I'm what you would call a 'front-end' engineer. Senior front-end developer is my current title, though I'm quite capable of full-stack development. I make $103,000 annually and do not have a college degree. There has never been a job that denied me due to lack of education because I've been able to prove myself and my abilities. Going to college is a great resume boost, but has had no bearing on my career thus far.
I've been on a lot of interviews in the past couple years and maybe 1 out of 5 even think to question why I don't have an "education" section on my resume or what my schooling is (none). No one cares. Being able to do the job/get through a technical interview/show decent code samples is ridiculously more important than a degree.
Care to elaborate on what potentially could replace the 'client-server computing model' in 5-10-20 years? This seems far fetched IMHO. I can only envision a future where systems place more emphasis on UI and design. I imagine this future because as our computers grow in complexity, the interfaces used to control them need to become more simple and interaction-focused.
If everything is apps in the future then "front end" technologies may be compiled native code like Objective C or Java or even Python.
If your computer only uses voice, the "front end" technology stack is very different from what we have today for websites.
If government and market forces cause the web industry to stagnate over time (see: net neutrality, pervasive privacy concerns), then the hot industry of the future might be something totally different.
Look at how different UI is from mainframe/green screens to the client-server apps of the 90s-00s to todays mainly web front ends. It has changed drastically over the past 40 years but still pretty much does the same thing. Provides the user a way to interact with computer/software/data.
Considering the fact that these are the de-facto UI languages for the World's most widely deployed platform (web browsers), do you think that javascript / html / css are going anywhere anytime soon?
1994 you: Considering the fact that these are the de-facto UI languages for the World's most widely deployed platform (Windows), do you think that the Win16 API is anywhere anytime soon?
I welcome recruiters contacting me and even sometimes go to lunch with them to really get to know them better. My opinion is that anyone out to find work for me is worth having around in times like today's.
Due to the increasing popularity of casual dining and the decreasing accessibility of Danish nobility, I've rewritten Hamlet to be an Appleby's assistant manager.
The fifth act of SICP is meta-linguistic abstraction, and among Javascript's merits it is not. SICP is no more a book about Scheme than Moby Dick is a whale tale.
I admire the effort, and understand the sentiment behind the project. I just think the authors are missing the big picture of SICP. In fairness, few of us are Ablesons or Sussmans.
> Due to the increasing popularity of casual dining and the decreasing accessibility of Danish nobility, I've rewritten Hamlet to be an Appleby's assistant manager.
Replace "casual dining" with "megacorporations" and you get an actual movie made in 2000 [1]. And, of course, that example is not unique [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10].
Scheme is a deliberately minimalist language, which is fairly accessible and easy to write your own implementation of. In fact, in SICP, you do that, a couple of times, writing first a Scheme interpreter, then extending it in various ways like adding logic programming capabilities, then you write a virtual machine and a compiler that compiles down to that virtual machine.
JavaScript is, well, a weird and warty language. You wouldn't want to try implementing JavaScript in an introductory CS class, and it's much less amenable to language extension like the logic programming variant of Scheme you implement in SICP.
But I notice that this translation of SICP into JavaScript doesn't got that far; it only goes up through Chapter 2 of SICP.
I'm not a big fan of R6RS, but it is still fairly minimalist. One of the good things that it did was divide the standard into a core language, and standard library built on top of the small core language. The core language eliminated many things from R5RS, but the standard library adds a lot more.
The main issues I have with R6RS are the library system (which I think is too complex, and it frustratingly adds an extra level of indentation as you need to wrap everything in one big expression), and some of the libraries in the standard library, like the I/O library, the Unicode library (which standardizes on such things as char-upcase and char-downcase, which are fairly useless in a Unicode context, without adding much that's actually useful).
R6RS is this kind of weird, awkward beast that's not sure what it's doing. It neither strips the language down to a minimal core, nor does it build up a comprehensive set of libraries containing all of the basics that people expect from standard libraries in a language these days.
Actually, Scheme is more accessible than ever before. If installing MIT Scheme and Edwin/Emacs is too difficult, now there's Racket-SICP, which allows you to program with DrRacket, a beginner-friendly graphical IDE, and actually comes with implementations of some parts of SICP that MIT Scheme omitted, like the picture language and (afaik) some concurrency primitives.
Is Scheme really decreasing in usage? Sure, in recent years there have been high-profile moves to Python at MIT and UCB, but I don't know of any hard stats on worldwide Scheme usage. Not that it matters.
SICP isn't a book about Scheme. It's a book about writing computer programs. Scheme was used because it imposes the minimum additional cognitive load. Worrying about all the warts in, e.g. Common Lisp (to say nothing about Javascript or Scala, say) would detract from the pedagogical mission of the book.
No "click through Visual Studio's project setup" phase, no "how do I open the text editor from IDLE" phase, no "open a command prompt" it's all right there.
This makes the environment and the language perfect for beginner students.
I would like to add that you need also be the type of individual that isn't afraid to ask for what you're worth in the market. Employers will gladly pay you less if you're willing to take it.
Wow, thank you very much for the insightful response. I too am currently allocating 100% of my weekend time, and find that the statement about Friday definitely holds true for me. I think the key term is 'balance'. I'll certainly be working on finding more of that.
Yeah, it's a tough thing to do. I tell people I have 2.5 full-time jobs, as the $DAYJOB is 1 full-time job, and the startup is one and a half (at least) by itself. But I keep telling myself that the result of all this hard work will be worth it someday.
BTW, I'd also caution anyone against taking much (or any) advice from me. I'm one of those people who gets obsessive about things and will push things to - and beyond - logical and reasonable boundaries and will do crazy shit.
Especially considering that I'll turn 40 this year, the way I look at it, I don't have a whole lot of "at bats" left to achieve some of my dreams. I've basically conceded that it's "desperation time" here and that pretty much any option that doesn't violate some core ethical principle of mine, is on the table, as far as pushing to make this startup a success. My lifestyle is probably not normal, reasonable, or healthy by most standards. But, to my way of thinking, it's either succeed, or "the water under the Golden Gate is freezing cold".
I feel like I create side projects due to my insatiable desire to be creating things. Sometimes I finish them. More often I do not. Every time, though, I learn something new and useful.
HN isn't only for tech articles. It's for articles that may interest the tech community. You'll often find posts on politics, finance, and other obscure topics as well.
The guidelines indicate that most political articles are off topic:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. it's probably off-topic.
Political articles really should not be here: it's a poisonous topic that, on a site like this, usually just rehashes the same old things, which makes them not particularly 'gratifying of one's intellectual curiosity'.
This article isn't really obscure, it appeared on Bloomberg.com, and the Argentinean government fooling around with foreign exchange, banks, and statistics is not really news either.
An example of an article that I think would be more in the spirit of hacker news might be something about options trading evolving between medieval Florence and Flanders, or something like that...
I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but in my view, the article isn't just 'political'. With currency and money involved, there is an 'economic' angle that I, personally, want to learn about. And with a government being involved, there are moral/philosophical issues that I, personally, want to learn about. So for me, this article gratifies my intellectual curiosity.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the link may seem off-topic to you, but it's highly relevant to me. And there's nothing wrong with any of that. And of course, just because an article shows up here doesn't mean you have to read it :)
The front page is a zero-sum game. Every article that appears does so at the expense of another article. The articles that appear on the front page get the most comments, which drive the community.
I'm not arguing against this article, nor am I arguing that all articles on the front page should appeal to me. However, I am arguing that your final line of reasoning does not hold in general.
I disagree that the front page is a zero-sum game. A front page filled with good variety has more value than a front page filled with repetitive articles on the same basic subjects. Whether this particular article is good variety or not is beyond what I'm willing to address, but I don't think it's correct to describe the front page as a zero-sum game, and too much conformity can be harmful.
I think you're correct that I misused "zero-sum," since the utility of the front page is not always the same; it can increase or decrease based on the quality of the articles. I incorrectly used it to describe a situation where the gain for one is the loss of another, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a zero-sum game.
Regarding your point, I think we're dangerously veering into platitudes. Of course I agree that a front page with "good" variety is better than a page with "repetitive" articles. And of course I agree that "too much conformity" is a bad thing. But I was originally countering the commonly spoken notion "If you don't like it, don't read it!" Because of the gain-for-one-is-loss-for-another nature of the front page, exactly what appears on the front page drives the community. If too many off-topic posts become the norm, HN will become a general interest site, and lose the community that makes it so valuable.
edit: There is zero reason to downvote mikeash. I tried to correct with an upvote of my own, but apparently at least two HN readers are mistaken.
This isn't exactly advanced economics though - it's the kind of thing you can easily learn about by reading actual books, rather than an article with a scant few paragraphs. A subscription to The Economist, even if it's current events, rather than economics, will also get you way more articles like it, but with more detail.
And your "moral and philosophical" discussions are exactly the sort of thing that turns into flame wars. I'm 100% sure there are people on HN who think, for instance, that taxes are immoral. Others are for high taxes, especially on the wealthy. Do we really need to get into that? Do you think anyone will emerge with their point of view radically shifted?
(source: Front-end dev for 5+ years)