I don't understand the Godfather III hate. The plot was implausible compared to the others, but it was quite watchable. The much-derided onscreen appearance of Sophia Coppola was, in my opinion, pure win; she has a naturalistic acting style that worked very well with that of Andy Garcia. Of course the movie wasn't as good as the first, but it was still a better 2+ hours than most other movies made before or since.

Indeed it is fantasy. Swords and sorcery, damsels-in-distress fantasy, with swords made of light and sorcerers called Jedi Knights. Vader is a stand-in for any number of undead, vampiric bad guys from previous eras. Watch the TIE fighters chasing the Falcon through the asteroid field in "Empire" and tell me you don't see a flight of vampire bats chasing a carriage over rocky terrain, a la "Dracula." George Lucas self-consciously created characters based on mythic heroes, under the tutelage of Joseph Campbell.

It would be more accurate to say "if they KNOW you're good, you will be in demand." Nonetheless, there are dozens of reasons why you wouldn't necessarily be in demand despite a killer skill set, most of which boil down to personal incompatibility between yourself and, say, former employers. Word of mouth relies on much more than just the quality of your own work. So does formal marketing.

Marketing != communicating. There's overlap, sure, but marketing is such a special, niche skill that its practitioners often have to endure years of school in order to master it. Communication is key in many job skill sets, but marketing remains a fairly rare skill for all that.

To the OP: I'd say you're pretty close. It applies in my case; what drew me to programming in the first place was the multimedia potential. (My first program was a sprite editor for the Commodore 64, and I spent most of the rest of that seminal year writing animation and music programs.) Still, there are outliers in the bell curve. I know at least two people who would have answered 2) to your original question, as the abstruseness and exclusivity of such endeavors are the main draw for them.

To the OP: agreed, in general. But for small variable names, camelCasing is definitely easier and doesn't exact too harsh a reading penalty. The difficulty in reading grows with each word added, so if you can keep your names to two-three individual components, you should be all right. By contrast, sticking in a bunch of underscores can seriously extend the length of a variable name, which I begin to find just about as onerous as reading scrunched names. So, my advice is to use underscores if you really need them, but be as sparing as possible. (Hint: they do make a great way to abbreviate certain groups, such as "to", "of the", and other article conglomerations.)

thus the uncertain portion would lead to "randomness", would it not? <<<br mode="hold" /> Within limits. The limit is the boundary between the micro and macro perspective. At some point, as we increase in scale from the subatomic level, stoichastic processes become bounded by their peers, in effect becoming statistical rather than real. As has been stated previously, the illusion of determinism isn't really an illusion above a certain scale. Randomness just fades into the background noise. The source of confusion is uncertainty as to where that boundary exists, as well as human inability to perceive it. Without specialized apparatus, we're unable to become privy to the randomness underlying it all, and so all we perceive is the Newtonian reality.