"David Bowie & Queen" is specifically a reference to the song Under_Pressure[^] which they recorded together in 1981.

Less than amazing? Seriously? How old are you? Do you have any idea how many problems were once consider the proper domain of AI that are now in every day use and taken for granted by the masses? Optical Character recognition? Speech recognition? Facial recognition? Image classification? Autonomous walking robots? Just because you now have an API that makes these things available to you, doesn't mean you should regard them as mundane. I suggest you go try to write those functions yourself (without reference to the vast body of AI research that made them possible) and then tell me that AI hasn't produced anything amazing yet.

When I learned OOP in the EARLY 80's, from Barbara Liskov herself, there was only one principle: Encapsulation.

Amen!

Yeah, it surprises me that the DSM even exists -- it just seems all too subjective to me with no real explanation of causes that I don't see how it's of any real diagnostic value at all... By your definition of savant, I guess I've never ever actually met one. Just read about them. And I always mistrust second or third hand reports -- you never know if the original observation was faulty, or if the re-telling was embellished for effect (or both). But I've met at least a dozen people who had truly spectacular skills with out any obvious deficiency in other areas. So, I'm convinced that it isn't necessary for someone to be deficient in other areas for them to have spectacular skills in specific areas. Although I imagine if you only have one skill, you are much more likely to spend all your time practicing that one thing...

Have you ever personally met a "savant". I knew a guy at MIT who could solve the most complex Calculus in his head -- even to the point of taking seconds to prove the professors solution wrong (and requiring the professor hours to verify his solution). He was also an extremely gifted athlete, successful with the ladies, and the most insufferably arrogant SOB you ever met. I have to give him a pass on his arrogance because I think more than a few of us who knew him would have been almost as arrogant if we hadn't met him and realized we weren't all that special after all. I think the myth that people who are exceptionally brilliant in one area must be deficient in another is just that. A myth perpetuated by the rest of us so we can feel that we are still superior in some way.

If you build it, they will come. The i5 is probably fine for almost anything you need now, but I'm pretty sure that at some point someone is going to come up with something that demands that extra power. (Not sure if they are still doing it, but 20 years ago Intel, specifically contacted the software company I was working at in order to encourage us to create software that was computationally intensive, just so they could boost sales of the new faster processor they were developing.)

Here's a serious answer for you: If you are doing it as an exercise for yourself in order to learn more about how to build such things, then go ahead. You'll end up learning all kinds of things that will be useful to you in order to create one. If you are doing it for use in an actual production environment, then DON'T. There is pretty much no possible way that you can get it right the first time given your current experience. Between the security issues and the legal issues it's extremely unlikely that you could do a better job of those than an existing solution, and it would take you way too long to get it right. As a professional producing an internet application that includes an online store, your job is to produce something that sells a product and the faster you get that up and running, the more product you'll sell. If you spend all your time building the actual store from the ground up, some competitor will have cornered the entire market before you even get started. So is this a learning exercise, or a serious attempt at e-comnerce?

My Experience: The early Mac's were horrible -- if you didn't reboot every couple of hours they would hang. Back then you could go a whole day before you needed to reboot your windows machine. [We've come a long way -- I never feel compelled to reboot either anymore.] My current Macbook Pro kept dropping it's WiFi connection with two different routers (no other device had a problem) and nothing would fix it until I bought the bullet and purchased an Apple router. No idea what the problem was, but it was cheaper just to pay the money then to keep trying to debug it. iTunes does some funny things with multiple accounts and/or locations. I've found it easier to create my music collection using non-Apple software and import the files into iTunes rather than trying to go the other way around (probably works fine now, but I haven't bothered to try). The one time I tried to restore a file from Time Machine it was unable to recover the supposedly backed up file. I couldn't tell what went wrong. I've since adopted a second backup scheme for my critical files -- and it works fine. Your experience was your experience, mine was mine -- no disagreement. In fact, since Apple has more control over the hardware and software, I'd expect the experience ought to be rock-solid. Maybe it's just the fact that I expect Apple to be rock solid, and never expect a pc to work the first time without some effort. It's always a big disappointment for me when an Apple system doesn't work flawlessly and it's always a pleasant surprise when a windows pc does... So maybe the Apple failures just stand out more in my mind. Also, when things do go wrong, I know my way around a windows system a little better, so it's easier for me to fix.

I guess you never owned any of the early Mac's. Or tried to get your Mac to interoperate reliably with a non-Apple Wi-Fi router. Or ever wanted to migrate your music library to some other device. Or relied on Apple time machine to make reliable back ups. Or... I don't hate Apple, I own two iPhone's and a Macbook pro, I also own one Windows laptop an two Windows desktops. I've actually had less trouble with my Windows systems then I have had with my Apple stuff. The myth that Apple products are "rock solid" is just that -- a myth.

Zac Greve wrote:

Vasily Tserekh wrote:

its your boss job to decide what to do with them

I agree again.

Really? I always figured my boss's job was not to tell me what to do. His job is to explain to his boss why I went ahead and did the right thing. I don't get paid to follow somebody instructions. I get paid to make it work.

Actually I was half sarcastic... I can picture the nested loops that caused the writer to resort to x, xx, xxx, xxxx (in fact I think I was guilty of that code 20 years ago) and you are right, that isn't good code...

What's wrong with x, y and i, j? If you name your coordinates anything other than x and y then you are obfuscating your code. If you use anything other than i and j to iterate over the x and y axes you are obfuscating your code. Those names have been idiomatic since we graduated from assembler. I prefer x1, y1 over xx, yy, but that's opinion and I certainly wouldn't fault somebody else for chosing xx over x1.

jschell wrote:

However, by definition, most teachers are average.

I wouldn't say MOST are average. I would say: half of them are BELOW average.

UML for flowcharts? I prefer pencil and paper or a whiteboard.

Absolutely not. The Apple "Retina" propaganda is BS. And there "pixel-perfect" approach is an antiquated nightmare. They double the denisty of their display and suddenly applications quadruple in size and you use 4x as much bandwidth to download the high resolution pictures. OK, maybe it's only 3x with compression, but is it really worth waiting 3x as long for a website to display and paying more for the next tier data plan, just so you can get "beautiful" images and graphics. 99% of the time the "low" resolution version would be just fine, thank you. The Microsoft clear-type font rendering algorithms are far far superior to what Apple uses. The vector based graphics are easier on memory and bandwidth. So if you want to read / edit information that is text and diagrams, you want the Microsoft display. If you want to look at pretty pictures, and don't care how long it takes or how much it costs to download them -- then by all means, go with the Apple.

My TRS-80 model I was limited to a 64k address space and the first half of it was the OS in ROM and the video address space -- leaving only 32k for user programs. I had to learn assembler to make my programs fit.. I would have loved to be able to buy more memory...

Performace isn't the same issue it was 20 years ago. On your typical desktop application you've got so much more memory and processing power now that we are spending 99% of that power drawing shiny half-transparent drop-shadow thing-a-ma-widgets that you have to have or the designer prima-donnas will point to it as proof your application is obsolete. [Thank god for the UI-design-philosophy-formerly-called-Metro.] Your average compiler is better than you at optimizing, and most computation intensive algorithms are available as highly optimized routines in a library. Unfortunately that means today's developers think they don't have to worry about performance at all. Which just isn't true. You should see the !@#! that some junior programmers have written! I had one give me a module that brought my computer to it's knees as soon as I threw a medium sized quantity of data at it -- turned out he had an O(n^3) implementation of an algorithm that should have been O(n). Data is getting bigger all the time. Bandwidth is limited in the vast majority of homes and on most phones -- despite what the technological elite experience. The performance issues are high level design issues now, and your instincts from 20 years ago will server you well -- choose an efficient design, implement intelligently, and let your tools handle the rest.

I took a 13 year sabatical to do volunteer work, then came back to programming 5 years ago. My main professional experience was C back then (mid 80's early 90's). All the software recruiters laughed in my face and told me not to expect much in the way of salary. It took me 3 months to land a C++ job where my starting salary was 50% higher then what they are paying for those newfangled-latest-thing-web-developer jobs. The vast majority of job listings out there are web development for some company that doesn't know anything about computer science and doesn't care and just wants some code monkey to build / maintain / update their web-site. They want to pay you a code monkey salary and they think they can because there is always some bright eyed kid who thinks he knows everything about computers who is willing to do it for less since he doesn't have a family to support. There are still lots of work that is done in C/C++ and fewer engineers who can do that work (all of who expect to be paid a decent wage). A computer is still a computer no matter what form it is, and somebody still has to write the code that talks to the bare metal -- if you had skills in that area, they are still relevant. If you didn't have skills in that area, there is actually less to learn in that arena then learning all the API's and frameworks of the latest thing. If you are looking to get back into the business professionally, then go with what you know. It's still useful. After getting a decent job doing what I know well, I got a side job doing iOS apps. (I didn't need the money, I just prefer somebody to pay me when I'm learning something new.) Objective C isn't that different from C++ once you get past the weird syntax and wrap your head around the Apple reference counting memory management. You just have a reasonably size API with poor documentation and a worse IDE to deal with (but that's what you had 20 years ago). Your average smart phone is memory constrained (nothing new there either) and it just has a lot more pixels than you are used to. From there I've branched out to various web related technologies because sooner or later your smartphone app has to interact with the internet. (And again, I was getting paid to learn it since it was related to the iOS stuff.) If you aren't looking to do something professionally, but just want to get into it for fun -- then go ahead and dive into some web-stuff. Skip C#, you already know C++ and the only thing new in C# is garbage collection and a HU

Agreed. Being tied to a single company without options is usually a bad thing in the long run.