Not to mention that Java tooling is quite extensive now - Maven, Gradle or Ivy offers flexible - if sometimes a bit complex - dependency and lifecycle management, which is a godsend when bootstrapping a new developer environment. Add to that nice integration tools, a few really powerful profilers (I'm fond of Yourkit profiler), some wicked hacks like APT that can save your bacon when you need to turn a project around and as said a few posts below a huge amount of readily available libraries and I can't convince myself to go back to C/C++ for long term development.

I'm currently experimenting with React on Meteor though, and even if Javascript lack of typing is making me slightly uncomfortable (last time I developed on an untyped language, it was Basic...) I likes what I see up to now. Repeatable build and integration testing automation is a must to me, so I may be a tad biased.

You're going to have to provide sources for this as it's a rather plain accusation of supporting terrorism. As an European, I'm not pleased at all of someone spewing bullshit about Europe recognizing ISIS as anything more than a bunch of backward barbarian.

It's quite interesting that after all this time, and given the popularity of this little thing called Internet, some have still can't grasp the "My computer, my rules" concept.

Support our modders, give a little something each time we download or even just go by the mod webpage - be it a dollar/euro or two - so that modders can keep taking part of their time to further update and develop their mods, and most importantly editors/distributors don't have a leg to stand on when requesting 75% of the money on the premise that they sold the engine, so they should get 3/4 of all newly created content.

Exactly this! And for the java part at least, they should use NIO channels, which are designed to be closer to the system.

What they determine, in fact, is that their coding knowledge is sub-par. Not to be unexpected from people in biological sciences!

The real issue is: how come Slashdot editor didn't saw this as soon as the story was submitted and put it back where it belongs: /dev/null?

Ok, I've had enough. Where all those who're shunning java come from exactly? How on earth can someone still spew stupidities like "compiled java executes slowly" or "generics are stupid"? What the fuck are you doing as a living to be so out of the usual programming practices?
Next, you'll tell us that Design Patterns are bullshit and statically typed language are dead?

No, sincerely, I HAVE to know!

Just look at John Allsup, comparing oranges to apples, putting side to side Haskell, Javascript, Java and Python?! At least Java and Python are natively object-oriented... Haskell is in a totally other alley - and I personally believe that functional languages are vastly underrated - and then, boom, javascript. Seriously?

So please, just tell me what you do for a living and your past experience in programming/software architecture, because I really want to understand the background that makes you express these opinions.

Very, very local sample: out of 5 I work with currently, I have:
* 1 with a real interest in his work, eager to learn and improve
* 3 with a "happy with what I know, afraid of anything new"
* 1 with a toxic attitude, i.e. resists any attempt at being introduced to version control systems, code reviews, unit testing and the likes

For the past 15 years, I've come across maybe 4, 5 developers really engaged in their trade, with a positive attitude and a genuine eagerness to learn new things, find the proper tool for a given problem and learn from mistakes they and others have done.
A good 20 others could have been janitor for all they cared: it's just a 8-17 job for them.

Sample is quite small, and comes mainly from french consulting firms - CGI, Sogeti, Atos, Accenture, Sopra.

Lookup "encapsulation": this is why your class members can't be declared public as long as they're not final.

If you're writing a one-off code chunk, so be it: you'll be the only one to use and debug it. But you'll soon learn that a lot of "one-off" soon become "pre-release" and "sold to the customer as done, tested and readily available".

And this is why C is not an appropriate language when you're developing an application where the important aspect is the result, not the amount of memory of the speed required to achieve it.

A language is a tool, and each language is a somewhat different tool. A good architect/analyst/developer knows which tool to apply to which problem, the associated "fluff" being largely nonsensical with regard to the inherent benefit of applying the right tool to the right problem.

This, my friend, is common knowledge among experienced practitioners and often fly a mile above the head of beginners which tend to have the "have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" mindset.

As an Obsessed Atheists, this comment offend me greatly. To the Intarweb police, please limit the freedom of expression of sycodon. Thanks.

How come Cameron, being the PM and all, not be held fully responsible for his inability to prevent UK resident to perpetrate terrorist acts on the very sole he's in charge of? After all, he's the one with intelligence services and such, stampeding the privacy of the very people that elected him. Would all this just mean that he violated fundamental rights of the British people to no avail?

that it is NOT installed, nor a requirements for the Information System I'm managing at work. A second nice thing would be that it stays this way.

As far as I understood the article, everything is based on a behavioral repertoire... The only advancement of the study would be the confidence mapping of said repertoire? Wouldn't it be better to work toward the automatic creation of this repertoire by the robot itself?

"Ask Slashdot" from someone confortable enough using Linux in 2001 for productive work and not knowing that a Raspberry Pi or a "mini USB PC" are not running on the same architecture as the PC from 2001?

How low have we stooped?

It greatly depends on the environment in which your data processing and glue scripts runs: if it's homogenous enough to go for an installer runtime like python or ruby, then so be it.
As a matter of fact, Perl is often available, and the CPAN is a trove of readily available solutions.

This kind of scripts is typically what I'm doing on frequent occasion, and I've always found that portable shell scripting has always trumped any other solution as long as your environment is unix driven - and then for this rare cases where Windows is the platform of choice, I package a few cygwin exes and dlls with the script. I'm working on a very controlled environment though, and expecting to have access to CPAN, much less to Python or Ruby runtimes is a recipe for a great deception.

Shell scripts I say: it's a default on so many plaforms that it's worth keeping it fresh.

As for the next step, I'd say Perl because of its pervasiveness - and the fact that it's a still alive and mightily kicking language - then Python as it's quite common on Linux distributions now.

A closing word: don't dismiss a language because it feels old. If C is a bit overkill for glue and data manipulation code, shell scripting is not going away soon. IMO, the important part of doing our type of job is to know to use the pertinent tool to get a result quickly enough without compromising maintainability too much.