Programming Stereotypes

I was reading the comments to a Slashdot article about Python programmers and I was amused by a comment by a fellow who goes by “DasMegaByte” on his impressions of programming languages and people who use them:

[…] I wonder how else we can pad programmer’s egos based on completely subjective hypothesis on language choice?

  • Perl users have more dense social lives.
  • Ruby users have big, full beards chicks love to run their hands through.
  • VB users have sensible shoes and drive Toyotas.
  • C++ users enjoy a good mystery now and then.
  • PHP users probably own one or more Dremel multitools.
  • Javascripters are full of little trivia snippets and are great fun at parties.
  • Cold Fusion users are kind of quiet but have very deep thoughts.
  • SQL programmers have annoying laughs but are otherwise okay guys

[…]

My favorite may be his comments on SQL programmers (though the comments on JavaScripters are jovial as well). Still, I’m left wondering if Bryan has a Dremel multitool ;).

“No Safety Net for Programmers”

Free trade seems to be moving forward, but the government hedges its bets — under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers can get benefits if their jobs have been moved overseas. Unless you’re a programmer:

Under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers whose jobs have moved overseas can be eligible for a battery of extra assistance, including income support, job training, tax credits for health insurance, and job search and relocation allowances. Some older workers can even receive a temporary income subsidy, a form of “wage insurance,” which helps cushion the financial blow when a new job pays much less than the old one. For instance, if you go from writing code for computers at $50 an hour to selling them retail at a computer superstore for $10 an hour.

But Fusco and his fellow IBM employees who petitioned for the benefits were repeatedly denied. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration determined that programmers like Fusco do not qualify, because of the nature of what they’d produced on their old jobs: software. The government cited commerce and trade rules that classify software as a “service” and “not a tangible commodity,” rather than an “article” as the trade act stipulates. […]

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Sure, I have sympathy for workers whose jobs were offshored, but wouldn’t they be eligibile for unemployment benefits anyhow? That aside, I do find it a bit odd that programming is considered a service rather than a product — I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion :-/.

ProFont — Monospaced Programming Font

From Joel via MeteFilter’s thread on Arial vs Helvetica, I discovered ProFont, a monospaced font for programming (for Windows, Linux & Mac). Well, not that it’s “only for programming”, but that’s where it may be best suited.

According to his site, Tobias Jung was desperately seeking ProFont for quite some time. It was available on his Mac OS 9.1 box but he couldn’t find a suitable clone for his Windows setup at work. And, to his credit, Tobias doesn’t just wax nostalgic about the font; he also offers some compelling reasons for using it:

  • Slashed zeros
  • Differentiated Is and Ones
  • Distinct punctuation (colons, semicolons, et al)
  • Oversized parenthesis (and presumably brackets as well)

In short, it appears that ProFont has almost all you could ask for in a programming font. My only concern is that, while Tobias cites its small bitmapped nature as a benefit, I might find ProFont a bit tough to read at 1600x1200. Still, I think I’ll give it a chance (If you try it, Joel recommends the FON version, not the TTF version.)

13 Ways to Loathe VB

Via this Register article is Thirteen Ways to Loathe VB from Dr Dobb’s Journal. I was never much a fan of Visual Basic (primarily because it’s one of the few languages to run on only one operating system) but this article gives me even more reasons not to like VB ;).

3. Calling functions and accessing arrays. In most languages you can distinguish between a call to function F with parameter 3 and a reference to array F index 3 because one is written F(3) and the other F[3]. In Visual Basic they are both written F(3). Yes. […]

“Why I Hate Advocacy”

I’ve recently discovered the article “Why I Hate Advocacy” by Mark-Jason Dominus. The article is hosted at Perl.com, but it’s really just about language advocacy in general.

Considering that the guy is obviously a Perl guru, he’s remarkably objective to languages in general — he appears to be a strong believer in the “use the best tool for the job” approach.

You can be ‘unfair’ to a person, and you can hurt their [sic] feelings, even if you tell only the truth. But Pascal is a programming language, not a person. It has no feelings to hurt. Criticizing Pascal’s type system is like complaining that your hammer has a scratched face. There is no use getting upset about it. You just have to get a new hammer or make do. Saying that the criticism is unfair to the hammer, for whatever reason, is just silly. [...]