ibebrett

Just out of curiosity why? I personally can't imagine why someone would choose it as a favorite. Not because I think it is bad, but because I feel its kind of a kitchen sink language that doesn't really have any clear advantages or features.

"We assume that microbes evolved to attack humans when actually we are just civilian casualties in a much older war"

Did anyone actually have this assumption?

What makes you think that? I have had the opposite experience with Scala/Haskell

there is a difference between it being cool and being acceptable. you had an identity as a nerd. you were accepted as a nerd, and cool people were probably happy that you were because it put you lower on the totem pole.

I would disagree. Would you leave a typo on your resume?

Actually I have been able to do this pretty easily, but its probably because I commute an hour and a half each way to work on a train. So I get 3 hours a day to work on things I want to work on.

If you hadn't beat me to it, this is exactly what I would have suggested

I think it should be pointed out that bayesian's believe bayes theorem as a statement about plausibility of statements, so intuitions about an event space (which are obvious statements about sets) don't carry over to the general case.

They clearly know what they are doing. They definitely need people with prolog experience

I tend to disagree slightly. I have a math/cs degree, but work with a lot of physicists turned programmers. They are all smart and have plenty of experience at doing what they are doing, but have no idea what is out there CS wise. They reinvent the wheel quite often when building large systems. By not having the time taken out to read real cs text and instead focusing on just getting things done they missed a lot of sound computer science. They are all very bright, but just doing the relevant work only helps you on that type of work. Being exposed to a ton of different areas (as might happen in a cs degree, but there are other ways of course), lets you know what is out there in terms of different approaches.

Because in silicon valley and the startup scene in general you will see mostly 20 somethings as software engineers. Companies like that they can pay them less and get long hours out of them . (No children, work is #1 priority, etc).

Its just as arbitrary as "why do you like me?" "we happened to be in the same bar, which is randomness+a bit of factors based on our personalities" just because a computer is not causing you to randomly meetup at say a party, bar, concert doesn't mean its more or less based on randomness + a few factors based on your personality, location, age, etc (more or less what dating sites use)

I may have been to harsh in my assessment. But still, how many of these people are sitting down and working on some puzzle/problem/project they find interesting vs saying I know I need rails, and angular to make web apps and then just going through tutorial after tutorial. How many of them are actually interested in it in and of itself. I learned how to program very far away from the concept of writing an app that I could deploy to heroku.

This may be thinking back on things with rose tinted glasses, but I learned to code in qbasic when I was 12 or so at a Boys and Girls club after school and fell in love. It was entirely effortless and fun to me. I think the difference is at that point I wasn't trying to program to enter some lucrative career and be a startup guy (where are these "coders" going to be once the market dies down and a new industry is hot? probably trying to do that). For me it was something I loved immediately, and while obviously there are really hard problems, the coding part was effortless