The last few paragraphs of the article really brought an interesting light onto the subject. Most of the people I know who left college to start a business or to work somewhere in Silicon Valley had a remarkably privileged upbringing. They never had the worries about the financial or temporal investment into an education or any experience taking risks. I'm not trying to berate people who drop out of college for these reasons, but it's an important factor to keep in mind when truly analyzing their success.
If anything, this article supports the claim that C++ is a good language. The fact that C++ templates are Turing-complete and allow for this kind of thing is pretty darn cool in my opinion.
I think a much better way to do this would be to send a confirmation email first. After the user accepts the confirmation email then it continues with the submission. This would prevent potentially evil stuff from happening.
Personally, I've never found Github's interface to be overwhelming at all. Sure they have a lot of content on every page, but I think it's well-designed enough where I can easily find what I'm looking for very quickly. For example, when I want to switch branches, looking for the drop down menu with the branching icon is all I have to do and I usually find it right away.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra
The name of the field misleads a lot of people into thinking that CS is only about programming, but it's way more than that. Personally, I think all of my CS background from university is what distinguishes me as a software developer instead of just a "programmer".
The differing mouse "feel" that you're describing is most likely a result of the different mouse acceleration curve that OS X uses. (Mentioned in the article) I've noticed this too but I was able to resolve it by changing the mouse acceleration curve using this tool: http://triq.net/articles/mouse-acceleration-preference-pane-... Now I think it feels just as nice as Windows.
Interesting that doctoral degrees do not pay more on average than professional ones! Perhaps it is because most PhD's enter the field of research as opposed to industry? I haven't met that many PhD's in industry but there are a few.
I don't think he was trying to be insulting. From what I gather, he was trying to justify the negativity theme in the comments for this post, which was the subject of the original comment. I agree that the blog post was not detailed enough, and didn't talk enough about HOW you became a programmer in 12 weeks.
I'd really like to create a start-up, and my partner and I have many ideas, but I feel like most start-ups out there today are playing the role of the third-party instead of creating truly revolutionary things. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have the resources and backing to execute any idea that has a chance to change the industry. Compare this to a start-up, where if your imagination extends beyond what the iOS SDK or some web framework provides, then nine times out of ten, you're out of luck. I'm not saying that start-ups are completely incapable of becoming a first-party, but it's been a while since I've personally seen a truly revolutionary idea that can realistically be carried out by such a small group of people with little money.