The majority of this article tackles the over-reliance on software metrics, an issue that many people have brought into question over the last decade or so, and he does a good job of summarising the problem with it. However, in the last two paragraphs he attempts to tar the rest of the Software Engineering discipline with the same brush, painting it as a set of overtly rigid tools bureaucratic managment might use to crush the life out of any software project.
I've studied as a computer scientist and as an engineer (electronics) and it's been my constant impression that those trained in the former completely misunderstand the latter. The engineering mindset is one of creative problem solving, using heuristics, tools and systems that have worked well in the past to guide you to your eventual goal, and ignoring them if they don't make sense or will misguide you. Instead many programmers seem to want to find the general algorithm for development. It doesn't exist and in a way its our philosophers stone, it's pursuit wastes time, effort and money. Instead we should be happy with the ever expanding toolkit of techniques the modern developer has at their beck and call whenever they're necessary. That's the real essence of Software Engineering, even if some parts of the industry have gotten lost over the past few decades.
Frankly, this article's title is blatant troll-bait and I really should know better.
I would have seen this as good news, if I hadn't read this article the other week: http://www.chartingstocks.net/2009/03/ning-exposed-tech-comp... . I noticed Marc stopped blogging just before the first questionable action that's reported in the article. Marc's blog posts in 07/08 were fantastic stuff, but the behaviour of his current business, with no reasonable response that I could find, undermines his otherwise good reputation. Does anybody know more about what's going on here?
I don't think I get this. They could have put together a blog or similar website which they pushed articles of this type out to once a month, with all the convenience of linking and being able to view the content (there's very little imagery in this edition) in whatever platform you already use. Instead they've chosen a digital imitation of a physical magazine, which you need some kind of specialised reader to read, wont be indexed by google and will make it hard to reference. Am I missing something?
I remember when I was Time's person of the year back in 2006. Which is to say I'm not sure how much can be read from this. It's amusing they had the wit to run with it and I'm intrigued to see if this does anything to raise the profile of 4chan.
To a certain extent, it doesn't matter that much. This is a problem that affects most universities and most courses. Ultimately I became resigned to focusing on what I wanted from my course, which was to learn some knowledge and skills I found interesting. Also a degree seems to act as a sign that you're capable of getting a degree, and putting up with the bullshit that entails these days. It doesn't say anything about how good a developer you are or will become, or what kind of "Computer Scientist" you are. That's part of the reason why companies have interview processes, because you can only glean so much from a CV.
So, my advice is to give the guy a hand if you have time, you'll probably find he has skills that compliment your own which could come in useful someday. Also, try to stop caring so much about how your peers are performing, and focus on exploiting the access to people and resources available to you so you can get what you want out of the course. Ultimately there's very little you can do to change the behaviour of people your only mildly acquianted with.
This is very similar to the rants I've given and heard from plenty fellow students back when I was still studying a few years ago. I can see exactly where it's coming from, and yet I can't agree. Partly it's the blatant snobbery of it, which I know from my own experience. It's frustrating to see folk with no interest in the discipline do better because they're more focussed on getting a first than actually learning anything.
The thing is, the industry is a lot bigger than it seems when you're at university. Developers/programmers are actually a pretty small part of it. For example, software testing/validation is a job in itself which can involve very little coding. Professional documenters are paid to write about software and do very little coding, but an understanding of the field is still useful to them. And lets not forget the good old ranks of management, forever considered to be a complete waste of time that gets in the way of "just hacking shit out". Except it turns out people don't want shit.
So basically, just because somebody is on your course and doesn't want to spend all night fiddling with their ubuntu installation, reading HN and learning the stuff you know that you'll need for the job you want, doesn't mean they wont be able to hack it in industry. If anything the industry could do with more normal people. Preferably ones with boobs.
Yet another generic, vacuous article about twitter, of the skeptical variety. I suspected there might actually be some insight in this one since it got posted here, but it's as inane as the rest of them (deliciously ironic given most articles of this type scold twitter and it's users for their inanity). For once I'd like to read an article that at least muses on why folk tend to be confused when they first join twitter or why it seems to have a marmite effect (i.e. you either love it or you hate it). I'm getting quite tired of this sort of banality however.
goes off to check his twitter feed for something more interesting
I was really hoping I'd get asked to sign-in before I could read that article.
More to the point though, twitter's issues tend not to be the kind of thing you're looking for in beta testing. You can't test scale with a limited number of users by defintion. A service which still loses data in corner cases, exposes private information unintentionally and so on is better off in an acknowledged private beta than suffering the incredibly bad press and resentment of users which will arise in these scenarios.
Also, not all software is built equal. Twitter is strongly affected by network effects, the more people using it, the more valuable it becomes, so getting people signed up is more important than ironing out every bug. However the likes of gmail is weakly affected as you can still email all of your mates whether they use gmail or not. Spotify's value doesn't particularly increase when new users join it, but it does when it's catalogue is expanded.
Yup, that's a good way of putting it. So his claim that the CTT is false is misleading. Really he's showing that it doesn't hold for real machines. Perhaps that's not a particularly novel statement but i certainly found it enlightening :)
He's restricting the input functions so that they're parameterised by the variable that marks the current state of the computer. In reality this occurs often (the variable represents time) but mathematically there's no need for this. It seems to me that he's refining the model of a computer which we can realistically construct and showing that are even fewer things it can compute than its theoretical brethren.
I suspect the addition of twitter to the proposal was purely to ensure it recieved the attention it's now getting.
Also, primary school is equivalent to elementary school is in the states, so this doesn't mean that pupils will never be taught about some of things that have been made non-compulsory. In particular, as the article points out, the second world war is covered extensively during secondary school (i.e. high school). And it's also worth mentioning that this probably only applies to the english curriculum.
It can't be both? The percieved benefits of protectionism, combined with the squelching of unsavoury opinions and other content must be very appealing.
I've studied as a computer scientist and as an engineer (electronics) and it's been my constant impression that those trained in the former completely misunderstand the latter. The engineering mindset is one of creative problem solving, using heuristics, tools and systems that have worked well in the past to guide you to your eventual goal, and ignoring them if they don't make sense or will misguide you. Instead many programmers seem to want to find the general algorithm for development. It doesn't exist and in a way its our philosophers stone, it's pursuit wastes time, effort and money. Instead we should be happy with the ever expanding toolkit of techniques the modern developer has at their beck and call whenever they're necessary. That's the real essence of Software Engineering, even if some parts of the industry have gotten lost over the past few decades.
Frankly, this article's title is blatant troll-bait and I really should know better.