Everyone will have a different take on this based on the kind of software they write. The bottom line is that math is pervasive at all levels of software engineering but it impacts developers in different ways.
If you write video games or any other graphic related application, or if you work on jet engines or modelization or industrial engineering, you are obviously immersed in math on a daily basis. If you write servlets on a Java backend, you are probably not required to be as much versed in math, physics or chemistry.
Still, no matter how close to mathematics the software you write runs on, the bottom line is that you are using a programming language to do so, and all languages are rooted to various extents into math. Some are very closely connected, and sometimes based on, specific mathematical fields (e.g. Haskell and Category theory) while others are more loosely based on such principles.
I find that just like you don't need to know how an engine works in order to drive a car, you don't need to know a lot of math to be a decent developer, but it certainly doesn't hurt to read up on some of the theoretical foundations that underlie all of computer science.
> The problem with Android's layout system (if I understand it correctly) is that you specify how things are arranged relative to each other, so you never really know where something is.
RelativeLayout is just one of the several layouts you can use on Android. Typical Android GUI's are usually a mix of this one and a few others. This combination is very powerful and has been instrumental in making Android GUI's scale so well to many different devices with various resolutions and DPI's, a challenge that Apple will soon face.
> Sorry, we just wanted to give the background to the project and why in the post, rather than focussing too heavily on code.
Your landing page should contain what your users want to see, not what you want to put there. You might be excited about the motivation behind your project but nobody cares, really.
I clicked on the link and I spent ten minutes reading a wall of text hoping to find good reasons why I should switch from Angular, Backbone or Ember. Instead, I just closed the window without knowing anything about your framework.
> There's plenty of API docs for the core components
Still not a substitute for a user manual, even tiny.
I'm excited. Not so much by the fact that Google now provides this service (which I may or may not use) but because this is going to put a tremendous amount of pressure on other ISP's, and competition is badly needed in this field.
It was ordered and paid for by the catholic church, of course it's going to represent concepts of the catholic creed. If NASA ordered their rockets to be painted with science based themes, you could hardly call such paintings "inspired by science".
"Inspired" implies that the artist woke up with an idea and painted it.
> Unless you use Erlang or OS processes you are sharing memory.
Actually, even actor-based systems share memory. If two actors A and B send a message to an actor C and expect a response from it, they are sharing memory: what's in C's state. Which can be different depending on whether C received A's message first or not.
That would be a step backward, we really need generics and a reasonable support for exceptions on Android (or any large scale system, for that matter).
Go is a fine language at the system level or to replace Ruby/Python scripts but that's about it.
It's a bit of a disturbing read for a couple of reasons:
- Going to an early stage start up as a young father is not a sacrifice, it's a selfish act. You are thinking more about yourself and what you want to do (and not do) rather than what's best for your family. Hate the idea of a 9-to-5 job? Well, suck it: the regular hours and clockwork and guaranteed paycheck will go a long way toward making your family more stable and stress free. Maybe it's a good time to also ask yourself if there are no hidden reasons behind choosing this line of work. I know I've seen fathers do this because they didn't realize they were not interested in the chores involved in raising a young age infant.
- I'm guessing the infant is less than two years old (the text mentions diapers) so I'm shocked that this text is not giving credit to who really, really deserves it: the Mom. At that age, the infant doesn't really care much whether Daddy is around at night time or to play with toys, but this father really needs to realize how much stress his work situation is putting on his wife.
I have a two year old son and I quit the start up I was working at before his birth. I felt it just wouldn't be fair to my wife to stay there. There will always be start ups to join should I ever want to try this again, but a child growing up is an opportunity that doesn't occur often in one's life.
It always makes me chuckle when I see companies trying to ship a product (free or not) and realize a few months later that it's not picking up adoption. Then they decide to open source it in an effort to make it popular but of course, they can't admit that, so they always come up with excuses like "We want the community to benefit from it" or "We really believe in open source", etc...
In the end, for most of these products, open sourcing is usually just the last step before the product dies.
No apology there (nor should there be).