status aren't linked.

There are programmers who without direct day-to-day management produce code that is valuable to the business, and programmers who receive comprehensive managerial attention and produce code that costs the business.

> Another example is TDD. People espouse the benefits, then some study comes along (http://www.neverworkintheory.org/?p=139) saying the benefits are largely illusory and that code reviews are more effective.

The study is much more thoroughly debunked in the comments than I will attempt to reproduce here. Important points: 1) The study's hypothesis was that TDD would produce software with equal, or fewer defects than inspection. That would be one, and depending who you talk to, by no means the most significant benefit of TDD. 2) The actual data collected by the researches showed no statistically significant difference in the two approaches.

Reading studies about the effectiveness of different tools and methods is a great idea. Treating them uncritically is not. :)

> I'm less inclined to believe it than I was beforehand.

I'm not arguing with anything you said, and agree the article provided weak (if not no) evidence for the idea that increasing money has marginal utility for happiness.

What evidence did it provide that has convinced you that increasing money doesn't have marginal utility for happiness?

> Are they not entitled to earn anything? Should all researchers be starving artists in garrets?

Do you mean the creators of SfY, who seem to claim to have done at least some of the research that went into it themselves, or do you discount their effort and risk merely because another company accused them of infringing a software patent?

This does not work in the current market for the kind of role we're discussing. The hiring manager is looking for criteria to turn the big pile of CVs into a small pile of interviews.

Being overqualified, or unexplained gaps fit the bill perfectly. It really does not matter how well tailored the experience, or how impressive the covering letter.

> Well, you really need to tailor your application to be suitable for the jobs.

Be clear: You mean "you need to lie". When applying to a coffee shop, for example:

The person with a 4 year degree will not get the job. They will leave as soon as something better comes up.

The person with a 4 year gap on their CV will also not be getting the job, as it will be assumed that they're hiding something.

You seem to be stating that Christians (the anti-Dawkins) are objectively (ie measurably) less culturally and economically powerful than Feminists (the anti-Sqoot). I'm assuming, as Heroku and Sqoot are American, you mean it as a general statement about the US, or at least the US tech industry.

I'd like to believe this was true. Could you offer any evidence?

People like to talk about the tools and techniques they use regularly.

Hackers and "people" might not be interested in hammers, but I can attest that if you get a group of blacksmiths together in a pub, they will spend entire evenings talking about different kinds of hammers, techniques for striking, etc.

You're too kind, missing the drive to provide for the next generation is more than a minor nit.

A tempting response is "So something like min(20years, authors remaining lifespan)" but that could leave early work (often less commercially successful) with an expectation of a longer copyright duration than later work.

A fixed period risks letting copyright lapse in an authors lifetime, which is certainly offputting to anyone who, for example, dislikes fan-fiction. So we move towards "authors remaining lifespan + rough average lifespan" as a compromise.

Seems reasonable, although I find one way to increase my understanding of any issue is exactly this kind of discussion.

"Less money into books -> less books" seems like "demand goes down -> supply goes down" and fits my unsophisticated understanding of economics. It's not necessarily clear that reduced copyright -> less money into books.

Authors have managed to produce novels while holding down demanding full time jobs (or in at least one bestsellers case, still in full time education) at the same time. It is not necessarily the case that the only way books get made is full time writing.

You could also argue that the reduction in books from reduced copyright would be balanced by an increase in currently unwriteable "remixes" of existing works. Copyright could be, for example, the only thing holding back an explosion of people making enough to live on publishing fan-fiction. Who speaks for them?

There's still scope for a sweeping reduction, in the States at least. Reducing the duration from "Year of Authors death + 70 years" down to, just "Authors death", for example, clearly couldn't lead to any given author producing fewer books.

I absolutely agree that if there is a forum on the scope and duration of IP, small-money authors should be represented. It doesn't seem like that will be happening any time soon though.

I had a similar problem at the end of the book, in that it's difficult to describe a world where poverty does not exist and where no one really suffers as a dystopia. ("a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.")

Why I feel it's a bad world... Stunting natural fetal growth and then torturing small children to condition them into complacent compliance with their destined roles seems morally indefensible to me.

(Incidentally, soma was repeatedly described as side-effect free. I'm curious where you read it as having destructive qualities.)