I think you hinted at the reality: Most our code these days is written in jQuer...JavaScript anyway. The server-side code is just an API wrapper for your interface to talk to. Hence, why we have all this debate. Sure, that API language matters, but it's for things like: "How fast can the server respond?" "How easy is it to learn?" "What is the community like?" "How good are the standard and open source libraries?" Note that the actual features of the language are not really important anymore. They all get the job done. At least with anything modern enough to have all the basics you need.

These are the things I love about Scribe. Definitely bookmarking this post should the discussion come up in the future.

Like most things, the problem isn't the technology. It's the people. You would have to get all the people on the internet to agree on it. It's a lot more challenging than just having something that works well. It's gotta be fun, useful, trendy and all that jazz.

Lists are awesome. But you have to organize them better than just the one gigantic list. Once you organize them, the list is freedom. You SAVE a TON of time not having to remember the same thing over and over again or figure out what you are working on. I don't know, but I have too much going on to keep it all straight.

My bank always does security authentication things through snail mail. I always wondered if that really helped the situation, or if it's just that the crackers don't have the patience to wait that long, so they get bored and move on.

The beast feature of php is the manual and the community. It's awesome being able to find solutions very easily. Trying to figure out how something works in MSDN for .Net is like sticking nails through your eyes. It's like it was written by lawyers and marketers exclusively—just jargon and shameless promotion, but not much real information. Of course, the difficulty in reliably searching for .net or c# is part of that. The PHP manual with the user-notes is a dream come true. What can take a full day to research in the MSDN manual takes seconds on php.net. THIS is what you have to duplicate to replace php. Make it easy to understand, RAPIDLY. You need a good manual, with user notes, that gets updated and a community of passionate people who like discussing trivial matters. The language itself is secondary or even tertiary to it's success. That doesn't mean you can't make it awesome, but an awesome language is not enough nor is it a necessary prerequisite.

We're talking about a low quality item, with (relatively) high quality encodings. It's like comparing the conductivity of silver, copper and gold for transmitting electricity for your cheap radioshack light dimmer. Sure they make a difference, but can you really tell when it's just light? Most can't, some experts probably can. A lot more would notice the difference if you were transmitting a tremendous amount of electricity over a long distance to run a huge spotlight, power a car, or (ironically) to run audio equipment. The variances would be noticeable, the light would be brighter on higher quality, the car would be faster. But here, there is nothing that needs perfect tone quality: Good test items would be a perfectly balanced choir, or a full orchestra with various solos jumping out throughout the song. But yeah, if you're just running a light in your house, cheap wires work fine. Give us something that has quality and we might be able to tell you if it degrades. If what you are listening to is garbage to begin with, poor encoding it isn't going to hurt it much.

The "toasty crunchies" example is pretty entertaining. However, the one thing not mentioned is the tax on your time. Going through that whole script (including the temper tantrum) is about 20 minutes of your time that most of us don't have. Saying, "we don't have that" and pouring food from the correct box instead: 30 seconds. My child generally is content when they see tasty food. Sometimes actions really do speak louder than words.

As a parent myself with similar proclivities, let me voice my agreement here on a few points made in the article and in the comments: 1. Parenting is hard. (But fun and rewarding). 2. Different children are as different as different adults. No. Really. They aren't just automatons. They actually make their own decisions and decide how they are going to react to different situations. 3. #2 doesn't mean you are helpless as a parent. On the contrary, the better you understand this, the better job you can do. #2 and #3 are not mutually exclusive. Children are genetically very different AND you can still make a huge difference based upon how you raised them. Silly humans, always trying to pick one extreme or the other. :)

You don't have to lie to have discretion in what you decide to say. Always tell the truth. Saying every thought that enters your mind is a totally different subject. My 3 year old does that, and believe me, she (and all of us) will be better off when her "filter" activates. It's entertaining, but not productive.

Thanks for the notification and explanation. Now using 2-step verifcation.

Best quote from someone in the trenches: And most of the time, what inexperienced developers consider beautiful is superficial, and what they consider ugly, is battle-hardened production-ready code from master hackers.

I think the problem lies more in the current standard than in the format itself. As soon as you can make a fully functional webpage within a single-file "book," then the eBook will be vastly superior. Right now it's just a young technology. Give it time.

We're doing something wrong. The fact there is this battle between better encryption and better cracking is just a never-ending arms race. I am not sure the solution, but I think it is something along the lines of making the user database useless outside of the realm it is being used. Maybe have the entire database hashed against the administrator log-in and that information is never written to disk, just cached in RAM? Tying it to the hardware somehow? I don't know what it is but surely there is a better solution.

The problem is that most of your projects are going to be an original creation, so that no simulator for it will exist. The only way to get one would be to make it... except that would take exponentially longer than just dealing with the problem. It only becomes feasible if you are going to repeat a very similar simulation many times.

Too bad none of these things actually work yet in a real IDE!

To flip the coin over, I am so glad the tablet era has arrived. So much easier for lots of simple things. Email, movies, books, news and most of my little games—on the tablet. Still. I think it's too soon to declare the desktop dead. Maybe dead for being exciting and new, but still very useful and very relevant for most of the work being done in industry. That said, the pc can be killed by a few feature additions: - Really fast and complete tablet docking stations - Really effective voice to text - Better gestures to do more complicated work All these exist, but they are not of high enough quality yet. Make high quality version of all three and suddenly the pc is unnecessary.

It would only be post-pc if we could sell all our computers and still get our jobs done. Not even close. I still need three monitors (and a few more would be better) as well as a large keyboard and a mouse. Granted, I am a developer, so I need more specialized hardware, but even our secretaries would struggle terribly trying to look up phone numbers and addresses on a relative clunker like the ipad3. At home, I have the same problem. I can't do anything useful without an actual computer. I have a tablet, and I love it, but I still need the PC. Until tablets get more useful so that you can actually do real work with them, we are still going to need to the pc. I don't know that you will ever be able to do real work with such a small screen.

A live troubleshooting of a real world problem can work very well also. Hard to set up if your in a big business, but in smaller organizations it's a very good test.

I have to agree with what a few people have already said. The personal ban has always been the most effective method. This was a wonderful feature on Kali. Simply /ban annoyinguser and suddenly you don't hear from them any more. Really annoying users would be instantly banned by about 50% of the population. The rest could decide if they wanted to keep seeing those posts or not.

By the way, Jeff, your copyright needs updated. It's not 2009 anymore. :)

I love that we are arguing about the etymology of zucchini on a programming site.

@Gustavo I believe Jeff is referring to a future bubble, to appear in about a year.

@Steve Hollasch. Well said. Use what works best.

If I comment on this post, will you steal my password? :O