pcote

I disagree. The article makes sense to me and could be also applied to a lot of situations. Certain career paths shouldn't be pursued with depression unless they got help first. Would you recommend a depressed person pursue becoming a mortician, skydiving instructor, or prison guard just because they wanted to?

>In many occasions people simply don't fit in not because they're not productive or good people, but because they just can't function very well in a boss-less environment.

In order to function well in a boss-less environment, it helps to have grown up being educated in one. If your education is authority directed, it's natural to expect your adult work be authority directed. It seems to me that Valve's culture is particularly well matched to people who came from democratic schools. You can probably train yourself to be that kind of self-motivated person as an adult but it isn't easy.

> Not everyone can produce real-world code. Most of what we do for a living belongs to our employer. Side projects, particularly in the US, can be an issue for IP reasons (California is somewhat of an exception here)

Says who? My side project that I do on my own time doesn't use the same language as my day job nor does it tackle the same problem domain. How can this be construed as an intellectual property issue?

I remember reading this. Highly recommended but the methodology dogma goes both ways.

My take on it is this. Object-oriented and imperative style is eating with a fork and a spoon. Functional technique gives you a knife. The people I'm most suspicious of are the ones who think I'd be more productive if one of my utensils were taken away.

The upshot of Python lambdas is they're really convenient in simple situation. It causes trouble when debugging though. Sometimes, I need to stick breakpoints in places that force me to rewrite a lambda as a regular function. The more that happens, the less I like lambdas.

Doing what you love may well be good for your career. However, that doesn't mean the thing you love will BE your career. You could spend your teen years pursuing your passion of music for example. Maybe it leads you to think about how the brain responds to music. Maybe from there, that ends up turning you on to neuroscience. Maybe from there, you end up in a career as a brain surgeon. It happens.

So chasing your passion can lead you to a very good place in the world so long as your keeping your eyes and mind open while doing so. Pursuing or NOT pursuing your dreams with a closed mind will probably not get you far regardless.

Spring was born from a book on application design written by an expert on the subject. MVC .Net was probably the result of the sort of R & D that companies like Microsoft can afford to do and do well.

Not necessarily. Two brothers can be brought up under the same terrible parenting and take radically different paths with their lives.

Slightly off topic but I'd easily value communicating with my peers at $100. I have the good fortune of working with smart people who, despite the importance of their own projects, are willing to help me if needed. The time of others has value and I think it should be used accordingly.

I know a couple of guys who got into I.T. with just a high school diploma. However, those people went through a lot more than 10 years of life's hard knocks before they got there.

"Do the exercises" is only something you can do if you have the book. Learning from blog tutorials don't usually have that benefit. You could still use this person's approach but you'd have to substitute in something for step 3. I'd say some kind of "mini-project" makes an acceptable substitute in most cases.

> we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.

It's called "curriculum". It's prepackaged knowledge. It's put together in a predetermined order. It's handed down by an authority figure in a compulsory way. It's an education style that can shape how student's view learning.

2013 Scala newbie here. Scala feels nice in the way that Python feels nice. They both give the newcomer some say in what programming paradigm they get to think in. I like languages like that.

I'm a little hesitant to call Scala "Java without the semicolons". Going too implicit too soon might cause things to go horribly wrong while climbing the learning curve. Besides that, it might scare my colleagues if I was ever to bring that kind of code to work.

I use dictionary comprehensions personally but I have mixed feelings about the syntax. It looks too much like set comprehensions on first glance. Compare the following to see what I mean.

myset = {x for x in "This is my stuff".split()}

mydict = {x:len(x) for x in "This is my stuff".split()}

I love curiosity sparking posts like this.

>>key in dct

is much better than

key in dct.keys()

Of course, that got me curios to find out if there is a magic method out there that takes advantage of keyword "in". Turns out __contains__ does that.

Always exciting to stumble upon new stuff in my favorite language.

Oh, this topic again. What the heck...

>Nowadays Silicon Valley says that college education is a waste.

I wasn't aware of Silicon Valley being of one voice on this matter. Is there a representative spokesperson I don't know about?

>I find this disturbing. I want them to educate better citizens, not richer business people.

Personally, I'm not aware of how college made me a better citizen.

> But first comes the person, not the bank account.

I am not a better person than someone who didn't or couldn't go to college.

>When you look at the problems our democracy has, probably the biggest one is the "low information voter."

After the grade pressure was off, a potential job was the only thing that could get me to research anything. Later on, I learned to let my own curiosity have a say in what I looked into. I think I became a lot more "educated" when I got to that point.

I learned Python because I wanted to make stuff fun little scripts in Blender. Tutorials helped. So did reading source code and drawing inspiration from it. Ultimately, it was just one project inspiring another inspiring another.

In your case, I guess the thing to do would be to google an open-source django app. Find something you like from the templates director. Copy what you like and build out from there.

Likely an autopilot bug. It's almost second nature for a lot of coders to do this when making a list of strings.

strlist = 'one, two, three, four, five'.split(", ")

That habit probably just kicked in a little when putting in that example.

It a certain degree, beauty is a better indicator than percentages when it comes to how functional a programming language is. Scheme scores high in that regard. Python does okay if you stay moderate in it's usage. Any amount of functional programming in Java tends to be downright ugly and unlikely to pass most code reviews.

Interesting goals but....

>> 1. Create a single language that incorporates the best of functional and imperative programming. Both offer distinct advantages, and we envisioned marrying the two.

Imperative/Functional hybrid are nothing new. C#, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Scala, and Groovy all fit that bill.

>> 2. Codify and statically enforce common shared-memory state patterns, such as immutability and isolation, with minimal runtime overhead (i.e., virtually none).

"Statically enforcing variable immutability...." Isn't that just a fancy word for "constant"?

>> 4. Do all of this while still offering industry-leading code quality and performance, rivaling that of systems-level C programs. Yet still with the safety implied by the above mentioned goals.

He wants to allow for "pockets of imperative mutability tied together with functional tissue". That's not a bad thing but it's not exactly a "safe" feature if put in the wrong hands. Lots of people have written function objects with bad imperative code and side effects. Lots of people have fed them to their language's equivalent of the map function. That can cause bugs.

I can feel you there. However, there is a certain zen in the opposite as well. Having a general idea of what to build and a general plan and direction but little else. The specifics are left to between you and the thing you are building as you build it.

And that's what's beautiful about a good general purpose bucket of bricks. It's right brained creativity which complements Lego's instruction-based kits.

I'm a Python guy with a Java day job so I'm guessing my situation isn't that different from what he dealt with in 2006. Heck, most of us Java guys are dealing with it in 2012!

Python didn't drag my day job down. Instead, it gives me the understanding of what Java's shortcomings are and why IDEs and frameworks exist to cope with them.

It also changed the way I looked at design patterns. Before I knew Python, they were pretty intimidating. Now, I look at a strategy pattern implementation and find it more a cute attempt to compensate for something than anything else.

The problem with this matter is it's been done before. In 2000, pictures of Elian Gonzalez being face to face with swat forces caused only limited outrage. The public was exposed to that case so much that they pretty much got numb to the situation and were downright sick of hearing about it before the raid happened. If anything in overall U.S. Cuba relations changed, it probably had nothing to do with the kid.

It's not that different with regard to file sharing. We've been hearing horror stories over extreme anti-piracy tactics for close to 15 years now. Your average 20 year old doesn't know of a world where this sort of thing doesn't happen. So in this kind of environment, I just don't see how one little girl is going to change anything.

The Row v. Wade decision inferred a constitutional right to privacy within the 14th amendment. If this right exists, then it makes no sense to limit it to specific subclasses.

Arguing (or watching people argue) trivial matters gives my brain a break from the serious things I would otherwise be working on. That's probably what drives most people into these discussions and onto their soap boxes too. It's a lot more fun than trying to figure out why my app can't find that damn configuration file.

I don't like to envision big because I would be too intimidated by my big vision to start small. Starting with a modest idea helps me keep things concrete. "Envision big" causes me to start thinking abstractly prematurely. I tend to not write much code at all when I do that.

List comprehensions are not deep magic. If you use SQL as your frame of reference, it's actually pretty easy to pick up. They also add a hell of a lot to readability once you know what it does.

> Words evolve, why can't "to steal" mean "to take something without permission regardless of the expectations of the person licensed to distribute that something"? We need a word for it... the world is becoming more and more digital! Stealing is just a word that so far has only been used to refer to physical goods because only recently have digital goods existed! The word "hacker" has evolved in meaning, why can't "stealing"?

Here's why. Evolution of a thing is dictated by variations of that thing and its ability to survive and spread in its environment. That applies to the existence and meanings of words too, including the word "hacker". If a new or altered term for "stealing" hasn't taken root in society, then it's unfit. It doesn't matter whether or not "we have a need for it".

Python does not typically end up in a video game's main code base. However, to say it failed is to have a pretty limited view of game development. Art asset creation often requires customized tools within software packages like Blender or Maya. Python is doing just fine within it's part of the development pipeline.

The merits of functional programming techniques are a lot more interesting than the languages that implement them, "pure" or not. Closures, first class functions, and list comprehensions are interesting topics of discussion. Java vs. Haskell not-so-much.