Xah's Edu Corner: Teach Ourself Programing In Ten Years?

[Emile van Sebille]

On 1/2/2010 1:14 AM Xah Lee said...
> These books are the bedrock of the industry. It is not because people
> are impatient, or that they wish to hurry, but rather, it is the
> condition of the IT industry, in the same way modern society drives
> people to live certain life styles.

Turing complete.  Once you've learned to program, learning dialects is a 
different study.  I hated Word Perfect early on, but if I were faced 
with it today I expect that everything I know about word processing 
would kelp to deploy it effectively with minimal in-depth knowledge of 
it's peculiarities.  Likewise, I don't work in perl, but I don't 
hesitate to deploy and modify perl projects to my needs, and mostly 
having only brushed up on the semantics that need to change.

> No amount of patience or
> proselytization can right this, except that we change the industry's
> practice of quickly churning out bug-ridden software products to beat
> competitors. Companies do that due to market forces, and the market
> forces is a result of how people and organizations actually choose to
> purchase software. In my opinion, a solution to this is by installing
> the concept of responsible licenses. Please see this essay Responsible
> Software Licensing and spread the word.

Licensing programmers isn't likely to turn Microsoft around. 
Enforcement doesn't carry much weight with them.  Let's work to 
strengthen that, then there's a functioning mechanism in place to work 
with.

Not-holding-my-breath-ly y'rs,

Emile