What's next? We shouldn't expect programmers to be aware of how characters, integers and floating point numbers work on a computer?

If they work in high level language that hides all that behind "number", who cares. How floating point numbers are represented is interesting trivia, but hardly useful in most situations. In general, I would expect people to remember things that are used often and be able to learn the rest fast (e.g. understand concepts and have enough knowledge to make further learning easy).

The rest is fluff and hidden cultural test: "Do you have the same history as I do?"

Nightlife in the south bay is rather lame.

But here's one thing I've found: People who really want to have fun find a way. There are small pockets all over the bay. SJ downtown is a little lame but it is getting better

you are basically talking about all the streams you can find on the internet.

And yes they are illegal - they are often taken down

I think you severely underestimate the amount of serious work put into all these "tech properties" (I'm guessing you mean Facebook/Dropbox) by very experienced, in-demand engineers.

VR and AR both need just one hit application. What would be a hit application?

1) It should just work, with no annoying aspects. Should be completely intuitive and engaging/fun

2) People want to use it on a regular basis. For example people play games for hours at a time on a regular basis, or use an app every day multiple times a day. Not just a "use it for 10 mins, think it's cool but never use it again" app

TiltBrush came close to this for me. Particularly the dress form scene. As soon as I found it, I picked the widest brush and started sketching an outfit around it. There's no fabric simulation, though no reason there couldn't be eventually, and it was still fun.

One hit application could be an outfit designer, especially if it can export to physical clothes. Even if it doesn't, it's a powerful artistic tool that also reminds me of The Sims.

Besides that, I can see lots of 3D modelling work done in VR. It seems like a natural boon to architectural design.

C++ is not relevant? What world do you work in?

From what I read somewhere Facebook was making their mobile engineers use their app on older Androids (and maybe iPhones), which turned out to be very frustrating for them. I'm sure they are aware of the problem...

Yes what the author doesn't realize is that C is still an extremely important language no matter what, just to make computers run properly and fast.

If there were good alternatives then maybe we can discard C. But if you want to become a professional developer you SHOULD know C, even if you dont use it regularly. The same way I believe every professional should know basic OS concepts, threads, memory management, architecture, etc.

I think it is very important that computer science students learn C early on. Learning concepts like memory management and word alignment (which he mentions) is very critical imo.

For other majors which have require some programming it is best if they stick to something like Python, etc.

But the author does make a lot of good points regarding how many holes there are in these languages, and how much of a time sink they can. In fact I spent the last few days trying to track down this obscure bug where an object being allocated in C++ was randomly being free'd (according to gdb a valid address would become 0x1 all of a sudden) and I couldn't figure it out. I implemented some nasty WAR which makes the program run now...

A small aside, would be interested to hear how you tracked down the bug? Obviously after you have solved the root cause.

In the embedded world, I would put a breakpoint on a write operation for that address. Once the breakpoint is triggered, I would inspect the trace.

This is in the embedded world, unfortunately the gdb for this platform is rather limited and watch breakpoints don't work as expected.

Essentially here is what was happening: -Create C++ object -Try to point some reference to this object, but object address is suddenly 0x1 (just by doing one step in gdb) when trying to access one of it's properties. -Tried to run it with valgrind, and it works fine with valgrind, which leads me to believe it is some memory allocation issue with C++ on the heap -I modified the C++ class to have a uint64_t variable before the variable declaration. Now program works fine!

I believe the issue is probably with heap corruption at some point, when something overwrites certain addresses.Having that extra unneeded 64-bit int in the heap makes it still be valid.

> This is in the embedded world, unfortunately the gdb for this platform is rather limited and watch breakpoints don't work as expected.

Thanks for sharing. There is nothing like a JTAG debugger with this kind of bugs. Good luck that it does not resurface later on.

Limits for "lottery" green cards makes sense.

But for educated professionals who are already working here? Doesn't make a lot of sense.

It makes sense if you don't want to get educated professionals just from China and India and nowhere else.