abolibibelot

Got me. That being said there's been quite a lot of funding happening in Paris lately, and there are a few French companies (some of them startups) which are starting to match Criteo's compensations.

For senior developers in Paris the median may be around 50-60, (most of software engineer jobs are in consultancies) but there are tech companies that pay up to twice as much . I know mine does, and is looking for developers from all around the world, if you're interested :)

The guilt and shame is so spot on. Living though such projects illustrated so well the "the beatings will continue until morale improves" project management school of thoughts.

This school has its agile proponents too, though. But compared to the common practices of the penultimate decade, XP and Agile at least acknowledged that failure was the default mode of software development projects, and made contingency plans for it.

Don't know about the formalization by Royce, but I've witnessed and suffered waterfall in practice - let's call it ad-hoc waterfall if you will - and it was no urban legend.

And on moonless nights I still wake up screaming remembering a RUP project I was involved in around 2000.

"No true scotsman" and all, I know.

Some of the criticisms are still valid: there's a definite "gossip magazine diet plan" vibe to the book, even if the clean cut from waterfall or iterative process horrors (Rational Unified Process anyone?) was sorely needed.

The criticisms about no metrics supporting the book assertions are valid too (we have more metrics now, though).

That said, a lot of things in this book are now considered good engineering practices, and the methodology guys have come back with a vengeance with the Agile/Scrum/Lean/Whatever waves that filled the blanks left by XP (and ensured a nice revenue stream for pure process consultants).

When dealing with this general problem, the proper tool would more likely be language/culture detection + Named-Entity Recognition.

Simple regular expressions can be good enough if you're aware of the domain restriction though.

I'm gonna be That Other Guy and say that the date and phone regex are respectively english-language and US specific. So it's common for a narrow definition of common.

Old Man's War is an ironical counterpoint to Starship Troopers (something that becomes more blatant in the later novels). It's a bit like Hadelman's Forever War mixed with slapstick. It's no masterpiece, but the humor makes it a great read.

I love Verhoeven and the long running joke he played at the expense of Hollywood (mostly with Starship Troopers, Robocop, Basic Instinct and Showgirls - Flesh + Blood is great but not as sarcastic as his later american movies).

Starship Trooper, the novel, is hilarious on its own, with its hawkishness and interesting political views (it's less creepy than Ender's Game in that aspect though). But Heinlein is a much better writer than Card and Stranger in a Strange land makes up for the juvenile tripe he wrote earlier. I guess Vietnam had to happen for some people to reflect on the Rah-rah-rah kind of military Sci-Fi.

(I know there's a cult of Heinlein on HN - I've always wondered if there was an intersection with the Cult of Rand and the Cult of Card)

Edit: as a thought experiment, it would be interesting (as in "depressing") to imagine the exact opposite: an adaptation of Old Man's War by the current Hollywood industry.

In terms of threading, Ruby and Python are in the same, sad, GIL boat. The speed issue is the same, but the C libraries alleviate this somewhat (Numpy, scikit-learn and lxml come to mind). Tail recursion is really needed when you have a functional language, and since Guido van Rossum, and therefore Python, has a bias against FP, the lack of TCO is not that glaring when you write pythonic code (which is kind of a circular argument, I know). When it comes to libraries, the old "batteries included" argument gets old, and the standard library shows its age, but it's usually addressed in external libraries... ...which brings me to my real gripe about Python, the ever changing way you're supposed to manage packages (use easy_install, wait, no use pip and virtualenv, wait you should take a look at wheels too, and so on).

An interesting retrospective. What would be interesting would be to know the challenges you've encountered once you started working as a developer. I have two questions though: I'm curious to know why you state that

"Ruby is probably the best platform to learn if you're a designer and you want to learn how to code to add value for your clients."

and also I'd love some more details on why "Python is fairly mediocre in a lot of ways" (not starting a language war here, I'm genuinely curious)

Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought.

(I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)