wasd884's comments

Better colleagues with better brains.

I'm not disappointed in Linus, how much bullshit and push back could you take before you snap and don't want to play ball any more? If you beat a dog, it stops coming over to you. I think I would have done the same as Linus many years ago. He is still a saviour, just a defeated and jaded saviour.

I am disappointed in the current state of technology though. Everything is code of conducts, safety first, sexual this, gender that, my feelings, your feelings and political correctness. I wish people could just talk about programming and software without making it complicated. None of the above topics are relevant to programming. The world owes you nothing, and that's true of people with pink hair and without alike.

My only hope is that this new approach to solving shit implodes. I don't see quality coming from this constant appraisal of everyone's feelings. Maybe then I'll be able to work again as a programmer, not a human resources manager who occasionally programs.

It does seem expensive when you've been exposed to free (or heavily discounted) prices your whole life. This is because the others still charge this much, except the difference in revenue is made up by selling your data and pushing adverts (rather than charging you extra). Suddenly the extra $30-$40 per year doesn't seem so expensive any more.

> My first guess is that the fastest route I can provide is Java through the Oracle's Java Programmer II certification and creating an original Android app for Google Play store.

Oh great, flooding the already low quality programming industry with even more "in it for a quick buck and I don't really care about quality" programmers?

I don't. I let my brain do its own thing.

If I forget something it's because I'm not using it much. If I forget something and need it again I search for it on the internet.

It's beautifully simple and requires zero configuration, cost or maintenance.

I agree.

OP, when you stop saying things like "PHP (yuck)" and start to appreciate each language for the one (or more) things it got right, you'll be well on the way to taking your coding skills to expert.

I might be being a bit "old hat", but I thought a programming language was one that you had to to compile (such as C) whereas a scripting language was one that was interperated (such as Python). I could be wrong but there appears to be some similar lines of thought on this.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17253545/scripting-langu...

You misunderstood me. I agree that scripting and programming have nothing to do with dynamic types.

> It's technically scripting, not programming, but can you imagine if Bash files were type hinted?

I was clarifying that writing Bash files was scripting and not programming.

Dynamic types weren't a mistake, but they were overused IMO. It's technically scripting, not programming, but can you imagine if Bash files were type hinted? For small scripts, solo projects or quick fixes, dynamic typing is great because it's fast! On the flip side, large codebases should (on the whole) not use dynamic types because of all the safety they fail to provide! As you said, most dynamically typed languages are moving towards some sort of type hinting and that's because high quality developers demand it when working on medium to large projects.

Very true, especially as type hinting for properties looks to be coming in PHP 7.4!

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/typed_properties_v2

I wonder if you could use this surgery combined with a specialised prosthetic arm to create movable yet simple replacement hands.

Imagine a prosthetic arm with a hollow body and a hand that can open and close in a simple fashion. Run a hydraulic pipe from the artificial hand up to the pincer and secure the presses/cylinders at both ends.

When the amputee closes their pincer inside the artificial arm the prosthetic hand would then close. Differing amounts of pressure would allow the amputee to exert different amounts of pressure to grip, pick up and move objects.

Also, there would be no electronics to go wrong. Hydraulics are very stable, cheap and reliable technology!

You've clearly made your mind up! I won't be continuing this conversation either...

> That kind of work was very poor methodologically and its results are best explained as the Clever Hans effect

I think you might be overreaching here! Roger Fouts was (and still is) an expert and I fear you may just be regurgitating information from a study that is nearly forty years old.

The book I mentioned earlier was written twenty years after the linked article and explicitly mentions the bias he experienced in an entire chapter alone. It counters and logically explains away a lot of the conclusions that they falsely arrived at. If I remember correctly one of the main reasons that studies in the 70s and 80s liked to play down the intelligence of chimps is that it allowed the "for profit" chimp research centers to continue operating. A lot of these studies were published and financed by people who would lose out if they had to provide better (and therefore more costly) conditions for their "dumb testing subjects".

As for the clever hans effect, Roger was extremely careful to not to selectively extract words and interpret them during his research. He even invited officials from the ASL institute to verify his findings first hand.

The clever hans effect also cannot explain away why chimps started signing to each other (when no humans were present and the chimps were being monitored by video) or why sometimes the chimps would sign to themselves (much in the same way that humans occasionally mumble to themselves).

I implore you (if you have the time) to read Roger's book. It really is an eye opener and very well written!

I read this book not long ago:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Next-Kin-Conversations-Chimpanzees-...

And in it the author (who spent decades working with and teaching chimps) concludes that chimps have the intelligence to talk but not the vocal chords. They can understand humans talking (in the same way that a dog can understand verbal commands) but they cannot do much besides grunt or hoot back.

However when you change the conversation method to something else (such as sign languge) chimps can talk back exceedingly well. In the book mentioned above the author has video proof that the chimps can talk to humans (and each other) at the level of a two to four year old child.

This is the main chimp in the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee)

This doesn't seem to just apply to chimps either. Gorillas (and other large apes) can do the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)