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LISP was pretty weird, though XSLT is the strangest language I've actually used for work. Though, regular expressions might be considered a language in their own right, and they're pretty weird too.
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I certainly prefer Regular Expressions to XSLT and XPath.
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Missed the Malbolge[^] Language. I first saw this on an episode of Elementary.
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While I don't think anyone really works with it (it's probably just someone's grad thesis gone wild), Brainfsck[^] is the weirdest I've seen.
As far as worked with, both RegEx and XSLT are solutions that lead to, "and now you have two problems".
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TTFN - Kent
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The reporting language for a product I used to work on was the wierdest I've ever used although nothing is worse the Malbolge at least not yet.
This reporting language didn't even have a name it was just reporting script but it was unlike anything else, 5 sections to Cobols 4 ( I hope I got that right ) and each one had a different syntax from really readable stuff in one section like ORDER BY CUSTOMER to a bunch of /g style switches in another. It did the job however and the job was a scary one, multi-dimensional database analysis at speeds that would make Larry Ellison  with envy.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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Just imagine what you'd do with the other six days[^] (less an hour)
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TTFN - Kent
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I support that. I'm ready to start now! ^^
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love the idea but going from say 5 days work to 3 days would probably mean some reduction in salary.
however, work typically kills creativity, specially overtime work, that's why western world still leads Asia and China. (worker bee will never understand they can never be #1)
so, reducing length of work week may help (but I doubt it, 3 days or 25 hrs a little extreme)
dev
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Well, if normally works from say 20-60, that's 40 years, but instead 20-80, 60 years. Then you can spread the same work over 50% more years. So you could work 33% less in your younger years. Like here in the Netherlands part of your current income goes into pension build up (about 10%), and taxes that will go into a base salary for pensioned people (not sure how much). One could scrap these institutions (and save a lot of money because these are just money eating money redirection schemes). So I think it's doable if just looking at percentages. However I don't see myself programming anymore at 80! 
Wout
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Nice article! I have to say I'm too working less than 40 hours at the moment, and enjoying it!
Wout
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Well, I'm not sure that I'd count, "spending time with loved ones" as "goofing off". Certainly not in front of them anyway.
But I see your point. It would definitely require a lot of changes to society to make this work. Retiring at 80 wouldn't leave that many people left to retire.
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TTFN - Kent
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You won't spend it goofing off.
You will spend it driving your car farther and farther to the sub-sub-sub-sub-suburb which is the only place you will be able to afford a house.
The 90 minute commute is already common in California, has been for decades, and is now spreading to other areas as well
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What's my beef with productivity tools? It's much deeper than a dislike for any particular tool. Charles Petzold already described his concern about Visual Studio in 2005 in a great talk titled Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?. It's a long read, but definitely worth your while. You should go read it now. In case you didn't want to take the time to read that article (but then: you're already reading this lengthy article), here's the gist of it: Via IntelliSense, code generation, Wizards and drag and drop, Visual Studio assists us, but it also pushes us towards writing (or not writing) code in a particular way. It railroads us. Does it make us more productive? I don't even know how to measure developer productivity, so I can't answer that. Do we learn while coding like that? Not much, I'd say. Intellisense: good or evil? Discuss among yourselves...
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Yes, a good discussion. I find it does. Why? First, intellisense helps prompt or discover new methods. It also helps me to remember method names. I guess age and mind rott are to blame.
Secondly, re-sharper, fxcop, style cop etc are all great in my mind. Again, it helps "standardise" code and teaches you to adhere to a code practice. It again helps to prompt and question what you are doing in the first place.
It can help with productivity.
However, I do understand where Mark is coming from. In the old days, you had to "know" about what you are doing as there was little information, books etc. however, I bet the learning curve was longer.
Either that or I am just STUPID! 
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Not to mention, thinkgs like FXCop, JSLint, etc. can highlight things you're doing wrong. Personally, when it marks something as being a problem I look up why, then adjust my style to fix the problem both now and in the future. My future code becomes better as a result even without the tools.
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Maybe it was this pay phone hack that caused Bells to ring in Barclay’s brain when he spotted the article in the Bell System Technical Journal. The article laid bare the technical inner workings of AT&T’s long-distance telephone network with clarity, completeness, and detail. It was all there: how the long-distance switching machines sang to each other with single-frequency (SF) and multifrequency (MF) tones, how 2600 hertz was used to indicate whether a telephone had answered, what the frequencies were of the tones that made up the MF digits, how overseas calls were made—it even included simplified schematic diagrams for the electrical circuits necessary to generate the tones used to control the network. Nothing was hidden. By the time Barclay finished reading it, the vulnerability in AT&T’s network had crystallized in his mind... Operator said thats privledged information, And it ain't no business of mine.
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By vertical sharding we mean a process of increasing application scalability by separating out some number of tables from the main database, into a dedicated database instance to spread both read and write load. Vertical sharding is often contrasted with “horizontal” sharding, where higher scalability is achieved by adding servers with identical schema to host a slice of the available data. Horizontal sharding is generally a great long-term solution if the architecture supports it, but vertical sharding can often be done quicker and can buy you some time to implement a longer-term redesign. "The Table That Ate Silicon Valley" and other tales of big data.
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On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 2^57,885,161-1, was discovered on Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper's computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits. With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, 17th-year GIMPS is the longest continuously-running global "grassroots supercomputing" project in Internet history. Dr. Cooper is a professor at the University of Central Missouri. This is the third record prime for Dr. Cooper and his University. For more information on Mersenne Primes, read on...
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I’ve been doing a lot of calculations in both SI and US Customary Units recently. Normally, I can do the conversions at the end of a set of calculations, and the venerable units program works just fine for me. But in my current project, I need to show intermediate results in both sets of units and there’s just too much busy work in going back and forth between IPython, which I’m using as my calculator, and units. After a bit of hunting, I found the Python quantities module—it’s a bit more cumbersome than units if you’re just doing a few conversions, but it’s much better if you’re doing a long series of calculations. There's a metric boatload of great information here on unit conversion.
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If you want to transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it’s generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the internet. This isn’t a new idea—it’s often dubbed SneakerNet—and it’s how Google transfers large amounts of data internally. But will it always be faster? When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx?
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We stand today near the beginning of the post-PC era. Tablets and smart phones are replacing desktops and notebooks. Clouds are replacing clusters. We’re more dependent than ever on big computer rooms only this time we not only don’t own them, we don’t even know where they are. Three years from now we’ll barely recognize the computing landscape that was built on personal computers. So if we’re going to keep an accurate chronicle of that era, we’d better get to work right now, before we forget how it really happened. Oddly enough, I predicted all of this almost 25 years ago as you’ll see if you choose to share this journey and read on... Robert X. Cringely revisits the history of his book and its place in Silicon Valley history.
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Working on mobile systems at Google gives me some insight into what the hard open problems are in this space. Sometimes I am asked by academic researchers what I think these problems are and what they should be working on. I've got a growing list of projects I'd really like to see the academic community try to tackle. This is not to say that Google isn't working on some of these things, but academics have fewer constraints and might be able to come up with some radically new ideas. What areas of mobile computing do you think need more research?
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Starting in May 2000 I was a member of a small team of engineers, game designers and artists working outside St. Louis, MO on a project for Sony Online Entertainment. Together we made Planetside, one of the only massively multiplayer first person shooters ever made. This is one of our stories. All I had to do was test it until something broke, fix that and repeat. I just had to do it fast enough.
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