rob05c

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_professionalism

"In 1993 the IEEE and ACM began a joint effort...to explore making software engineering into a profession...The ACM pulled out of SWECC in May 1999...ACM determined that the state of knowledge and practice in software engineering was too immature to warrant licensing"

Granted, that was in 1999. I haven't heard anything since.

The ACM article explaining why they pulled out is here: dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=581602 (paywall)

Two states adopted the IEEE's recommendation (against the ACM). Florida and Texas. In Texas, it's illegal to call yourself a "Software Engineer" without 16 years' experience. It's absurd. sce.uhcl.edu/helm/SWEBOK_IEEE/papers/10%20reprint%205.pdf

To which the government responds, "See, the War on Terror is working!"

If you likewise point out that psychoactive drug usage has remained flat since the 50's, they say, "See, no increase! The War on Drugs is working!"

The real problem is that legislators aren't bound by silly things like logic, or the scientific method, or burden of proof.

I use i3. It's not perfect, but it's the best I've found.

I like:

1) tile movement is very dynamic; it's tree-based

2) supports transparent terminals; I like seeing my pretty wallpaper

3) mod key works well for switching desktops, and moving tiles between desktops

4) good multi-monitor support.

I don't like:

1) no dropdown application menu. dmenu is ok, but I need to find a good menu bar app.

2) You can mouse drag-resize, but not drag-reorder tiles. It's on their todo list.

I have a project in Go which is pretty heavily functional. Over time, I've begun to notice the general goodness of his 2 rules. If you didn't RTFA, they were

1. Avoid nontrivial anonymous functions.

2. Function declarations after the code that actually does things.

I wonder if his advice is good for all functional-style code in non-functional languages.

Watching the video, I identified:

1 login screen has a picture of a galaxy.

2 windows are white-themed, with rounded corners, and minimalistic buttons/scrollbars.

3 music player is reminiscent of iTunes with time bar and track info top-and-center, and large album art pane.

4 system settings window has radio-buttons-like-normal-buttons reminiscent of OSX system settings. Also has a search bar in the upper-right of the window, with minimalistic magnifying glass.

5 windows have no visual border on sides and bottom.

6 Dock.

7 Expose-style viewing of all windows.

8 top-of-screen menu, with system icons in upper-right.

As I said in a previous comment, Apple didn't invent many of these, if any. Many, perhaps all, of these points are simply good design. However, they all combine to make the GUI "feel" like OSX to me.

Furthermore, it isn't a "copy." You can certainly identify as many differences as similarities. It simply shares a certain design aesthetic.

The galaxy login pic at the beginning didn't help :P

I don't have nearly the problem of an OSX-lookalike as some. I used OSX for years because it was basically the prettiest POSIX system available.

And like you say, a lot is simply good design. Apple didn't invent nearly as much as their marketing department (and legal) would have us believe.

Tangentially, I've fallen in love with tiling WMs, but they all seem mediocre at best. @aroman it'd be awesome if you guys made an alternative tiling WM that was as sleek as your windowing manager.

>We need to remind them of that fact.

“That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?” -Belling the Cat, Aesop's Fables

I believe programming is an art because "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." (Abelson, SICP)

This heart of the matter, and it means programming is an art, a social one. Like marketing or graphic design, it's an art for other people. Programs must be written to be as readable as possible, to as many people as possible, while still being functional and elegant. This requires an intuition of psychology and sociology, in addition to a firm engineering grasp. A great programmer must be both mathematically brilliant and socially empathic. If she lacks the former, she won't be able to solve Hard Problems; if she lacks the latter, she'll be a Cowboy Coder (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoder) and her code will be worthless to society.

That's why it's an art.