Depending on language restrictions, you may be able to implement read streams that make a pass through the file and create appropriate call-backs when hitting each section...
There's both sides of pair programming... recently I attended a presentation where the presenter basically said that pair programming should be mandatory... on the other hand, I've done pair (and even triplet) programming... Here's my thoughts:
* Advantages
- Works great in initiating a new team member in to a large project
- Gives each developer a chance to do code-review on the fly
- If there's good rapport, pair programming can get a lot more done
* Issues
- Requires good co-ordination between team members
- Two similar thinking people may not be able to take full advantage of this technique
From experience, I can definitely relate to one point raised by the author - no database can completely overcome an application with badly designed queries... also, as a developer, I would prefer to have the various checks and triggers that are possible with RDBs..
The iPhone actually does notify you (though it's only audio and not visual) if you have a missed call, voice-mail or text. It beeps every 10 (or is it 15) minutes. I would definitely prefer a visual notification. For that matter, how about visual notification for e-mails, tweets, etc?
The world is never going to be perfect... the question is: are you trying to steer it towards perfection or are you content going with the flow and just doing what everyone else does?
To me this argument itself is wrong; One of the reasons why using CSS is considered difficult by some developers is because of the different levels of support shown by different browsers.
The whole argument that CSS has a learning curve, or that we need hacks, etc - all point to the same problem. The reason it takes such a long time to get the layout just right is because there is some browser out there (typically IE6) that does not behave the way you want it to.
We would not even be having this "war" if all the browsers were standards compliant, so my gripe as a developer is - why are we not fighting the correct war? As a developer, I must be able to write code, whether using div tags or table tags, and expect that it works just as it is supposed to, and not have to waste hours trying to hack it to work with non-compliant browsers!!