jEdit was my main editor for about two or three years. An excellent and in some ways very underrated project. I see that the original author is here in this thread - if you happen to see this I just wanted to say thank you for this editor that brought me many hours of productivity and enjoyment!
I've been hoping to see something like this for quite some time. Kudos for a really cool project and for making it available for people to play with.
At least for Spanish, it can pronounce some words fairly well. I wrote a Spanish orthography-to-IPA converter a few years back. It's up on Heroku until folks crash it if you want to get some Spanish words transcribed to IPA.
I used it to generate a few random words. Some of the sounds were off - for example ɾ (the "r" in "estar"). But many words were pronounced clearly enough to be understood.
I had the good fortune to study with Chomsky as an undergraduate in the early 90's and can confirm much of what the article says. To me he was always kind, accessible and warm, even though I was not a particularly promising student.
Ok, I'll bite, because I like the Red Dwarf reference in your username.
It's not about just honoring any random person. His work has had a big impact on the tech community. His articles about his daughter's illness and death were extremely well written and stuck a chord with thousands of readers.
I'm 41. I also worry about ageism but so far I don't feel that it has affected me yet.
> Do you have to go into management to continue progressing upwards in pay and influence? I know this isn't the case at some companies (e.g. Google), but is it rare or common to progress as an individual contributor?
That has not been the case for me. I'm currently doing software development for a startup - the same thing I've done my whole career. I do get asked to provide guidance and help for younger devs sometimes, but I don't mind that one bit, it's actually very personally fulfilling.
> Is there a plateau in pay? Is there a drop in pay switching jobs after a certain number of years experience because places are looking for 5+ instead of 20+?
For me, so far no. I'm currently making the highest salary I've made yet in my career. I've been here for a year and a half.
My age has not been an obstacle to finding a job yet; I've had plenty of interviews and offers over the last 5 years and have chosen the places I wanted to work, rather than the places where I had to. It's worth noting that I'm white, male and American, so I realize I'm less likely to suffer from workplace/interview discrimination with US companies than people in other demographics.
> Is becoming a specialist rather than a generalist the answer?
I'm pretty much a generalist web developer, I do backend and front end work, On a nearly daily basis I work with Ruby, Javascript, Postgres, Haml, Chef, CSS, Sass, Shell scripting, etc. I didn't have to become a specialist to get my job, although the fact that I've been doing Ruby for about 10 years did help me get it. I think the answer is, just to be good at what you do, whether that's as a specialist or a generalist.
> Are older devs not looking for new jobs because they have families and want more stability/are focussed elsewhere?
> What are the older people in your workplace doing?
I have two kids, 5 and 2. My coworkers are evenly split between man and women, are mostly in their 30's to 50's and most of them have kids too. A coworker of mine recently returned from a ~5 month maternity leave after having triplets, and we've been flexible about her work hours/conditions because we didn't want to lose her. So we're definitely not averse to having employees with families. I look for companies that have this kind of attitude to work at. It's not as hard to find as you might think; as long as you're good at what you do people will probably want to hire you.
I'm not sure to what extent my company is "typical" but you can at least count me as one "older" developer who is happily still working as a developer, was able to have a family without harming my career, and didn't get pushed into management.
All in all I would say, your early 30's is still young. Statistically you've got more than half of your life ahead of you, likely the best part, too. As we get older I suspect the demographics of our profession will change along with us, and there will be more older people in roles we stereotype as being for younger people.
At least that's what I keep telling myself!
If I recall correctly, the author of the article linked here apologized for its tone and removed it from his blog. It seems a bit of a disservice to repost it here without mentioning that context.
FYI `git reset -p` works the same way. Sometimes, depending on your work and workflow it can be easier to add everything and then just exclude a few of the changes.
I've heard almost all of the complaints before and had a few of them myself. But before tearing this guy a new one for rattling off a list of trivial-sounding complaints, be aware that the second half of the presentation extols the virtues of Lua and advises you to "get past the initial irritation."
> The ecosystem of Lua assumes you eat C for breakfast
That's a bit of an exaggeration. There isn't anywhere near the number of libraries that Python and Ruby have, nor anywhere near the general level of quality, but you can do an awful lot without ever touching C. Reams of Lua code have been written to script WoW by people who have no idea how to program in C. In fact, one of the primary design objectives of Lua is to have a language that's simple for non-programmers to learn.
> you're going to be looking around for easy, plug-and-play libraries and wondering why they don't exist.
That's very true. I spent the better part of a year working on open source web development libraries in Lua but eventually gave up because nobody was using them. There are fantastic libraries in Python and Ruby, at this point it's not really worth reinventing the wheel just to do the same stuff, but in Lua.
The interesting thing about the Lua community is that very few people use Lua as their primary day-in-day-out language, which leads to a distinct lack of fanboyism. I think that's in part why so few libraries exist. The typical Lua programmer attitude seems to be, "Why should I rewrite that in Lua when I can just use the one written in <insert language here>?"
Adobe Lightroom is about 40% written in Lua (the stat comes from Wikipedia). IIRC C and C++ are used for image processing and compute-intensive stuff, but the rest of it is all Lua. I believe that would be the most widely used app written mostly in Lua, though Apache, Redis, Nginx, Vim and some other big projects support using it for scripting.
Meanwhile in Argentina, to quit a job you are legally obliged to send a telegram, and people still send them to congratulate newlyweds on their weddings.