Just because some clown selects the background of their webpage from a dropdown, doesn't make them a programmer.

To Mr. Fast

"We're genetic freaks."

Yeah you are at Java EE team or as the lay person might say "you've been lulled too close to the wall" nothing genetic, just plain mechanical damage to the brain.

"We have above average intelligence,"

Based on my Java experience no you are not, it took you 17 years to get from a silly dancing muppet to a half thought-thru EE crap. You are relying on the open source community to provide you with a decent app server. You are not even able to implement your specs.

Sun acquired Forté Software Inc. Have a read at the code and take note that was an above average clever thing.

"above average ability to abstract"

May be but takes time ... remember the hairy beans "local" & "remote" interfaces ... what an abstraction ... I don't give a flying crap if the object is local or remote ... EJB 3.0 is addressing that wooahhwooaaawww 15 years to abstract that's good. Heard of Obj-C???

"- we like things like 'Monty Python'."

But don't really get those things. Because if you have a listen at the introduction to the movie "How to irritate people" Java is one of those things that abide by the rule "what ever you're doing to irritate someone should seem to be unintentional".

Can you give the Forté 4GL source code to A community so we may continue to do things properly.

Please.......just stop publishing these "bloke uses some Web 2.0 terms" stories, it just encourages them

... use FORTRAN, of course.

Once upon a time they said that COBOL would make professional programmers obsolete.

Still waiting...

The aim of engineers should be to do themselves out of a job. Software engineers too. I write software to support tests on a factory floor and if I could get away from boring stuff like that I would. The product engineers know the products, so in an ideal world they should develop the automated tests*. There's always another problem for software to solve. The thing is, non-programmers have been using MS Office as a development platform for years now. I don't feel threatened.

Hey everyone, thanks for the comments. Here is the full slide deck from the session: http://tinyurl.com/5oee3c

If they really like Monty Python, they would have ditched Java years ago and fully embraced the great Python language.

Mines the one with the snake skin.

In other news: Today every idiot with access to a hammer and nails was declared a professional Joiner.

Epic FAIL, as the kids would say.

I really, really hate these stories. I don't ever wanna see this on the Register again.

The way he says it he sounds like he really believes it's so revolutionary, but it's the same old crap we've been hearing our whole lives.

You know where I've heard it? Sun. I remember when Java was new and people were gonna be able to put together custom applications just dropping in java beans or whatever buzzword they had.

If you dig around, there's tons of tools that allow laymen to do some pretty neat things. And there have been for a long time. Has anyone here ever used HyperStudio?

What about Flash? Or Macromedia's older tools like Shockwave and Action? I remember playing with Action 2.5 on my family's first home PC back in '93. And hearing about Java.

Even coming from the site with all those Paris Hilton stories and ROTM gags this is pretty fucking lame.

I think someone's getting confused between application developer and content developer. Anyone can be a content developer (YouTube, Flickr etc) but as yet applications are still a closed shop. Even Yahoo's pipes or Excel Macro's cause heart failure amongst those who do not have the correct mindset to break a problem down and implement a solution. Until they start teaching logical analysis in depth at secondary school level, my jobs safe.

Indeed. My officemate was grading his students.

He had an Excel sheet with their grades for midterm

and final exam, and was filling one by one the column for

final grade, by computing the average between the two grades...

on the calculator application of the OS.

Mind you, he had a Ph.D. in math, not computer science...

Evidently he was jonesing from some of that killer skunk. His logic is inexcusable any other way.

--Glenn