compay

I started learning how to program with Logo when I was in 4th grade. Perhaps it's a bit out of date now (haven't looked at it in over 20 years), but I did end up becoming a programmer.

But only when you follow a Google search result link. If you bookmark it and come back, or follow any other link, then the result does not appear.

Edit: I meant to say, the replies do not appear.

Yes, I also want to come here to read and talk about code/startups - that also means NOT reading and talking about HN itself all the time. I'm fairly tired of seeing so many "meta" posts like this voted to the top.

I wonder if by accepting the challenge, it indicates that the "guru" believes his own bullshit. That's even more scary/pathetic than thinking he's just a fake.

Damn, Spolsky can't even get a puppy without people second-guessing him. Can't a guy catch a break?

I have everything installed in ~/Homebrew and have had no problems.

I really wanted to keep liking Macports, but I got sick of having to install a new perl just to install git, among many examples. The kicker for me was installing pandoc; Macports wanted to download and compile a new GHC, refusing to recognize the one on my system. I let it run for 3 hours and finally killed the install and looked for a better way to do things.

A lot of people seem to think that simply being reasonably fluent in two languages is sufficient to be a translator. It isn't, unless your standards are incredibly low. Translating is a skill, and if you entrust it to random people, expect random results.

First? I doubt it. Also, I don't know if they were before or after these guys:

http://www.didyouwatchporn.com/

No, I'm pretty sure the author is simply not a native speaker of English. Still, that doesn't mean he can't make some good points despite a few minor grammatical errors.

"No offence to Joel or Jeff, they are doing something nice, but we don't need more Joels or Jeffs, that area already have been covered."

Sorry, but that's simply terrible advice. That's like telling Kafka, "don't write your short stories, Poe already has that style covered."

I agree we don't need a bunch of lame Joel/Jeff knockoffs. But we certainly shouldn't discourage people from trying to stand on their shoulders to create something better.

Maybe you'll never like hip-hop; to each his own. I don't like most contemporary hip-hop either, but think Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Nas, Jurassic 5 and Del the Funky Homosapien all made some great albums in the late 80's - late 90's.

I agree Sequel is awesome, and will probably be my default ORM once Rails 3 settles down.

However, the new AR in Rails 3 using Arel is pretty nice too; it's a massive improvement over AR 2. You might want to give it another look.

You're right, I chose a lousy example. Much of my experience with Ruby revolves around Rails, so perhaps that colors my perspective a bit more than I sometimes realize.

You're right, but I think this is much less true now than it was a few years ago. With the libraries developed by the Kepler project (for example) you can do quite a bit of useful coding without ever touching C.

http://github.com/keplerproject

I do quite a bit of work with Lua and never use it with C.

Lua attracts a lot of devs with a pretty low-key, humble attitude. If you go to a Ruby mailing list and ask people "should I use Ruby for x?" the answer will mostly be a resounding "yes." On the Lua list, people will often tell you "that depends," will advocate for lots of other languages, or even tell you "no, I don't think so." I think that's in part because of Lua's history as an embedded/glue language: many programmers who work with Lua don't use it as their primary language, and so they don't have the same urge to hard-core advocacy and evangelism that many other languages' users have.

At work, probably.

Bingo. I stopped reading right there.

That post sounds like the happy driver of a 1986 Honda Civic complaining about unecessary gadgets like fuel injection, power steering and antilock brakes.

One in German:

Wenn fliegen hinter fliegen fliegen, fliegen fliegen fliegen hinter nach.

It means something like, "when flies fly behind flies, then flies fly after flies."

Use RVM: http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/

I spend a lot of time on the command line, and personally find having that much info in my prompt incredibly distracting. I would really prefer to leave things like battery monitoring to my OS or Window Manager - not my shell prompt. The screenshots in this article look like the kind of stuff that you do when you're just starting with a new piece of technology and you want to use every single feature just to play around. Cool and fun, but at the end of the day perhaps not very useful.

Rails 3 is doing a lot to "fix the fuckedness." This was a patch from a contributor, not the implementation of some kind of puritanical new policy by the Rails core team. Personally I find the all the ZOMG comments in the source code stupid and annoying. Removing them was a good idea.

Just because some people on a forum laughed at the iPod when it launched doesn't make the iPad awesome.

Having owned a merchant account for many years, I can tell you that this advice is 100% correct. Do it now!

I would not consider this a "considered approach." He's doing a multi-year, ground-up rewrite of a highly successful product in order to add a list of features geared towards Textmate developers (of which there are roughly 1), rather than end-users.

Meanwhile, he gets so many complaints from dissatisfied users wanting a few core features added to the 1.x version they paid for, that every 6 months he writes plaintive blog posts telling people "I'll release it in another 6 months: software is hard!"

This is the portrait of a project that's being sadly mismanaged into irrelevance, not one that's being carefully honed to perfection.

What I find amazing is the sheer cognitive dissonance of Textmate's popularity in the Ruby community; the same community that has enthusiastically embraced Agile developer practices and whose leaders tend to speak as often about the importance of good project management as they do about good coding.

Allan was saying "the end is in sight" 6 months ago.

http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/

This really reminds me of a series of blog posts by Chad Fowler, warning against the "big rewrite."

http://chadfowler.com/2006/12/27/the-big-rewrite

Now he says the next version will be out "maybe in 6 more months if everything goes right." In other words: "I have absolutely no idea when or if I'm ever going to finish it."

Which, of course, is fine. It's his project and he has every right to develop/mismanage it as he sees fit. But I got tired of waiting for basic things like split-window to be implemented and went back to vim a while ago. If 2.0 ever comes out I'll definitely check it out but for now I'm happily using vim.

And hosting it for free at Github.

Ha, I would have thought you were a native speaker, your English is excellent. :-) I think you make the same generalizations about Latin that native English speakers often do, though, in assuming rich nominal case = complexity. The issue is much more complex than that.

Sure you can deny it. You picked the classic example of something that seems hard to you because of your native speaker bias. What some languages resolve with conjugations and declensions, others resolve with combinations of prepositions and word order. English verb-preposition combinations are so brutally hard for foreign speakers to master that they publish "collocation dictionaries" to help. Latin's case system is much more predictable and regular, in some ways it's easier to learn.

Ranking human language complexity is a much more difficult task than you might imagine.

Having studied several languages, I think the biggest difference in difficulty is in how long it takes to acquire basic proficiency. For English speakers, it's obviously easier to ramp up in Spanish or German than Chinese or Korean, because there is much more vocabulary and syntax in common.

However I think putting a number on the difficulty of becoming a fluent, capable speaker of any foreign language is much more difficult. I'm not sure if it's any easier for an English speaker to become an idiomatic, witty, eloquent speaker of German than Chinese.