I'm not certain that I agree with this because a URL makes no claims about idempotency or side-effects or many other behaviors that we take for granted when building systems. While it is possible to construct such a system, URLs do not guarantee this.
I think the fundamental issue here is that semantics matter and URLs in isolation don't make strong enough guarantees about them.
I'm all for elegant URL design but they're just one part of the puzzle.
Agree that saying "intimate understanding" is a bit off the mark. Had the author written "intuitive understanding", it would have made a bit more sense.
However, given the prevalence of the von Neumann computing architecture, I don't think it's completely off the mark - even if people don't know von Neumann's name :)
I think society, collectively, puts a lot of currency is "knowing what you're going to do". It's a question that adults ask children, especially precocious ones.
But, frankly, it's pretty much bullshit.
I was an average student in university. The courses I liked, I did well in. The ones that I struggled to engage with, not so much. The reality is that once you are out in the real world, no one's going to tell you what to do.
If getting a CS degree is that important to you, then stick with it until you can qualify for it. But there's no requirement that you must have one just because you want to work in the field.
Note: There might be companies that won't consider you as a candidate if you don't have a CS degree. My recommendation is that, again, unless you really want to work at a company like that, find your own path.
I had the interesting experience to work at Palm in the early 2000's on a project that was to compete with the Blackberry.
Needless to say, it never saw the light of day but I still remember that we had to ask the PalmOS engineering group to create a hardware layer thread so that we could do network I/O in parallel with running the user app.
It was an enormously challenging platform to work with.
Interesting narrative - all we need is Bruce Willis at the controls and we’re gold ;)
I’m sure it was all planned and coordinated with their marketing team. After all, they need to figure out important things like how much fuel, time to arrival, etc.
Definitely experienced this as well playing music in public.
I also experienced a variation of it when I did karate. During sparring, once my sparring partners hit me for the first time, I was able to start focusing on sparring and not the fear of being struck.
I remember taking a graduate level networking course at NYU in the early 1990s. The instructor was an IBM consultant. We studied token ring, FDDI, SNA, HDLC/SDLC and several other commercial products.
One evening, I raised my hand and asked when we were going to study TCP/IP.
He simply quipped, "TCP/IP is not a real networking protocol."
So I wouldn't say that universities are always behind the curve :)
I worked at Sun Microsystems in the late 90s/early 2000s and at the World Trade Center offices, pretty much everyone had to hot desk.
I was in a group that, unlike our "pure" sales brothers & sisters, spent a lot of time in the office. The whole hot desk was a big PITA because we had to reserve our desks and we could only reserve, I think, 1 week in advance.
But, one of my colleagues figured out that the back-end of the reservation system had an RMI interface and it didn't do any validation of the reservation requests. So he wrote a CLI utility that let us reserve the same offices week after week.
We would've gotten away with it except that the head of sales realized one Monday morning that we always seemed to be sitting in the same place. I guess she made some enquiries because not long after that, we were all called into her office and made to promise that we wouldn't hack the reservation system anymore.
At the bard so famously wrote, "Pride goeth before a fall." :)
This behavior always reminds me of book "The World Without Us"[0] in which the author points out that, of all our domesticated animals, cats would definitely survive due to their excellent hunting skills in a world without humans.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us
My experience with eSIM has been with my Apple phone. I have an app that basically does this - it's Ubigi and I've generally been happy with it. I installed it from the App Store.
As to why Apple themselves don't have such an app, I would have to assume that it's because they don't see reselling of mobile data as a core competency nor a profitable business line.
I'm 58 and feel like I still have a lot to offer. But my focus in these days is to help my team (most of whom are easily half my age) be successful. I find that their success gives me a lot more of a buzz than coding something I've probably written more times than I remember.
I do step and code from time to time but only when it's clear that it will have some kind of multiplier effect for my team.
[Edit] I just wanted to thank the poster for starting this discussion. It takes more than a bit of courage, I think, to write something like that.
This is a great idea. Any chance you can back port it to older versions of macOS? My laptop is running Big Sur (11.6.7) and I see it requires Monterey (12.3+).
I think the fundamental issue here is that semantics matter and URLs in isolation don't make strong enough guarantees about them.
I'm all for elegant URL design but they're just one part of the puzzle.