caustic

"Testing is waste of time" -- yes, we already know this.

Unit testing through skeptic's eye -- "It's OK Not to Write Unit Tests", as discussed here previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376417

Ironically, just few days ago I submitted the link to Links programming language here on HN -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2003828

It reminds me the masterpiece "I am a Modern Man" by George Carlin -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkCR-w3AYOE

Do you work there, at mlstate?

This seems to be very cool project too. I will not compare technical merits of all the mentioned projects, because I am not experienced with any of them.

Do you have any big application developed in OPA? How was the experience compared to more traditional webdev stack?

It seems like they are embedding some state in these URLs. By I am by no means an expert in this language, so I am only guessing here.

This is arguably one of the coolest things I have seen. It's web programming without tiers, as they call it. Just take a look at examples -- there is no distinction between client and server. Everything is defined in a single source. Beautiful. I think mainstream should adopt more languages like this.

Is this article by the guy who couldn't write Sudoku solver in his favorite TDD way?

It seems like they were right about Singularity!

I don't know, may be it is just me, but I noticed people here at HN don't have respect about agile. Is this the case?

Sorry for the duplicate submission, but the Wikipedia page title changes all the time.

Please note, I am not the author of the mentioned article. In fact, I never took Modafinil. I just remembered there was a decent discussion here at HN of the first part of the article, then I Googled and found there is follow up. So I decided to post it here.

In your case it would be better to use interpolation search[1][2] instead of binary search.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation_search [2] http://sna-projects.com/blog/2010/06/beating-binary-search/

Moreover, when you start doing, you'll notice that most of the "knowledge" you've got from these business books is useless.

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is".

"For entrepreneurs, reading business books is the new television"

Could not agree more with the author. Most of these books are just waste of time. There are few good business books, though, the ones that look at things though skeptic's eye, the ones that disillusion you. But even those books are probably not worth reading.

Moreover, most of these books were written by authors who have never done any significant business in their life.

The problem with software development is it is just a very broad field. When someone talks about programming, he/she usually talk about some specific kind of programming. You see, there are many programming worlds, like system programming, middleware/framework programming, multimedia/game programming, embedded devices programming, business applications development and so on. These are very different and require different skill sets. One will have hard time transitioning from writing dating sites in PHP to writing high-performant web servers, from writing SQL queries to designing database engines.

I am convinced that Agile is implicitly related to business application development, and when someone is saying he/she is using Agile methodology, they most likely develop web applications for enterprises. And probably this is the most widespread niche today. But frankly speaking, I don't think this is not the most challenging work for programmers. Been there, done that.

But I am yet to see Agile evangelist who clearly states what kind of projects Agile is appropriate for. They all speak about software development in general without making distinction, as if Linux kernel or Java virtual machine or Ruby on Rails framework should be developed with their methodology. Certainly you can come up with many more examples of successfull hi-tech projects that didn't use Agile. Ironically, these projects is what makes Agile possible at all. Millions of man-haours were invested in development of operating systems, databases, virtual machines, libraries, middleware frameworks, programming languages, protocols and so on and on. Agile developers take all this as granted and try to teach everyone else how to do software development.

Or thise evangelists simply have too narrow scope, then this ignorance annoying. Does Agile work for software projects that require heavy engineering? I don't think so.

For Linux users there is also redshift application -- that is a f.lux analog.

http://jonls.dk/redshift/

It's funny, I wrote a Kanban board to my ex-employer and know other people who work on similar projects. New competitors pop out every week. Way too many Kanban boards already.

I think this is the beginning of the new generation of project management tools that focus on communication instead of planning and reporting.

My favorite one is Bullshit Job Title Generator (http://www.bullshitjob.com/title/)

Here are few examples:

* Direct Tactics Analyst

* Senior Infrastructure Producer

* Regional Communications Manager

* Global Functionality Analyst

* Legacy Usability Specialist

This is one of the most useful posts on HN in my opinion. It is both very practical and informative.

I am doing solo part time development on a medium size personal project which uses Maven as it's build system. It works just well for me, I have nothing bad to say about it.

Yes, Maven is a great tool in my opinion. With automatic dependency management and IDE integration it makes my life so much easier.

When I'm justifying including a third party (open source) library I ignore those that are not build with Maven and whose artifacts are not installed in the central repository.

* slow (even with -o to stop it downloading the internet every time)

At least you don't have to download everything manually, which is far, far more tedious. I'd rather let it to the tool to download dependencies.

* incredibly verbose, in both configuration and output during builds

I bet the simplest pom file will be shorter than the equal ant build script. And I personally don't care about output verbosity.

* inflexible (but I've not really looked into plugins or advanced configuration)

You can easily extend maven builds with ant scripts, which makes Maven as flexible as Ant.

*opaque and thinly documented even for basic needs

That may be the real issue.

> helped someone go... to the top of his field

Did it really? I seriously doubt it. Bill might be mistaken. To me it looks like just one of the cognitive biases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Unfortunately we cannot conduct an experiment of having two identical Bill Clinton, one of them read this book while another did not, then see they results.

But among more than 3 million of book readers, how many of them have something as close to Bill Clinton's achievements?

> he "sold over 3 million copies" of the book

Then we have 3 million of Bills Clinton?

I have a couple of questions.

1. I couldn't find biography of Alan Lakein, the author of the book. Did he achieve something as extraordinary as Bill Clinton did?

2. Could Bill Clinton achieve the same life goals without help from this book?

The article provides 10 reasons why pair programming might not work. Moreover, it says that these reasons are very common:

  10. Most software managers...
  9. Most software shops...
  8. Most software shops...
  7. Most software shops...
  6. Most software people...
  5. Most software shops...
  4. Most software shops...
  3. Most software developers...
  2. Most software developers...
  1. Most software shops...

Do you see the pattern: most pair programming attempts, if they happen, fail, because of "Most of the...".

You write: "most of the people who have tried pair programming like it". Your conclusion is contrary to one of the the article.

You have spotted it. The whole Agile movement and its practices, like pair programming, are driven and promoted by consultants who make money out of it.

EDIT Moreover, I am not sure whether the companies you mentioned really practice pair programming or they use it as a marketing ploy to impress they customers.

Where are these people come from? Installing Eclipse is as easy as unpacking ZIP file. Unlike VisualStudio, whose installer is just slow and buggy piece of crap, which constantly breaks so hard, that you have to download a special tool to reinstall it.

They didn't mention Facebook. Should they?

The story has sequel: The parable of the two programmers, continued http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1012623