ohwaitnvm

As an NYU CompSci major, I'll say that if you were going to choose a school entirely based on the quality of its CS department, NYU is not the way to go. First off, the department is small. Intro classes are offered every semester, though after even the first course, you end up with no flexibility in selection of times or instructors. Every Major-required course is offered every semester, so no worries there, but again, professor choice and classtime options are non-existant.

Moving on to the electives: The most popular electives are offered maybe every semester, as a single course, but it is much more common to see electives given only one slot every year. The less popular (either for teaching or for students themselves; I'm not sure) electives are offered as rarely as once every two years, and they include things such as Intro to Database Systems, Unix Tools, or other things that seem like they should be offered more frequently.

A plus is that you can take graduate level courses as electives, and there are quite a few interesting topics offered there. If you're looking to do web development, currently there is a Googler-taught course on Ruby on Rails, but little choice in the way of others such as Django or PHP. Actually, the CS department intentionally gimps some of the more interesting courses, reducing them to having zero value towards the completion of your major. (Web Development is an overview course that happens to be one of them.)

That said, NYC is an amazing place to be, and I don't think I'd want to be anywhere else, even given a better CS department. As well, you have the option of the Stern school of business, wherein you can take business classes, or potentially meet other NYU kids with ideas for startups, and business-side knowledge (though much more frequently you'll meet Sternies with ideas ripped off from other websites, and 0 ability to do anything productive for the site, who really just want to use you for grunt work programming their wonderful idea.)

Good luck with college applications, and may you end up with a wonderful department!

I was debating type systems with a fellow student the other day, and there seemed to be a sort of disconnect in the meanings of the different labels we applied to one another's preferences and arguments. This article definitely helped me see more of the other side of the debate (Mine being that of a hardcore Rubyist amd his of Java) and understand the disconnect we were having in discussion.

A worthwhile read for sure.

Certainly a nice stat to see, but what I think would be significantly more interesting is data on bulk buyers of domains. After all, a drop in deletions says nothing about the purchasing of said domains; what would be great to see is a drop in bulk domain purchases.

Fine by me.

I can understand what you're saying, and I agree, but I think you miss the idea of abandoning the mouse. You're not doing it with intent to lose the marginal benefit of the mouse, rather, you need to give it up in order to become more efficient and familiar with the keybindings.

Thus, once you are no longer a beginner (the guide's target audience) you may graduate to keyboard+mouse. I don't use emacs or vi(m) or anything truly in line with them (textmate is my closest) but I have no doubt that someone who uses only the keyboard for three months and then reintroduces the mouse will show a greater capability with the tools than the same person spending the same time using both keyboard and mouse.