Went to a career fair today. I did my research the night before on which company has iOS apps.

Me: "Hi, my name is Barrin6! I noticed you guys have an iOS app, could you tell me a little more about it"

Recruiter: "Yes! It's built in phone gap blahblahblah"

I instantly tune out and die a little bit inside when I hear that.

Java Newb Question: How can I render or ignore HTML in my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA)?

I just started Sedgewick's Algorithms course at Coursera and the downloadable .java files have unintelligible comments because they're riddled with HTML tags. Ex: http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/code/e...ckUnionUF.java

Thank goodness developers are level headed, right?

Snarkiness aside, that's a weird, semi-toxic outlook if you discard any information due to an unwanted keyword being mentioned. They may very well have a great reason to use <insert-technology-you-despise-because-of-whatever-reason>

Well, if he wants to be an iOS developer and finds out a place doesn't use iOS that would be a bummer.

Phone Gap is like Cordova, right?

I think cross-platform development will be like (warning weird analogy incoming) Hyundai cars. They were rubbish cars RIGHT UP UNTIL the moment they were suddenly really good and absurdly good value. I bought a first-gen i30 and at first was subject to raised eyebrows and smirks from people when I said I bought a Hyundai. I wouldn't get that anymore.

I think picking that transition point is important. I don't think any cross-platform dev technologies are there yet, but we're getting close.

Here are my thoughts:

Companies use phone gap because it's easier to develop for 2 platforms while just using one set of language. This tells me that your company isn't really serious about delivering a good product. You don't care about your product, your users or even your developer's health and well-being.

Phone gap doesn't run natively and it will always run slower in comparison to a app built natively. And with each new release from Apple's SDK, Phone gap will be slow to adopt new methodologies. And even if it does, there are always buggy problems with it. In the end, not only will you lose out on more time if you just had went natively, your user base and product will suffer all in the name of being able to do things cross-platform.

I don't know about Android user's since the app ecosystem in Android is terrible, but Apple user's will generally notice a difference in performance in comparison to the other native apps in the app store.

I would suggest you guys go and download some phone gap app's and see for yourself.

+1 to barrin's thoughts, fwiw

Wait what's wrong with the app ecosystem in android?

phones/apps are just a fad imo

The html stuff annoys me as well. You can see the rendered java doc by pressing either control j or control q in intellij, which will render it.

The multi platform support by one language, makes development more affordable to get a weak product built by someone that has little money.

The people with lots of money, can hire as many people to work natively on their feature, which the initial people want to give to the world and make $$$.

I'm skeptical of how much $$$ is returned to the people owning the apps, which are built by one language compared to the projects that have dedicated teams for native developers.

As my own experience with software, I think the really big money is going to the players working natively and if you're a developer it makes the most sense to be working for those guys or on something really cool to you personally.

Most products of software are very similar and could be argued that the return by developing natively vs non is unpredictable but from observing, I think native apps is where the big money is hidden. There is definitely enough money to make on non native developed apps to live but I don't believe you can save any time by going that path compared to just hiring more people to do native apps.

What is a computer better at than repetition and saving human time?

as a serious answer, i'd say "wasting human time."

Humanity could discover some really vile stuff, the computer resulted in creating in future history or not.
Sort of like any field, *cough medical field *cough.

I like to think that technology is the future of a better world, but who knows what went into the 'Philosopher's stone' creation.

All the stories, hint at blood of peoples' lives by destruction or despair.

We win anyway, with awesome jobs and the chance of changing the way people spend their time using technology.

There was an article I was reading today about how deep learning was helping man unlock the secrets of the genome, which would take immensely longer and far more people to accomplish the same thing.

Seems a pretty good example of non-time wasting pursuits.

obviously i wasn't saying "computers are just waste a time." they do save time and they do amazing, beneficial things. but they are even more effective at wasting time than they are at either of those tasks.

The only time wasted, is time not spent thinking and no machine prevents you from doing that.

Humans jump from one thing, entering into their life (they have no control of it) and they grab onto it or get rid of it eventually.
I'm sure that people have spent more hours than they should or wanted to, doing 'x' something unproductive or considered a time waster with technology; but the majority of time they brought it upon themselves. A person needs to have the mindset of being cautious about what they do with their time or be swayed in life without realization of it. That goes with doing anything in life.

For sure, people, probably including programmers, spend far more time on Facebook, twitter, YouTube, etc, than they do in an IDE or command line.

product of having more free time thanks to good IDEs and flexible programming languages that are easier to learn and quicker to implement than assembly?

You'd be surprised at how incredibly productive and focused you become when you don't have any of that stuff open. Especially true for IM or Skype at work, which both should be banned unless you work in sales. YouTube is okay for listening to some music (trance or DnB obv).

IM is a clear benefit at work imo.

New courses available for what'll be my last semester.

Have 11 hours that are mandatory, but I'd also love to do an internship (3 hours?). There's also a great looking mobile app dev class that's four hours.

Wonder if I can swing 18 cr hours. Doing 15 this semester.

kotlin appears to be java + php + ruby

You can scan the entire internet in ~5 minutes these days.

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan

So just do that (law could be a problem etc.) and grep for the IPs you want :P

Isn't everything just saving human time at the end of the day?

Modern theorem provers are pretty awesome but a bunch of mathematicians with a bunch of time could do that as well.
Drawing fractals is cool but an artist with unlimited time could do it as well...etc.
[monkeys with typewriters]