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Apparently, buying someone's book is the best way. I suppose it's better than "How To Win The Lottery".
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Microsoft as 'humanity's best chance at a level playing field'? Windows as the preferred platform for creatives? Some at the company believe it's possible. "The people. United. Will never be defeated."
repeat beyond nausea
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Kent Sharkey wrote: United [w]ill never be defeated
If you mean Manchester United....
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Or, per Sham 69, If the Kids, are United, they will never, be divided.
(also Repeat ad nauseum).
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Smalltalk is widely perceived as an old, moribund language—an antique from a bygone era. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's a great conversation starter in job inteviews?
As in, "Where did you possibly use Smalltalk?"
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It's funny if anyone really perceives it as an old, moribund language. I think it was pretty far ahead of its time, but all of the commercial implementations were insanely expensive in the 80s and early 90s.
As much as I like C#, Visual Studio, along with many other 'modern' languages and tools, once in a while I'll be trying to perform a specific task and think 'wow, this modern environment is really awful as this task compared to Smalltalk'.
That's not a knock against modern languages and ecosystems. It's just that the whole paradigm or editing text files and then compiling or running them doesn't feel quite the same as working in a live image as you do with Smalltalk...or Common Lisp.
Also, the point the article is trying to make isn't unique to Smalltalk. It can be pretty enlightening to learn a language that's different from the norm. Smalltalk is good, as are various Lisps, and statically typed purely functional languages like F# and Haskell. I know there's only so much time for learning and trying new things, though.
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Absolutely agree - learning Smalltalk and a functional language will change the entire way you approach code.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Sadly, while I'm an enormous fan of Smalltalk, there are inevitably a number of errors...
1. "Smalltalk introduced the world to the language virtual machine" - quite simply wrong. For example BCPL used "O code", in the late 60's.
2. "Smalltalk also pioneered JIT (just-in-time) compilation" - wrong again, that was Self, a Smalltalk derivative that also introduced prototype-based inheritance.
3. "From the very beginning, Smalltalk had closures, which are lexically scoped first-class functions." Actually, it had blocks, that are very similar to closures, but not quite the same. Particularly, they didn't close over their environment - it was not safe to return a block that accessed variables from their environment, as they may no longer exist when the block was executed. Later variants fixed this.
4. "Smalltalk was the first language tool to support "live" programming and advanced debugging techniques such as on-the-fly inspection and code changes during execution." Again, wrong. LISP did this much earlier, and was a heavy influence on Alan Kay in the development of Smalltalk.
5. "Smalltalk made "duck typing" a household word" - actually "duck typing" was coined much, much later. Smalltalk and LISP both used it, but I think the phrase arose first in the Python community I think.
That's pretty rich for their first few paragraphs.
(I would have commented on their site, but, as is common, they wanted to hoover my address book when I looked at signing in with Google+).
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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The quest for storage devices that pack more information into a smaller space has reached a new limit, with memory that writes information atom-by-atom. Can they read it back?
Now they just have to figure out how to miniaturize a scanning-tunneling microscope.
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Thanks, Leslie: The Insider News[^]
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Microsoft has created a package of resources, inspiration, and advice to help college graduates stand out with recruiters and hiring managers in today’s job market. I can finally get that job as an Apprentice Pantsless Cloud Pilot?
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How "warm and fuzzy".
Now, where's the "koolaid"?
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Quote: of those who interviewed over Skype dress professionally on the top and
casual on the bottom during their interviews – with 3% admitting they go pant-less altogether.
Quote: Microsoft worked with career expert and inspiration power-house Maxie McCoy to put together tips for how to design a show-stopping resume and how to have an unforgettable Skype interview.
Be a 3%er and stand up at the end of the interview without turning the camera off? 
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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The Norwegian company has sold its browser, performance apps and name. The fat lady is singing?
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She might be singing at Yahoo today too.
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Opera needs to be reborned inside the mobile device's new age. The IoT trending is a big to opportunity to arise a light browser with silent but powerful capabilities.
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Microsoft is making available a free preview of another Azure-based, business-focused video service -- called Microsoft Stream -- that will ultimately supplant Office 365 Video. It's like YouTube, but without any videos you want to watch
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Seven fully-autonomous computers will face off in a historic battle in Las Vegas early next month, as each try to defend themselves and point out flaws without any human control. The battle will be short, after one AI's password is reveled to be '123456'
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After long suffering from stagnant development, the IronPython project for running Python on .Net is getting a new lease on life with new team leaders and a Python 3 upgrade "Sometimes, dead is better."
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A new series idea for AMC (home of a famous zombie series): "The Programming Dead".
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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IronPython
A rust bucket by any other name is still a rust bucket.
Gads. The impedance mismatch between duck typing and strong typed languages is enough to shock you to death.
Marc
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Quote: Python 2 will no longer be supported as of 2020, and Python 3 is the established successor.
Is there any actual community support for this yet? Last I heard pythonistas were clinging to their 2.x language version harder than a govt burrocrat was to Windoze XP.
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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The lurch from employer-centric computing education to one driven by programming means the middle ground of tech skills – between basic computer proficiency and advanced code creation – has thinned out. "Why not both?"
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