vampirechicken

If you can't determine that this word problem is a Pythagorean qaudratic, then you might ought not to be sitting a "Higher Maths" exam.

You mean aside from saving the HTML and CSS and reproducing them on their blog?

Mostly it was all the terrible code that got written in Perl by the first wave of non-programmers to start building web apps.

Perl golf is meant as a thought exercise. Code should be human readable. The compiler will cope with verbose code just as easily as terse code.

Okay, invoking Word vs LaTex automatically makes your argument a straw man. I would have compared word to e.g. Adobe InDesign.

It has been my experience that while almost everybody can create a passable document in Word, something technical/government-ish with 500 pages and all of the publishing accouterments that come with a document of size, purpose, and complexity, you're getting into specialist territory, and almost all of the DTP specialists I know start by importing Word files in to InDesign.

"It should be something that any clerk can handle and that doesn't become obsolete."

This is an important statement. in that it is a reasonable goal, but nearly impossible.

Even using word, once one gets past a simple document, and starts having TOC, index, etc. and is "four five-inch binders" full of pages, then not just ANY CLERK will be able to maintain the document.

I had a class called "Introduction to file processing" that was basically "here's how you manage your data files," and taought us about the evolution from sequential access, to ISAM, to VSAM. Ended up working in RDMBS/SQL but it was a fascinating class - despite the assignments being in FORTRAN.

The perception is that the COBOL jobs don't pay as well as Ruby, Node, etc.

It this is not the case, then the recruiters are doing a bad job winning the hearts and minds of job seekers and those try to follow hiring trends.

You appear to be assuming that the limit is applied while fetching tuples, rather than while filtering the tuple set after fetch.

It occurs to me that if you handle LIMIT during fetch, you'll add complexity the fetch, and might only see run time gains in the cases where the number of desired rows is small.

If a column contains unique data it should be marked as such in whatever way your RDBMS requires (e.g. UNIQUE constraint and/or UNIQUE index)

Probably not, but it might have an effect on compensation in eminent domain cases.

flash cookies are less well known to people. Even the casual "privacy conscious" web user tend to be unaware that flash drop its own flash cookies that don't clear with the browsers "clear cookies" function.

No. Without any indication that the value in that column is unique the query engine must read the entire table in order to insure that it has found every row that meets the search criteria.

bitbucket is free for tiny private repos...

It is for entrance to Oxford, not Random State University. Aren't Oxford students expected to be elite?

But you can already script vim...