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Programmers love to sneer at the world of fashion where trends blow through like breezes. Skirt lengths rise and fall, pigments come and go, ties get fatter, then thinner. But in the world of technology, rigor, science, math, and precision rule over fad. Just you wait, everything unfashionable will return one day
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Infoworld are good at factual inaccuracies.
There first point includes "languages that target the JVM" under preprocessors.
I pretty well stopped reading there.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Heady forecasts showing Linux would become a major player on the desktop, on the server, and in embedded systems were published back in 1994. While the prognostications proved correct for server and embedded operating systems, what happened on the desktop? Starts with an 'O', ends with 'ffice'
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Certainly a large part of it. There is also familiarity and to get people to move, things often need to be considerably better, where as the experience is while for general users not a whole lot worse, still worse. e.g. for a normal user playing video's etc was jerky because until recently the scheduler was not really designed to take those kind of use cases into account, unless to switched to the RR or FIFO schedulers and thats not something a normal user would even know to do. These days the problem has been solved on multiple fronts, but people don't care as everyone is using smart phones and tablets.
Laptops outsell desktop computers and tablets (not sure on this) are close or have probably overtaken laptops in sales. In a way, with Android, Linux is the desktop.
I switched to OSX and iOS about 4 years ago and have not looked back. I use Linux and Windows everyday, and on the whole don't care. Use the tool that seems right for the job.
I would consider myself fairly handy with office, but it does feel cumbersome these days. Excel is about the most usable. Outlook I am a slave too which I hate. Something has to change with e-mail. Its a shockingly outdated way of communicating in a work environment. It should probably be made illegal.
"Je pense, donc je mange." - Rene Descartes 1689 - Just before his mother put his tea on the table.
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Giles wrote: Use the tool that seems right for the job.
I wish more people would realize this, rather than investing their own self worth into their chosen OS/tools.
--------------
TTFN - Kent
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Quote: Its a shockingly outdated way of communicating in a work environment.
It's a perfectly fine way to communicate in a work environment. What's wrong with it? What sort of work do you need any more usually? I have instant messaging also on my PC but that is only used by my co-worker next door asking if I am ready for a lunch break. I volunteered to have my desk phone removed to save the cost of it as I never used it for work anyway. In my developer, systems designer and general IT guru role I don't need anything more than Outlook alongside my development and testing tools.
I don't see what is outdated about it. It works.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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The phone is a vital office tool. How else are you supposed to get your computer unlocked a day after you changed the password to something you forgot overnight? 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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One, I don't forget my passwords - I have hundreds but I seem to be able to remember them all (so far but I'm getting older, I'm sure the brain will be going soon).
Two, format C: and re-install solves all lock-up problems.
Three, only wimps call tech support!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Fragmentation doesn't help either - which Desktop Manager to use, which distribution, and the general lack of consistency between apps.
I'm with Rob Pike on this one, who opined that if the state of the art was a clone of an O/S he helped write in the 1970's there is not much progress in software.(Rob Pike on Systems[^]).
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Heady forecasts showing Linux would become a major player on the desktop, on the server, and in embedded systems were published back in 1994
Well it took them 20 years but 2014 is surely going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
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You owe me a new keyboard. The monitor I can clean off.
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The diabolical Desktop/Window managers on Linux are what I blame.
.-.
|o,o|
,| _\=/_ .-""-.
||/_/_\_\ /[] _ _\
|_/|(_)|\\ _|_o_LII|_
\._. |\_/|"` |_| ==== |_|
|_|_| ||" || ||
|-|-| ||LI o ||
|_|_| ||'----'||
/_/ \_\ /__| |__\
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I started playing with Linux in the mid 1990ies - about 80 installation disks at that time. Got even my printer working! No, no plug n play, but many config files to be edited with vi or something like that...
Office was always a pain. Somewhen StarOffice was included with Suse Linux. After an update, it was no more available for free... And my files could no more be read (didn't I read something about three laws of data storage a few days ago? What's the first law? Here I met it).
Finding a Linux version which can use the Graphics card correctly is still a pain.
My last approach to Linux was some two years ago, when I thought I could use it as a server plus VMWare host system, and run virtual machines with Windows on it. Turned out to be abysmal slow; and password encoding issues for SAMBA were terrible.
Changed to Windows 7, won't consider Linux anymore a major component (a virtual machine for some special prupose could be OK).
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The NSA is funding quantum computer work that it hopes will allow it to break virtually any encryption used today — though there's no sign it's managed to crack the puzzle better than any of the other companies or agencies working on the same thing. That might be your password in that box
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This debate has raged on for a long time. In your opinion, what is the best programming language to learn as your first programming language? Why, Lisp of course. Doesn't *everyone* know that (at least the Lisp/Haskell developers do)
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Assuming that you want to be a well-rounded professional developer and not just a low-level coder in a sweat shop...
"will be the most valuable throughout a career."
"C) which language will make you the most marketable"
That's not important for the first few languages you learn.
"A) which language will provide the best conceptual foundation"
"B) which language will be the most helpful transitioning to other languages"
That's what's important in the first few languages.
Additionally, modern developers rely too heavily on IDEs (Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc.) which get in the way of learning the fundamentals of the actual languages.
I'm certainly glad that I never had to use punch cards, but I continue to prefer to use simple text editors and command-line compilers (and linkers).
My first two languages were BASIC (not VB  ) and Pascal, followed by Fortran and COBOL, then C. (Lisp and assembly came later.)
I think that Perl is an excellent first language; it may even be useful in the real world.
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I know VB has it foibles, but it was a VAST improvement on BASIC.
Or are you a fan of GOTO's, GOSUB's, Line Numbers, DATA statements and lack of local variables?
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: I think that Perl is an excellent first language; it may even be useful in the real world.
You had me up to this point (definitely agree on the IDE statement). While it's useful in the real world, Perl has got to be the poster child for "write-only language"
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TTFN - Kent
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APL is much more a write only language than Perl.
TECO-10 macros came in a close second... They look awfully similar to acoustic modem line noise!
(I'm really dating myself here!)
Perl is actually quite readable.
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True - APL is in a class by itself. Now I have to look up TECO-10. My productivity thanks you.
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TTFN - Kent
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TECO-10 was the text editor for the DECsystem-10 (PDP-10) timesharing system ... 1970's
Text Editor and COrrector.
It was a "blind" editor in that it didn't display what it was doing unless you asked for it.
Designed for use on hardcopy terminals, e.g. ASR-33 (10 chars/sec)
Just about any character sequence would do something!
(Other than file errors, very little was "illegal".)
There was also a TECO-11 and TECO-20 (if I recall).
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Assembly. Learn how the machine works at a nice low level so you actually understand why we have programming languages.
And frankly, assembly isn't that hard to learn. I'd say it's actually one of the easiest things to learn. What's hard about assembly is learning how to do more complicated stuff than moving bytes around. And that's where the real teaching happens.
Marc
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Sure... "Every high level language is the machine language of some virtual machine." 
I didn't really get any benefit from being introduced to assembly.
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Agreed, perhaps even maybe machine language.
Learning assembly might also resolve the issue of programming without "goto". 
Never moon a werewolf.
- Harvey
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I liked the IT curriculum I had in college in the late 1980s. The course sequence began with Pascal; the instructors acknowledged that it had little commercial value but was an excellent teaching language for the basic concepts of structured programming. After that came an "overview" course, which had students learn how to write simple "Hello, world" level programs in the languages that were in current use (for me, it was JCL, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG and C.) After those two intro classes (which could be taken concurrently), students would branch out according to their major and interests.
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