You can certainly leverage their marketing. For the next couple of months, the Flash universe is going to be filled with discussions of search. Google and Yahoo are going to do a bunch of marketing, and a bunch of market research, all of which you don't have to pay for. Just monitor some Flash-user forums, watch the users rave and/or complain about the new tools, and see if a niche market presents itself.

Meanwhile: Launch. Get something out there you can point to.

Realistically speaking, you've gotta be not just an über-programmer, but having extensive exposure to the HR and developer management to have any credibility on the matter. Otherwise the statistical sample is just not there, so the list has very little value outside of being entertaining.

A concrete gripe with this particular matrix - maintaining a blog has nothing to do with programmer's competency. In fact the exact opposite is true based on my observations. The reference to the value of TopCoder rankings is also laughable at best; again based on my own experience.

Wrong. Exceptions, unlike GOTOs, can't jump straight into a loop or any construct that has a local state. In fact, exceptions never break local states, and that's their beauty.

The best proof that exceptions don't break anything is that you can always represent a throw/catch cycle with IF's, RETURN's, possibly also subroutines, but there will be no GOTOs. You will have equivalent functionality, except the code will be a bit bloated and less readable.

http://mark.nirv.net/post/6694167/guilty-pleasures

Well, it's too bad that none of these pesky algorithms can be logically decomposed into independent processes and run all at once. Like, say, every matrix multiplication ever done by a multi-pipelined GPU in the past 20 years.

This is really the worst sort of trolling. Every time I looked up from studying today, I feel like I read something after which I was stupider than before. I mean, just look at what's become of my grammar, if nothing else...

MacBook Pros are standard (no more PCs)

heh.

Greater parallelism in hardware is a fine goal. But it's madness to write programs for processors. If humans can't read it, then your program is crap. There are no exceptions.

We have these many processors. The task is not to make parallelism fit on a single chip. The task is to develop practices and languages that allow humans to write code for other humans, in such a way that programs also incidentally take advantage of the many (threaded, algorithmic) von Neuman machines that we have wired together in modern computers.

In just a few years, 8 or 16 (or more!) cores won't be a big deal. When you have 50 single-threaded cores, you have a different kind of computer than what we're used to today. We already have languages that take advantage of these features pretty well. They're not hugely popular yet, but they're also not being taught at universities, and we're not yet at a point where they're terribly necessary.

The COSA project is imaginary yak shaving of the worst sort. If he was half the hacker he claimed to be, he'd be writing programs instead of crackpot papers. Where is all the useful error-free software that COSA makes it so easy to create? Where's the web server he built with it, or the word processor? Hell, I'd be impressed with a 4-function calculator! Show me the goods, and I'll take it seriously. I'll even join the beta and play around with the stuff.

Until then, in my view, Savain is on par with the muttering bum at the bus stop.