caustic

"Even when you are coding, you spend a lot of time testing what you have just coded, and realizing what you have just done does not work."

This is not my case. Over years I developed a habit to write correct code at (almost) first attempt. Am I qualified for pair programming?

I would like to see Hacker News data dump. Would it be possible?

Amazing conciseness. Don't forget to check out lift web framework http://liftweb.net/. It's written in Scala too and uses similar techniques.

You need to change copyright year from 2008 to 2009.

I don't care about downvotes. HN is just a great web site with great contents so that I hardly ever feel the need to downvote something.

Y combinator in JavaScript: http://thraxil.org/users/anders/posts/2008/09/15/My-Own-Java...

What would happen if I tried load testing loadimpact.com?

It would be nice to see Yahoo does the same thing.

What about Prolog? Why it's not in the list?

What is your experience with tools and technologies besides .NET and Visual Studio? Can you compare fairly?

As someone who works in a company producing agile project management software, I can confirm that the whole agile thing is surely a money-making machine and very lucrative market with plenty of competitors.

The funny thing is that while our company tries to follow agile practices internally, this does not prevent iterations from failing. The developers are not that bright, the growing code base is not that awesome, and this is our worst enemy.

From my experience of working with both Java and .NET I can say that: the weakest part of the .NET technology stack is community, and the strongest part of the Java world is community which produced the huge pool of quality, free and open-source frameworks. Currently Maven repositories count for more than 14,000 unique artifacts and almost 60,000 versions (http://www.mvnbrowser.com/faq.html).

C# is a nice language, but when you have to develop a real-world application, it does not help much. .NET simply lacks too many essential tools and frameworks. You can do basic things with it, but when you have a non-standard task at hand, you are alone to implement the solution by yourself or pay for crappy third-party closed-source component. Even for trivial tasks. Want a decent HTML parser to sanitize HTML documents? Write it by yourself or pay for crappy third-party closed-source component. Want to read email messages from the server? ... you got the idea. The list goes on and on. I am currently working on a C# project which has integration with source control systems. We had to invest a lot of time to write our own framework and providers for several most widely adopted tools, such as Subversion and Perforce. If we based our project on Java, we would saved lot of time on development by choosing Maven SCM providers, which are free and open-source. Another example is that we needed a decent audit history for the documents in the database. Again, we had to develop somewhat working home-grown solution. If we based our project on Java, we would simply pick open-source Envers framework (http://www.jboss.org/envers/) which does exactly what we need for free.

And I hate Visual Studio. It offers a little more than a notepad with syntax coloring and debugger. It is horrible for coding and those variegated wizards and diagramming tools don't make me productive either. Being unable to attach third-party source codes is a huge PITA. Eclipse in size is just a fraction of the VS installer, but still is feature-packed, better for refactoring and has a plenty of plugins. Speaking of IntelliJ Idea, it's simply the best IDE ever.

.NET build and CI tools suck, there is nothing to compare with Maven.

If you like to learn new languages, I think there is nothing to beat JVM in terms of variety programming languages running on top of it. Just for example, the most notable ones are JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Groovy (Python-like language with Java-friendly syntax), Scala, Clojure (Lisp-like), CAL Language (Haskell-like) and many more. By the way, JVM by itself is quite a decent piece of engineering.

My experience makes me think that Microsoft is trying to be popular at any cost, targeting inexperienced programmers, intentionally oversimplifying their solutions, making simple things trivial, complex things impossible. The Microsoft culture is to give you a big bright flashy button, which does a lot of things under the hood, but when accidentally it breaks, you are unable to guess what is going on and how to fix it. Living in the world of closed-source .NET code makes me cry.

So the conclusion is: choose Java over .NET, but learn more uncommon programming languages as well. Haskell, Lisp and Prolog were huge "brain-washers" for me.

I bet PG would sign up for this program for Viaweb if he had to start it these days!

From my experience I can tell that it's almost always possible to find better alternatives for Microsoft products and technologies. It seems like the only people who use MS stuff are those who don't care about what they have at hand.

java virtual machine?

Guys, could you please take a look at the project I am working on: http://keybr.com I thought it could be a good touch typing trainer web application.