This.

HUGE fan of Objective-C, back from the NeXT days. Been writing iOS apps since ARC was optional and I never used it, because *I* knew how to alloc and free memory. Yeah, that meant it was a pain in the ass when Apple made ARC a requirement.

I miss introspection, sure. But optionals, tuples, native unicode support, default parameters, conditional generics, and a consistent calling syntax just makes my life easier. Add to that first-class immutable structs, better functional programming support, and stronger exception handling, and I just enjoy programming Swift more than Objective-C.

It's not like dynamic dispatch went away -- it just got shuffled to object extensions.

That said, there are some things I don't like about Swift: lack of introspection (as I admitted), and especially still using ARC for memory management. While it may be fast, resolving retention cycles can be difficult, especially if one half of the retention is in some Cocoa library.

Swift doesn't lock you into Apple products. It's an open-source language, for cryin' out loud. What locks you into Apple products are the libraries you use to target a specific platform. Just like MFC locks you into Microsoft products.

I can see why some people might prefer Objective-C. I still look on it fondly as the best of the C-based OO languages. Hell, I still love programming in straight-up C.

I'm just glad I made the jump to Swift.

Oh, I'm also moving to Kotlin for my Android projects for many of the same reasons.

What do you mean? Corporate America isn't generally run by the best and the brightest. But in spite of that, considering that Microsoft was once so dominant there was no second place, I think Microsoft is imploding. It certainly hasn't done anything terribly innovative in a long time, and all it's done lately is to hand over the mobile market to Apple and Android, and manage to piss off the one set of insanely loyal customers it has left -- XBox fans.

So, yeah. I think the man is about as dumb as /. thinks he is.

His entire rant is a string of strawmen, ad hominems, non sequiturs, and question-begging. The problems he mentioned are all either social or political in nature. Otherwise, he's piling a lot of abuse and loaded words on people doing what they want to do: write programs.

The weird thing is, he identified the sources of the problems right in his rant. Single mothers living at or below the poverty line? The jobs they have don't pay well, are inflexible, and provide no relief for raising kids while trying to earn a living. Veterans waiting 8 months for medical attention? A processing system that is out-of-date and understaffed, and a health care system that has been gutted of funding.

What bright ideas are young software entrepreneurs are going to solve this? The software exist to make the VA more efficient, and it's not like you can just write a new piece of software and expect the government to make use of it (just like you can't do that for a big company).

These Big Problems don't have a software solution. He certainly didn't provide any ideas on how software might solve these Big Problems -- he just insisted on judging the career decisions of a group of people based on his preferences.

Fuck. That.

An old 16k Apple ][ in 1979, in a logging camp in Southeast Alaska. First integer BASIC, then Applesoft BASIC, then assembly via the Sweet16 mini-assembler. Then Pascal. Then I graduated and went to college and learned how to program.

And I wrote my "One Time, at computer camp...." a long time ago.

The official launch name will be Windows Apology.

It's about to drop: http://smp.uq.edu.au/content/pitch-drop-experiment

I don't know about that. Everyone on /. seems to be a fuckin' critic, yet critics still have jobs.

The Mars One people have no intention to bring anyone home. Presumably Tito wants his ass back on the Earth someday.

This is a farce anyway. Tito's net worth is more than a full order of magnitude too small for even the cheapest conceviable Mars mission.

Exactly. Epigenetics means the offspring inherits the factory as well as the blueprints. (Okay, DNA isn't really a blueprint per se, but it's not nearly as pithy to say "as well as the DNA templates which create RNA templates which are used to construct specific proteins.")

Fortunately, science works by correlating the predictions of hypotheses with observed reality. Also fortunately, the theory of evolution via natural selection doesn't predict evolving an intelligent life-form in a lab. It predicts many, many things that correlate strongly with observed reality, but that is not one of them.

If I'd said something as monumentally ignorant as your post, I'd be red in the face too.

I think you are confusing "is" with "ought."

There are major, but short-lived, bursts of stereoscopic 3D movies seem to come every 15-20 years or so, as another new generation is available to be briefly wowed by a technology that's not new and that doesn't really add anything to the moviegoing experience. People get over it and we move on.

Nice slut-shaming.

It doesn't matter if the plaintiff enjoys sex, or is flirty with some people, or anything else. If she was sexually harassed at work, she has a case. Her dress, her sexual conduct outside the office, and her general attitudes make no difference to the question of sexual harassment.

Nate Silver's use of statistics is geeky. Really. That's about all he talks about -- not politics, but statistics. (Well, and sports, but even there, he's all about the statistics.)

Bwah? 97.7%? I'm only seeing an 86.3% chance.

Or is the "Chance of winning" sidebar item incorrect?