This was my thought, too. I spent countless hours hiding inside of boxes as a child. I always found it comfortable to be "held" by the box, and loved the notion that I couldn't be seen by others.
That seemed pretty convincing, but then I added some comparison terms like "instagram" and "snapchat"... they are hardly a blip. I think that argues that the world is going mobile, but then maybe google trends isn't a fair way to measure who is walking where.
I had the same experience -- I didn't fully grasp how useful XHP was until I had to use it. Not only are they reusable components, but the type system they create and can enforce is a powerful aid to helping me suss out how they were meant to be used. (Now if only XHP::render could detect when it's already been called, to avoid weird validation bugs from the side-effects!)
And when I had to include some multi-line javascript in my code, I found myself feeling a huge loss. First, heredocs seemed to be the only way to make it readable. Second, I'd have to actually run the code and interact with the page to find out if I got the syntax right. It would be awesome if there was a way to make JS into an object in PHP, the way that XHP is done, and have it support some simple sanity checks and easily import JS components (which I suppose Javelin tries to do).
IPTDL (I prefer to date lawyers) and "that's what she said." More specifically, that income comes in many forms, and that even stock/options (in exchange for services) could count unless all the correct paperwork has been filed.
Seriously, we had that exact idea implemented around 1997 -- and it even supported multiple authentications (anonymous worlds, versus worlds with user accounts) all transparently. And it could even do VRML, crowd control, dynamic downloads (so you could link to new worlds), and a built-in world builder.
It seemed that we had thought of everything... And then management took over.
Language is a tool. Certainly, some people will create literature and others are merely hacks. Some languages will be conceptually cleaner, some more pure, and some an amalgam of expressions "borrowed" from other languages.
No, Virginia, Perl is not dead. Not as long as there is more than one way to do it, or a hacker trying to finish something that was due yesterday.
Perl, as we know it, might pass from this earth. But the spirit it embodied, that first we should use duct tape to build on the work of others then write glue to make it stick, that getting-things-done was the primary goal --- this is too close to the core of our restless selves. A thousand years from now, there will be some startup somewhere with an urgent need and a hacker that strokes his chin and says, "I think I could write that in Perl[1]..."
[1] replace "perl" with your favorite language. Pick the right tool for the job. Sometimes means "the tool you are most familiar with", but that says more about you than about the language.
I wonder if these guys would have gotten funding in today's corporate world, showing off that clunky device! It seems like this is a good example of the kind of leap that management needs to be able to take to see the potential of research work. We've all been so habituated to expecting "the world of tomorrow, today" that now researchers have to get a lot closer to productization (especially with respect to aesthetics) for higher-ups to "get it".
It sounds like they didn't get funding in the corporate world of 1976.
>Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore’s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919).
That seems to be as far as Kodak took it until digital cameras really started to eat their lunch.
Not really, Kodak where at the forefront of large low noise CCDs in the early 90s. They had industrial chips that wiped the floor with a lot of the science CCD suppliers.
The first pro digital cameras where from Kodak, or had a Kodak CCD inside.
In fairness I'm not sure they should have gotten funding. While this is amazing in retrospect it was completely inviable in 1976 (the year Apple was founded). The digital photo revolution that followed was reliant on Personal Computers, GUIs, cheap memory and a many other things that wouldn't appear for decades.
The idea was just too far ahead of its time (though I suppose they could have been the most successful patent trolls of all time had they pursued it)
By the time the technology became viable, the patent had expired, or was close to it. Of course, they could have tried to build a collection of auxillary patents around it later.
When I was in high school and college, my measure was to enter programming contests where competition was on time and following a spec. I did well on these, and I agree with earlier posters that this boils down to being familiar with a language and its libraries, as well as the most common algorithms that show up time and again in these contests.
As I've "matured", I feel like my raw speed is slowing down. I think that there are a lot of factors in that, like working on much more challenging problems, and switching back and forth between too many languages (so that I don't know any one quite as well).
Really, I think it's better to worry about working on stuff that you love, rather than how fast you're doing it.
My cats did not join me in the box.