I started teaching myself in the early 80s on an Atari 400 with Atari BASIC. At elementary school, I got some coaching from the librarian in Apple Logo. By sixth grade, I had participated in a few school district programming contests.
In junior high, I got involved in modeming and wrote a BBS for my Atari 130XE in Turbo Basic XL. When I got an Atari ST, I released my first public domain program, a VT52 "animation" editor, compiled from GFA Basic.
Afraid of the social stigma of being too involved with computers, I gave up programming for the rest of my teens, only picking it up again in my last years at college, when my curiosity about the expanding Internet led me to explore MUSHes, MOOs and HTML.
I found a job building static intranet pages from technical documentation and learned the basics of JavaScript, although at the time, it wasn't useful for much beyond client-side form validation.
Then I got a customer service job at a rising e-commerce site and began hitting the books in earnest, learning UNIX shell programming, regular expressions, Perl and SQL. I started writing command-line tools and CGI scripts and moved over from customer technical support to working on the customer service toolkit.
I hit a kind of plateau, though I didn't realize it at the time. Though I continued to crank out scripts, my efforts to become effective in compiled languages such as C and Java stalled repeatedly.
Eventually, largely through exposure to the work of experienced developers, I began to understand principles of computer science as well as practices of large-scale software design. As I became comfortable with a greater degree of abstraction, I branched out from reading books on specific programming languages to reading up on broadly applicable concepts and practices. I've been working in software for over 15 years, and I continue to read avidly.
It's also worth mentioning that surveillance is not news for poor and minority communities. Incursions on privacy justified by the "war on drugs" have been going on for decades in neighborhoods on the other side of the digital divide.
The notion that defectors are lavishly rewarded -- a notion that Snowden encouraged in his comment about palaces and petting a phoenix -- is at odds with the historical record. Consider Kim Philby. After the act of defection has been milked for propaganda, the defector is dispatched to guarded obscurity.
It's hard to know what's really happening between Snowden and his hosts. The notion that Russia's hands are legally tied and that Snowden is just hanging out at the airport as a logistically challenged but ultimately free agent is absurd, but it's understandable why Russia is staging that diplomatic farce.
As for Snowden's role, if he has valuable knowledge and he has not "given up his principles" -- so much the worse for him. He'll get a chance to reconsider the boast that he "cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture." It could have already happened, with the bit about resisting torture ghost-written by amused interrogators.
Russia has an "asylum-giving, human-rights protecting" image? Even if you were to believe that Russia is acting to protect Snowden out of anything but national self-interest -- does refusing to extradite Snowden cancel out Russia's multiplying authoritarian abuses? Pussy Riot? Navalny? Magnitsky? The "Gay Propaganda" bill?
The notion that Russia is beholden to Snowden to protect its image is ludicrous, although given the grandiosity of some of Snowden's statements, I do not hesitate to consider that Snowden himself might believe it.
Wait, isn't Russia the "first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless"? You kidder, you, Edward Snowden.
It doesn't matter whether Snowden has physical assets on his person. If he knows things that could be useful to Russian intelligence, which he certainly does, and if he can access things that would be useful to them, he has put himself in a position where they can make it extremely difficult to deny them whatever they want. You think they play beanbag?
Snowden has said that if his goal was to do business with foreign intelligence, he could be "living in a palace petting a phoenix." If he really believed that his leverage as a defector was strong, then he's hopelessly naïf and who knows what other missteps he's making. I see his flight from China to Russia as an indication that this may be the case: He appears to have thought that he could play China against Russia and take the better deal. When China laughed in his face and sent him packing, he had to throw himself on the mercy of Russia.
On the other hand, if he knew what really awaits defectors, he was making a disingenuous argument. In which case, how much of the rest of his story is like that?
Bully for Node, but to compare apples to apples, you should count from when the packaging system was released, not from when the language was released. Node's numbers wouldn't look so good if divided by the number of years since JavaScript was released.
Rubygems dates back to 2003, in which case Ruby's 5,439 packages per year still trails Node's pace but not so dramatically.
I assumed this was because a pool of funds had been set up to prop up Romney's odds to make him appear more viable -- or at least to stave off a story that Intrade users were betting heavily against him. Intrade was a small enough market that this could have been done with a comparatively small investment compared to media buys, and without any technological or financial chicanery. It's not illegal to pay too much for something that could have been had for less.
"Context" in Perl. Values undergo implicit conversion when assigned depending on whether the LValue receiving the assignment is a scalar or a list type. Perl functions can detect context at runtime (using "wantarray") and may vary behavior for different contexts.