Surprise!

My mom recently sent me the snapshot at right, with someone catching McDonald's in an apparent admission.  I'm sure most people who have eaten at McDonald's would smile and chuckle.

But it reminded me of a surprise Debbie and I got a few months ago.  I've forgotten the context, but somehow we were on the road, headed home late at night, and hungry.  We didn't want to take the time for a sit-down meal, and the only fast food places we knew were closed.  So we decided to grab a burger or something at McDonald's.

We hadn't looked at a McDonald's menu in years and years – and really didn't expect to do so ever again.  I saw couple of things on the menu that sounded appealing: a chicken-and-bacon wrap, and a mango-pineapple smoothie.  So I ordered them.

They were quite good.  Surprise!

I've had that same combination a couple of times since then, and I still have the same reaction: a convenient and inexpensive treat on the road.

Now, mind you, I don't think the wrap and smoothie are the best in the world.  I'd prefer more have more dark chicken meat, a bit more bacon, and the smoothie not quite so sweet.  But for the modest price and consistent quality, I'd say it was quite a bargain.

So to my own surprise, I'm now an occasional patron of McDonald's...

Programming Is Changing...

The article that included the graph below surprised me:

The gist of the article is to note that in 2012 (the year graphed above), markedly fewer programmers are working in a single programming language.  The article has the same data for 2010, and indeed there are many more programmers working in a single language just two years earlier.

The surprise for me isn't that we have more multiple-language programmers – it's that we have so many single language programmers, even today!

As I've written before, over the course of my career I've used dozens and dozens of programming languages – probably over 100 of them.  If I look at just the last two years, I've used seven: Java, JavaScript, Scala, PHP, C, C++, PIC assembly (two of these at work, all seven for personal projects).  I have trouble imagining an application programmer using less than two today, as just about every application uses JavaScript (for the client side) and at least one other language (for the server side).  And what application today isn't a web app?

Certain kinds of programming, much less common these days, perhaps can be done with a single language – things like embedded systems, low-level systems programming, etc.  But surely it isn't true that close to 20% of all programmers fall into these categories?  I'll speculate that on some larger teams, it's possible to write for years in a single language because you're slotted into some narrow area of work.  I still have trouble imagining 20% of all programmers fitting into that category.

So I'm surprised!

Flying Pig Moment...

This was certainly unexpected: the Ninth Circuit court has overturned the 2003 District Court ruling that San Diego had violated the constitution (both state and federal) by leasing land in Balboa Park to the Boy Scouts of America.  I say “unexpected” because the Ninth Circuit is by far the most liberal of the Circuit courts, and routinely issues opinions that (a) comport with progressive viewpoints, and (b) get reviewed and overturned by the Supreme Court (chart at right courtesy of the invaluable SCOTUSBlog's 2011 “stat pack”).  Out of the blue, contrary to their usual progressive position support, nearly 10 years after the original ruling, the Ninth Circuit reverses this.  A nice gift for the Boy Scouts!

Wedding Surprise...

...but a good surprise!

“Go To” Statement Considered Harmful...

I've been programming computers for over 40 years now, in more languages than I can remember accurately.  Those languages include dozens of machine languages, close-to-machine languages (C, especially) and dozens more high level languages.  A few years before I started programming, the pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra published his famous monograph Go To Statement Considered Harmful – and, silly me, I thought that every living programmer was very familiar with it.  It was the seminal work that led to the notion of “structured programming”, which in turn quickly advanced into a rich and diverse set of programming language design ideas that is still evolving today.  Mr. Dijkstra started it all with that paper.

Last week, I discovered that several of my colleagues – all much younger than I – had never even heard of Dijkstra's monograph.  Worse, they'd never heard of the notion that “go to” statements were harmful.  They knew they shouldn't use them, but really didn't have any idea of why.  It was just something they'd been told.  I sent them a link to the paper, which is reproduced online.

For some reason that I can't quite identify, I found this just as shocking as the day a few years back when I discovered that many quite effective young programmers had no idea how computers actually worked.  I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that both of these things are central to my practice of the programming art.  That makes it difficult for me to understand how anyone could effectively practice programming without the same understanding – but the evidence is agin me...

Animal Misconceptions...

One of these was a complete surprise to me: