2. Is just a bug where certain combinations can cause Notepad to interpret the file contents as Unicode

You can never achieve anything if it's definition is constantly being revised.

To answer your original question (and avoid the flame war :P ). I got my first (real coding) job through a combination of natural ability and dumb luck :P I had a chance to work at a company that were willing to take a chance on me, so I ditched my degree and jumped. I've learnt more in the last 5 years through experience than I ever did throughout my education. I suppose having the pressure of being fired is more incentive than someone threatening detention :P It's a sad state of affairs but as most companies can't identify real talent they have to rely on pieces of paper to do that for them. P.S. In hind sight I wish I had the degree so I wouldn't have to prove myself to other people/companies all the time. Although it is nice to see the surprised look on their faces when I'm compared to a graduate :P

Totally agree.
I have people in my workplace right now, who think they can code because of the tools they have.
From my experience, no, they cannot.

PWCT is just some other dude's version of MS Access, great; I hate the MS version. ;P

I personally couldn't care less what my next screwdriver and hammer looks like as long as they still do the same job.

I tried to upgrade an old VB6 app to VB .net and got more compilation errors than a typical C++ solution, So I went back to using C++ for a while; never even tried C# at that point. When I started my next job they insisted on using C#, I tried it and have barely looked back since. Well unless I need to play with GPGPU for fun, then I will put my C head on ;P

The more times you get your password wrong, the harder you have to hit the keys to get it to work. ;)

Ambiguity of identifiers would be a big concern for me. How would the system know what you meant by a container? Or where a statement started or ended without punctuation?

Yes. Pen an paper like Ada Lovelace had to. Assuming you don't want to get all meta-physical and disregard the syntax of the langauage you are writing it in and math as the langauge of the universe...

Butterflies :cool:

I suppose Machine code is the language of which Binary is it's Alphabet?

Been there, done that and I had my own T-shirt printed. I feel your pain. I start shaking every time a manager mentions THAT product now. ;P P.S. In fact one 'solution', if you can call it that, has been running for 4-5 years and I'm still called to fix it weekly. Rather than replace it. :mad:

We've still got a few WinNT machines in production the people refuse to let go of! :confused: Personally I'm happy with my Quad Core Xeon, With 8GB RAM and a C1060 for GPGPU fun. :-D

I guess I'll go back to reading IL instead, I prefer being closer to the metal anyway ;P Unless anyone wants to re-boot an open source replacement? (Anakrino anyone?) :)

I thought real programmers used butterflies? :laugh: