19 September 2014

I'm hot, what are you?

I'm not exactly sure where Matt Asay wants to go with his snarky post about COBOL. Citing various relevance rankings, including Twitter mentions (Twitter being the first place I look to for career advice), he concludes:
In sum, COBOL won't get you a date. And it probably won't get you a job, either.
He then circles back and grudgingly admits that the language still has a role to play in the marketplace, but without using the N-word. In other words, what he wants to say is, "my trendy language with arcane syntax is a niche language; your established language with arcane syntax is as useful as learning Attic Greek."

13 September 2014

The Six

Selena Larson has a piece about Kathy Kleiman's ENIAC Programmers Project, which documented the work of six hitherto unknown women programmers on this computing effort from the 1940s.

08 September 2014

A launch

From my most recent project, the new responsive microsites for Kennametal's services offerings and NOVOsphere app are live.

05 September 2014

PHP is older than JavaScript?

Lauren Orsini discusses the longevity of programming languages with Ari Rabkin, coauthor with Leo Meyerovich of a paper that looked at 200,000 Sourceforge projects. TL;DR: For a new project, a programmer chooses a project she already knows.
Through social influence and legacy code, our oldest and most popular computer languages have powerful inertia. How could Go surpass C? If the right people and companies say it ought to.