For exceedingly high values of long.

This. You and I are fine on Linux. But there are still a lot of things that need to be made user friendly before your mom starts using it.

This works for any generic or nested data structure.

Hell, there are lots of things that need to be made more user friendly before I'll use it for my personal machine.

A lot depends if you count Android.

My parents machine runs an old Ubuntu LTS, needs updating. I installed it after the hundredth time I had to fix some dumb windows error. They can just about use a computer, for them it's great. Only issue is occasionally it loses connection to the printer, which needs turned off and on again to fix.

Right, but it's really really really slow. It took an astonishing 8 seconds on my computer to copy a list of 1M ints, compared to 0.14 for b = a[:].

I don't know why it's THAT ridiculously slow, but Google shows that it's not something with my machine/python implementation.


Random tangent:

This is a good reminder for Python users that Python's not built for performance, and that making things perform their best in Python often requires making them non-Pythonic. Even numpy and scipy can be amazingly inefficient at times. For example, I recently was working with some code that (among a lot of other things) calculated the distance between a bunch of vectors (np arrays) using the p-minkowski distance. I was using np.sum(np.abs(x-y)*p)*(1.0/p) . I wasn't happy with the run-time, and I'm trying to use a lot more pre-written functions because I find that to be cleaner, so I switched to scipy's function to do the exact same thing, scipy.spatial.distance.minkowski(x,y,p). It turned out that that SLOWED DOWN my distance calcs by a factor of 10. This is because scipy's own function is essentially identical to mine except that it first calls the very expensive private function _validate_vector, which essentially rebuilds the array to make sure it's a proper numpy array and does some other bookkeeping.

Python is sllooooowwwwww. It gets even slower when you use built-in functions that are made to handle lots of special cases to make sure that everything "just works". So, if you know your data, you can often do much better than a built-in function. Of course, that's not always true, since a lot of built-in functions are written in C++.

I think that even more important than that is the lack of software. While it's true that most people don't use much besides browsers, messengers, and text editors, I think the threat of not being able to run something is pretty terrifying.

Good to know. I guess whether this matters or not depends on where the bottlenecks are in your code.

Scripting language going to scripting language and python is definitely not suited for everything. This is why you'll never see someone write an poker evaluator in anything but C or Java. Like you said, the challenging part is figuring out where you might get stuck in quicksand.

hey guys im looking for some career advice.

I'm getting a Master in Finance soon but think I might like a programming career better. What is the best way to break into the field? Right now I'm planning on taking at least two of the free online MIT programming courses in Python and C++. Are employers testing skills or looking for CS/CE degrees on a resume?

skills and experience. for almost all jobs degrees are close to worthless.

Moms all over the world use it. Cell phones, embedded devices, non-desktop computers all over the internet.

As of right now I'm pretty sure the world would suffer the most if Linux was removed from it.

Was Apple Albania?

The world would be a very different place without Linux. But I think it is safe to assume that the scope of the original question was personal computers and not servers or embedded devices.

First, CS degrees are definitely not worthless for the majority of jobs. If nothing else they introduce you to common data structures, algorithms, how computers work, etc.. Is a degree an efficient way to learn this stuff - probably not. But is knowing this stuff important for most CS jobs - absolutely.

Second, a degree on a resume is a good way of showing an employer that you know this stuff. I (and probably the majority of other people) rarely give interviews to people without degrees. Not because I think degrees are so great but because the probability of that person knowing the basics is higher than with someone without a degree. If I see someone that has good (and meaningful) work experience/open source experience and no degree that's fine. But it can't just be something trivial like a few small bug fixes to an open source project.

I think the degree on the resume will become less important as there are more and more online courses offered and many of those become at least informally accredited (being offered by MIT for example) but I don't think we're there yet for the majority of employers.

Man, and I get **** for being an Apple fanboy...

I am having a brain fart and google will not help ... just one of those things that doesnt search well. But when you have an ... index? .. indexer? ( "i" in the following) that you are using to get things out of an array, say you use it as: for(int i = 0; i < 2billion; i ++) and you are using i to pull out individual variables from an array of variables, what is the term for what i is doing? I dont think "flipping through" is the proper term but its the best I can find atm.

jj,

i wasn't saying the degree itself was worthless, just that it is worthless as far as getting a job is concerned. not sure what your experience is, but in my own experience at startups, both hiring and being hired, and talking to lots of ppl who hire, this is certainly true. ymmv.

Looping ...

I dont know why but I swear I have heard another word for it... and in my head the other word for it sounds more proper... like a fancy math term.

Iterate?

Thanks thats the one I was thinking of xD

yea i agree. my concern is having these skills I learned myself but not having any experience to break into programming. in finance I am finding out that I need experience to get any further experience. hoping to avoid this chicken and egg situation in CS.

My personal outlook is that a good CS major is much closer to a mathematician than a "programmer" and mathematicians are pretty sought after. Now if the recruiters of the world agree or not, I dunno but I'd basically hire a CS guy for the same reason as a mathematician in many fields (like at BCG etc where mathematicians are always in demand) and not because they happen to be "good with computers".

you can find entry level stuff and move up. perhaps more importantly, you can write your own projects and contribute to open source ones. that kind of street cred is impressive to anyone, and is direct proof that you can program. i'd hire someone with a long list of impressive github credits over a freshly graduated CS student any day.

I mean a degree is definitely going to help you get an interview. Or more accurately not having one will hurt your chances of getting an interview. And getting an interview will help you get a job.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding?