I wonder if he has a colleague in the English department who wrote an article complaining about the amount of "notebook bullshitery" that an English student has to go through to start writing an essay.
Calling out the pains that students go through having to go to a store and pick out a notebook? And the woes and confusion that they experience with faced with the vast and baffling array of colors, paper sizes, page counts, line widths, and so on.
I found the woes outlined in this article to be dubious. This is simply a "first world problem".
On the other hand, I did get a warm-fuzzy feeling regarding my job security, since I am more than comfortable at the command line and further: learning to use tools I have never encountered before.
We should not be encouraging people to learn to program so much as we should be encouraging people to learn how to construct an algorithm.
That's the first thing you need to learn. Kind of like learning how to properly construct a sentence. You need to understand how to express a problem in a step-wise fashion.
There's a lot of talk in the technology industry about diversity. Adding more women, etc, but on a whole we need career diversity. Coders, writers, artists, actors, mathematicians, welders, plumbers, cooks, chemists, managers, politicians, and so on. Society takes more than just coders. So let's just encourage kids to get involved in finding a way to contribute that they might enjoy or at least find interesting.
As a developer who has struggled with depression, I really dig this.
I've got a lot of years doing backend work, and I'd be more than happy to help pro bono.
I personally would not get too hung up on the stack you use. Find something that will get you up and writing tests and building pages as quickly as possible.
Discussions about various stacks usually have to do with scaling and scaling usually is a problem after the prototype stage (which is the goal I'm guessing).
Up and coding.
I also agree that you should do the bulk of the work yourself. The knowledge you gain will be priceless, and in today's software development world, it is helpful for front-end guys to know what the backend guys do and vice-versa.
Certainly lean on people here for help and advice, but I wouldn't have someone do all the backend work for you.
Unfortunately there isn't a standard computer science curriculum out there. So one school may focus on pure computer science (i.e. that actual science of computation) and another may be teaching students how to write C# programs.
Software plays such a critical role in today's society that I almost (almost) think computer scientists and software developers need to be licensed like civil engineers, which would then create some standards. Of course there are a lot of reason why this would be a bad idea, but bottom line issue is the lack of consistency between schools.
I found the apps to be puerile, offensive, and inappropriate.
That said neither was sexist or misogynistic. It's not like they were called "How Dumb Was She?" or something.
We've come around to the idea that anything crude is sexist and misogynistic and this just isn't the case.
That concept in and of itself is sexist, because we (men) assume that women are too delicate to handle this stuff. We haven't stopped telling the dirty jokes at work, we just look over our shoulders to make sure the women aren't around before we do. Which creates an environment of exclusion.
Instead we should just stop telling the dirty jokes at work, because they aren't appropriate for work.
These jerks should never have even CONSIDERED presenting this app, because it's offensive. Offensive to women, men, people with devout religious beliefs, investors who took the time to listen to these presentations, and the list goes on.
Full disclosure I'm not a JavaScript programmer. I dink around with it. I can work with it. I understand it enough to maintain the code I need to at work, but I'm not a "JS Guy".
At the heart of my programming heraldry is C. From there I branched out into C++, Java, Perl, C#, etc.
In effect you are comparing JavaScript to Assembler, since CoffeeScript compiles to JS. I'm certain most people would agree that this is a ridiculous comparison, because as quirky as JavaScript can be it is far easier to work with than assembler. I wish people would stop making that comparison (I've been guilty of it myself, but I've stopped as of late).
In my view, the popularity of JavaScript comes down to two things: Interactivity and instant gratification.
I first played with JavaScript while in college in 1995. It blew my mind that I could just put some code into a text file and load it into Netscape and see stuff happen. No compiling, no linking, just text making the browser do things, and unlike Java it did not require me to upload an applet and hope that my target user had a JRE installed.
Today you have things like Chrome dev tools and JS Fiddle where you can get even more of that.
The velocity of going from idea to web app (site) is a lot nicer for most people.
IMHO JavaScript is the programming equivalent of an LLC. It's quick to start, low capital investment, and doesn't expose you to a lot of risk.
Anyhow...that's my two cents that I had to throw in before more veins in my head popped.
You know if the kid really wanted some press for his app...he should have turned down Yahoo's and state that he values his company too much to allow them to be used as a PR stunt.
...and then the dump truck full of money pulled into his drive way.
Calling out the pains that students go through having to go to a store and pick out a notebook? And the woes and confusion that they experience with faced with the vast and baffling array of colors, paper sizes, page counts, line widths, and so on.
I found the woes outlined in this article to be dubious. This is simply a "first world problem".
On the other hand, I did get a warm-fuzzy feeling regarding my job security, since I am more than comfortable at the command line and further: learning to use tools I have never encountered before.