AFAIK it is pretty common for most universities in Germany to start CS programs with either (S)ML, OCaml, Haskell or any combination of these depending upon the individual preferences of the responsible chair.
Java is (was?) pretty common for introductory OO classes. Advanced OO classes (outside of a "Software Engineering" context) though often introduce Eiffel, Smalltalk, Python, C++ and C# as well.
Depending upon your particular choice of courses, specialization etc., being exposed to Lisp, Prolog, Perl, C and R isn't uncommon either and from what I heard Scala is also starting to appear as a teaching language.
From what I heard the curriculum in France, Swiss, Austria and Denmark is very similar. So I am a bit surprised of the notion that there are universities out there where you can get a CS degree without being exposed to some functional programming.
I am also quite familiar with the Java (and Ruby and pre iPhone Objective-C) ecosystem and invested quite a lot time in getting proficient with Scala since 2007 but recently got hooked on F#.
My experience has been, that the available documentation on .Net (and F#) is so much better compared to the other stacks I know, that after three months or so of dabbling in my free time with .Net I already feel like having a much more solid base in .Net than the other platforms (where I have 4, 3 and 6 years experience).
Granted this might be due to me either suck at Java, Ruby and Objective-C or me not yet having real world experience with .Net and being oblivious to ugly corner cases, warts etc. you only come across on a big real world project.
But honestly my first contact with some of the books and online resources available for the .Net ecosystem and comparing that with what I was accustomed to was shocking.
I can't talk for Python, but from my limited experience the Ruby community started to get the submerged in a wave of sub-par developers when Obie Fernandez et al. started to promote the meme, that attending a Ruby/Rails related conference puts you in the top 5% bracket of software developers.
The last time I tried installing Batteries (on OS X) it was a big PITA and it looked like it was dead in the water (this was about 18 months ago).
During the same time using GODI to install a xml processing library completely hosed my system after me foolishly granting it root rights, which killed my OCaml enthusiasm for good.
OCaml is in itself a really nice language (apart from some warts like lack of native multithreading support) but it's tooling, infrastructure and "first developer experience" and lack of progress in these areas in the last years is beyond atrocious (compared to F#, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby, Python, JavaScript).
The "Walz" is not for building primary skills (i.e. in our case Software Development or in their case Carpentry). It is assumed that carpenters doing it are already quite skilled in their respective profession. The reason of the "Walz" is to teach self reliance, soft skills and to round out ones primary skills by being exposed to practices of their craft that have evolved/developed differently from those they learned during their apprenticeship.
In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an employee any longer (so in our case to become a founder).
I think the internet undermines these goals, because, well IMHO it is becoming more and more a gigantic echo chamber (we all read the same blogs/books, admire the same persons, use remarkably similar tools etc.)
I think it is astounding that a lot of very smart people assume that currently hip and promoted best development practices, say for a Web 2.0 whatever platform are relevant for other areas (e.g embedded, big iron, medical, aeronautic, finance) because there is not much evident push back in the blog sphere from practitioners in these spheres... which AFAIK is more a result of these people tending to much less likely to blog or work on open source software, than of the universal applicability of said practices (and if the push back, the results I have seen so far have been highly embarrassing for the hipster crowd).
I guess a lot of hacker news reader work in said startup areas. So is anybody willing to give it a shot?
I am located in Munich, Germany, not exactly a startup hup, but I have some connections to Berlin and would be willing to annoy my contacts there until they agree.
Also should the plans for my own company work out in the next months, I would be willing to offer exclusive intern/entry/mid-level positions.
This guide is the most concise and bginner friendly introduction to an active lifestyle I have seen yet... I second the recommendation... additionally (sad as it is) I think a lot of "professionals" would also benefit from reading it.
From what I heard (but I am no expert at all) Japanese culture encourages an extremely sharp (at least from the standpoint of Europeans and I would guess Americans) separation between business and private life, e.g. behavior which Europeans would consider highly eccentric - say a high powered banker running around disguised as Mickey Mouse in his off time - are considered a non issue.
In case this is true, this could be a reason why Japanese people don't really see much of a need to ensure that an online identity can be traced to "real identity", because they consider the "virtual identity" to be "good/real enough".
The problem with sleep deprivation is that unless you have an objective way of measuring your (mental) performance you're usually not able to realize when it declines, because your're self monitoring capabilities decline as well.
A simple test, that worked very well for me, was testing my reading speed (I know it is only a weak indicator for mental acuity, but it is easy and fast to test).
Under perfect conditions (well rested, optimal nutrition, completely silent room, no visual distractions, after mediation and a good cup of green tea) I am able to read about 800 WPM (which is not to bad) of the kind of text I usually need to read with good retention. For me this declines rapidly to less than 200 WPM (which is quite bad for a "knowledge worker") with sleep deprivation and/or a noisy environment, even though I believe I am doing fine.
That being said, even though I would say that doctors are handicapped "mental performance" is handicapped by their working conditions, I fully agree that it is better for patient safety to not hand off a patient to a new doctor say every 8 or 12 hours due to the amount implicit knowledge that a doctor gathers during a >24h time period about his patients that can't be transferred in a handoff.
Software Developers, imagine what a screw up it would be if you'd have to hand off your code every 8h to another developer, who'd have to continue right were you left... add to this not having a version control system, spotty test coverage and highly ambiguous specifications
For the "current" standards of good looking and for skill levels attainable by people having a life (and/or job) it would be probably something like that (roughly in descending order):
* Basketball (for women tied with Volleyball)
* Decathlon (men)
* Sprint (men - women equivalent would be long and high jump)
* Boxing (all variants but only for lower to "normal" weight classes)
* Judo/Wrestling/BJJ/Gymnastics (lower to "normal" weight classes... maybe to sinew for women)
* Rowing/Kanu
* Olympic Weightlifting (lower to "normal" weight classes)
* Powerlifting (again lower to "normal" weight classes, additionally not at elite level)
* Swimming (men... women a probably higher in this chart)
If you allow "newcomers", I would add to above list CrossFit in the upper third for men (lower third for women) and Kettlebell (lower to "normal" weightlcasses) in the lower third.
Swimming would have been higher in the past, but for today's "standards" it allows a to "high" level of body fat compared to the other sports.
Football (aka. "Soccer") players only start to look "good" at a pretty high level (if they're not doing anything else), the same probably holds true for Baseball.
Additionally some positions in American Football (e.g. Receiver) and some Skiing variants would be ranked quite well.
Considering the amount of money governments are willing to spend on rootkits as compared to more benevolent activities, I suspect that these companies won't stay a minority for long.