I couldn't agree more: as a self-employed software engineer with degrees in literature and psychology, I am living proof that now (not one day, right now) programmers are working for liberal arts "managers" ;-)
In the SW part of the country, the surf region, there are loads of foreigners, many of whom have been here year-round for more than a decade; still, the accent is poor, the phrasing limited, and the non-native speaker element is absolutely evident.
You may immerse yourself in everything French, but unless you start early on in life it will be exceedingly difficult to attain native speaker type fluency. Language is not just speaking phrases, being able to read literature, etc., it's also being, language is being the being of another culture.
It's the same for me when I'm in England, the locals just don't understand me.
"you know what I mean, right?", I say, and they respond with, "oh, royt, e means royt!" WTF is royt, can't these people articulate themselves properly? k-rist they invented the language and we had to improve it, god bless America, rush limpbag and everything that makes the homeland free of the brave.
I come to France in the autumn and spring, have been doing so for 5 or 6 years; studied French as a kid, and lived off-and-on in Montreal for about 5 years.
I would not consider myself anywhere near fluent; that is, compared to how I am able to express myself in my native language, Scala. Hah, how clever, I actually am a rank amateur in Scala, but its hot, maybe you'd like to hire me?
Anyway, the point is, I've met anglophones who have lived here full-time for several years and, wow, sometimes the accent is just painful, all the words are there, but the ability to articulate themselves in French just isn't happening.
Really, language acquisition has to occur at a young age, the earlier the better. Furthermore, building up a vocabulary is helpful, but you can't think phrases in your native native language and then speak them in another language without creating confusion on the part of your listener(s)
I'd really love to hear the C1s, I think I might have a good laugh -- Skype anyone?
absolutely agree, I would LOVE to hear the C1 French speakers demonstrate their savoir faire with la belle langue NOW, with further years of practice post-C1 mastery.
I can guarantee that:
1) you will sound nothing like a native speaker
2) I will laugh
5 months without living/breathing the language amongst native speakers, fluency, methinks NOT ;-)
I took 8 years of French growing up (10-18) and I understood nothing, literally nothing when I visited Quebec for the first time (that's a joke, do you get it?)
Anyway, the point is, fluency cannot be gained without living in the culture where the language is spoken. Book learning, reciting phrases, etc. will not give you the auditory queues that conversations with native speakers will. When you mispronounce a word or phrase, a raised eyebrow speaks volumes. Books do not raise eyebrows.
The best way to learn languages is to live abroad, in various places, watch loads of TV (really the more the better) and mingle with the locals.
Finally the absolute best way to learn a language is through your significant other; if he/she speaks the language you are trying to learn, and has no interest in speaking your native tongue, wow, spaceship language learning class of the highest order ;-)
Yeah, good point, live usb has been a life saver beyond os install and preview.
I've intentionally been sitting on the fence for over a year now. Once Fedora 14 goes EOL, going to have to make the move.
What I have now is a dream setup (gnome 2, gnome-do, compiz, emerald theme mamnager), so have been in no rush. Was hoping Gnome issues would get sorted out; i.e. they'd listen to the power users screaming bloody murder. Apparently not, or not entirely.
I'll take gnome 3 for a spin, it can't be thaaaat bad (I hope); if I'm appalled, check out XFCE, and then, if need be, KDE (KDE felt complex/clunky compared to Gnome 2 when I made the comparison a couple of years ago, maybe things have changed)
I do miss cmd-`, toggle through currently focused app windows from Mac, one of the few features that I did not get in my switch to Fedora 3 years ago.
Of course, so much more was gained, the point of no return has long been reached ;-) Now the question, to Gnome 3 or not to Gnome 3?
Am I going to freak out as a gnome-do + compiz + dual monitor (laptop + external) user, or, with time, one adjusts, and, like an arranged marriage, learns to love the other?
If I had sufficient karma, I would up vote you, but alas, made the mistake of bringing up a pro-Scala perspective in a why-did-Twitter-leave-Rails thread.
At any rate MonoDevelop is actually quite awesome in some respects, particularly code completion, which is unbelievably snappy (VisualStudio is rather sluggish in comparison, but assume that is due to running in a Windows VM)
Rails is there to generate static content as the alternative, hitting the Rails stack for live data, is asking for trouble -- just ask Twitter ;-)
Of course by saying such a thing on a Rails thread, I am clearly asking to accrue yet more karma. I can take it, the truth hurts, I'm a compile time Boddhisatva brought here to enlighten the heathens, willing to descend into runtime hell to save all beings and bring them to the other shore of static compilation.
Bizarre, can find nothing on the net that backs that claim, would love to see concrete evidence here in 2012, was under the impression that Twitter was fully ditching Rails.
Facebook is PHP (with C++ pre-processor called HipHop). StackOverflow is, ta da, M$ stack (C#, SQL Server, etc.)
State of the art in highly scalable web apps? Try this:
1) Apache 2.4 proxy/load balancer + mod_pagespeed
2) Scala microframework (Scalatra, Spray, or Unfiltered)
3) ScalaQuery functional JDBC wrapper (A-R-ish analogue)
4) Scalate pre-compiled templatye engine
5) pjax pushState + dataTables + FancyBox (modals)
6) Jedis in-memory cache for the content that varies
7) static html templates served off of CDN
Of course, the app server can be anything (Rails, Django, heck, even PHP) with sufficient caching. I really like Scala right now, it's the new hotness: terse syntax, functional, compile-time checked, and ba-blazin' fast, wahoooooo ;-)
Exactly, with caching the application server becomes far less of an issue. There's a catch, though.
Twitter, is a live service, content is constantly changing, which means round-trip to app server required, and that is where dynamic languages suffer, under load.
re: "I can assure you that espn.go.com could easily be served with ruby instead of java.", perhaps, but like Twitter, they chose the JVM and not the Ruby runtime. That's the "big site" de facto choice, compilation over runtime, whether it be .NET, JVM, or, perhaps in future for the enterprise, functional a la Haskell, Erlang, etc.
re: the best backend being the cheapest, depends on what you mean, hardware is not everything, the application has to be developed and maintained, bandwidth accounted for, etc. But yes, I can roll with that, minimal hardware expense to get the job done. Now, if you're implying that compiled languages are more expensive than their dynamic language counterparts, not sure if that is necessarily the case.
I run a couple of Dell R610 ESXi servers in colo, small setup, but complete overkill for actual load we're handling. At any rate, Scalatra (Scala Sinatra clone) running on Jetty "costs" 38MB of RAM per instance, not exactly expensive.
Wikipedia and CL largely serve static files, so no biggie there what the application server is, front end proxy (httpd, nginx, lighthttpd, etc.) does the heavy lifting.
Wordpress is an interesting one, I wonder if they aren't doing some C++ pre-compilation a la Facebook's HipHop? Maybe not, WP is pretty light code-wise (compared to the slow, bloated dog that is Drupal), and for the most part personal blogging sites are not handling Twitter level bandwidth last I checked.
@bad_user is a cool thinker @icebraining, no hot headedness to be found, he's just stating the facts in regard to industry trends for enterprise level applications: it's an M$ and JVM world.
Yes, you're correct, it was not an either-or proposition, I'm sorry, they dropped them both.
Seriously, I'm curious, what public facing, or any facing, components does Twitter use that is written in Ruby and/or Rails?
A Google search for "twitter rails" brings up the usual got dumped threads. A similar search, but this time, "twitter scala" brings up, as a first result "Scala School" for Twitter engineers, followed by a bunch of threads on the Twitter + Scala marriage.
Don't worry, Scala has its own issues (Yammer, for example, ditched Scala for Java due to, ironically enough, scalability issues).
oh, Twitter (Scala/Java), American Airlines (Java), Facebook (on HipHop in C++), Stackoverflow (C#), ESPN (Java)
I think by big that's a code word for enterprise.
The big sites you have worked on are comparatively small if Ruby is backing the show. That's not to take away from the ton of traffic that you guys were able to serve; it's just that there are few enterprise level Ruby backed sites running these days.
Github, I believe is one, but lately I've been getting the "unicorn is angry" icon when viewing repositories, so I wonder about scalability issues. For the record, I have never, ever seen a "unicorn is angry" icon on Twitter. Maybe switching to the JVM got rid of all the magic ;-)
Twitter did not think Rails was particularly adequate at serving up anything (for their extreme needs), so they dumped it for the JVM.
Charles Nutter is doing genius work with JRuby, btw, that's where Ruby has a future with the enterprise, on the JVM. Twitter dumping Rails for Scala was a major win for Odersky & friends, and a big hit to Rails (though Ruby/Rails continues to innovate, nothing has changed there)
Not sure why client-side applications take a second or 2 to render a page, but if that is the case, cached html on front end server would be dee way 2 go, just avoid hitting the application server entirely...