It never ceases to amaze me how foolish some people can be - or at least sound - when talking about computer programming. I used to think that intelligence was evenly distributed for any individual person, but in fact it appears that people can be incredibly good programmers or writers but utterly out of touch with the rest of the world.

Exhibit One: an article - now removed, but linked to by this summary - made the rather bizarre claim that 'college students' like PHP and Python but don't like ERP. I don't know which amused me most - the fact that someone found it noteworthy that developers are interested in easy and productive languages that can do a variety of interesting things, and are hardly interested in the boring financial and inventory-tracking workings of the average business, or the fact that they went on to say that "maybe one day, it will be different". Er, no. I'm sorry, but developers are developers because they want to develop things. They don't give a damn about your inventory management or interaction with suppliers, and why should they? I'm not saying every programmer wants to write shoot-em-ups, but let's be serious now - management minutiae has no inherent interest to people interested in software and will only hold interest proportional to the amount of money you pay someone to work on it.

Exhibit Two: this vacuous exposition on 'tuple-space'. "Tuple spaces get really interesting, though, because different collectives of users of the tuple space can each agree upon different sets of meanings for tuples--and the agreements exist outside of tuple space, so the space doesn't need reconfiguration for any particular new use. Meanwhile, the infrastructure supporting the sharing of the tuple space remains simple, and the interface remains the same. Because they don't know any better, tuple spaces can allow for all kinds of sharing and coordination that no one necessarily has to plan for ahead of time."

Err, yeah. You know, every personal computer already has an implementation of this. There's an area called 'memory' which is divided up into bytes, and you can use those bytes however you like, arbitrarily assigning meaning to them as necessary. It's scary how ignorant people can stumble across an old idea, and rebrand it as something new and interesting. Speaking of which...

Exhibit Three: "Enforcing Strict ModelView Separation in Template Engines" (PDF). "Java began supporting server development with Servlets. [...] The next stage of evolution was the introduction of Java Server Pages (JSP), which at first glance seemed to be a big step forward. While JSP was not the answer, it did put the idea of a template into programmers' minds."

Yes, someone from the University of San Francisco wrote a (reasonably high quality) paper on web templating without realising the existence of ASP or PHP, which came along quite some time before Sun jumped on the bandwagon.



More information on my programming in the near future, honest. That is, if I don't get sidetracked into another rant on the 'dangers' of over-designing a software project. Recently I finished my exams at university and have been working on portfolio pieces (eg. random maze generation, cooperative AI, etc) rather than my main tactical shooter project.