Choosing the right metaphor in terms of OOP is equally important as well as the understanding the word's meaning and the implication of alternative meanings.
How would we react if one of the commercial missions goes wrong?
There must be a certain difference of standards, when a public organization kills people for science, and when a private company kills people for profit.
Idea is a single word. You can neither say if it is overrated, nor analyze the market on the basis of a single word.
— But can I write bullshit articles with a flamebait title interviewing some guy no one takes seriously?
Yes, you can.
There are pure ideas that just occur on an impulse. And there are ideas that satisfy a given demand. If you skip one of the steps when implementing an idea that satisfies the demand, you bail on the demand, not on some abstract over-hyped quality that serves no purpose.
In my opinion the really worthwhile ideas go alongside with the demand, and making sure that the demand is met is no overrated practice. Why? Because the demand is just a social definition of a problem that needs a solution.
People that have ideas unrelated to the demand usually write this kind of interviews.
I tend to get confused when people mix the discussion of syntax, coding style and API into the aspects of environment itself.
This pointless way of thinking is very much like finding a more appropriate keyword for a public field, while trying to improve the methods by which VM handles big integers.
Scala is liberal.
It allows you to express yourself more elegantly. But freedom comes at a cost (this is natural!). The price is learning it, remembering it and a constant state of awareness for all the patterns it has to offer.
The speed of a compiler (think of PyPy), is a thing that can be improved at least to some extent. But very few people are willing to work on the inner structure of a language, that you doom to be inappropriate for 50% of the tasks out there.
Look at the set of various languages as a biosphere of evolving organisms. They tend to improve. If there was no demand for Scala or PHP, they wouldn't have occured in the first place.
I think the original article and the follow-up is a poorly disguised attempt at elitism, or maybe just an excellent way to challenge people.
I will say it in simplest terms possible, what really matters is how Scala handles tail-recursion, not whether it allows it. And the first point is out of reach for consideration, if you are a simple developer that may encounter 'learning difficulties'.
The most effective combat tactic is not to struggle, but to make things in your life _interesting_.
One of the tactics is to simplify exercises, the other involves rationalization. When I feel in control - I do not need to force myself to do something, I just do it because fills the structure of my life and because I understand how consequences of my actions build this structure by relying upon each other.
So I do not respect the success in combating laziness only through sheer will, I prefer to divide big tasks and find meaning in small ones.
You have surrendered to the ideology of laziness. But there is no such thing.
The energy enters you, you transform it and then you use the transformed energy to suit your needs.
In this chain, something is broken. People tend simplify this by calling it laziness when they need to put a tag on someone they don't like.
But the real reason for you inability to accomplish tasks at hand is that something in the chain I have described earlier - is broken.
You either struggle to get enough energy (food, sleep, emotion), or you struggle to transform it (usually abundance of low-quality energy sources and inability to improve their quality)
The only way out of this state (which is not permanent) is to revise your routines and methods. Improve and rationalize everything you do, so it won't call to those 'woeful' associations when you start working on something.
I'm sorry, but as much as I respect people both on Reddit and Hacker News, I wonder where does all the enthusiasm come from, when:
* demos show nothing new from a technological perspective
* the presenter sounds like a door-to-door salesperson
* as it seems to me, the only purpose of the demo is to raise a hype and somehow (I still don't understand) they succeeded
Euclideon got financed by Australian government.
I really hope the board took a critical approach and relied on at least /some/ technical expertise to grant these people A$ 2m. If they made this decision based just on a demo - I'm moving to Australia at once, where I will invent a technology you have never seen in your whole life before. Ever.
As a new programmer I felt blessed when I learned OOP.
I could actually write long and clean pieces of code, without spending double time on restructuring them. Clean and coherent structure is important for understanding, while understanding your own code, and remembering what it does, creates a more fruitful development. Since new programmers often work iteratively by adding new features to their code, this is rather positive, than negative and that extra learning effort is always rewarded.
By knowing OOP you can access other's libraries in the language you recommend. By using other's libraries and by altering them, you can create more cool stuff faster.