wakkalakka's comments

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I do in fact agree it is probably unreasonable for people to expect automatic code generation to be hand-editable without disturbing the machine-editable workflow, but it is something that comes up a lot.

I see that Google's tool also seems to produce rather inscrutable output (see my edit to my original post). This does sound like one of those really hard problems where is pretty much impossible to balance the needs of the machine-modifiability with human-readability.

Thanks again for the reply!

This sounds a lot like Tumult's Hype:

http://tumult.com/hype

One of the primary complaints about Hype is that its HTML / CSS / JS output isn't very clean. I wonder if Google's tool produces better output.

EDIT: Looks like not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470640

This is not about red vs. blue, Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative, or anything else like it.

Everyone tries to get their patent cases heard in this particular district in Texas the same way that everyone incorporates in Delaware. It's one particular legal venue that just happens to be friendly to certain vested interests. The reason to seek out this venue is because of nothing more than apolitical favoritism towards patent holders. That's all. Don't make this into something it's not.

And here was have a prime example of why, despite all the opinion to the contrary[1], there is a clear need for a more stringent review process for Android apps. This is exactly the kind of thing which could have been caught by some kind of run-time analysis, either by hand or through some automated process that's part of the "approval" needed to be on the Play Store. Given Google's technical chops, I doubt they would have a hard time checking for this automatically at submission time, so they wouldn't have to hire a staff of human reviewers like Apple does. It might slow down the process of posting things to the store just slightly, but in the end it would benefit users.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329490

There are appears to be a strong trend these days in certain circles to demonize Steve Jobs in some way or other. Simply mentioning his name either here or on reddit (and probably a few other places) is often enough to garner a large number of replies saying he wasn't a genius and was just a salesman / marketer, etc.

The fact is, he did have a proven track record of being able to distill various concepts and functions into products that people loved -- not just liked, but loved. When presented with a prototype or the beginnings of an idea, he knew what to keep, what to throw away, and what to change. He knew how to keep at it until it was truly great. So great that it could turn entire industries on their heads. So great that whole companies would spend years trying to imitate the results. He did this many times during his life, enough times so that it is pretty much impossible to say that it was merely accident; he clearly knew what he was doing.

The results are so striking and so clearly beyond that which other people working at the same time were able to produce that I think it's safe to say Steve Jobs was exhibiting a next-level talent, one of those talents that even people whom we normally think of as extremely talented find difficult to even comprehend, let alone replicate. Because of this I think it is truly fitting to use the word "genius" when describing what he could do, even if it was not the skills of an engineer. I know using that word will probably incur some of the replies I was just talking about, but that's how I see it.

When it comes down to it, Steve Jobs probably could have been a good or even great engineer if he had set his mind to it, but he had a much rarer talent around which he chose to build his career. I can't help but feel that a lot of the vitriol directed at him is because people either do not understand or on some level actively resent what made him different.