pellicle
Do you have any idea how much time teachers spend grading and preparing lessons after the school day ends? If you teach 5 classes, with 20 kids per class (that's being optimistic), then every time you collect an assignment, that's 100 assignments to grade (same goes for homeworks, quizzes, tests, and labs -- holy freaking cow it's a lot of grading). And not only that, but high-schoolers will nickel-and-dime you for every point (and compare grades with friends), so you have to be painstakingly consistent. This is excruciatingly boring work, and it sucks hours of the teacher's time after the school day has ended (and most evenings).
Not to mention contacting parents after school (who believe every word their child says about how mean and awful you are (translation: you expect them to actually do work in your class and behave)), after-school meetings, hunting around for lab materials, and coordinating with the other teachers so you're all on close to the same page.
> Are you seriously comparing an easy 6 week continuing education course to full time employment?
When the school year ends, besides all the wrap-up paperwork teachers have to do, they have to deal with angry parents of kids who failed (and about whom they've been sending letters home from day 1). Anyway, after all that's done, teachers are standing in a large pile of material they've burned through throughout the year. All this needs to be organized, revisited, and made ready for next year. The school year is about Sept to June. That's, what, about 34 weeks net? Figure 2-3 homeworks per week, 1 quiz per week, 1 test every 3-4 weeks ... that's a boatload of material to edit/revise over the summer.
And don't discount recovery time. Teaching is mentally very difficult. Students are constantly testing your limits all year. Parents are forever questioning your teaching and complaining why their kid has to stay for detention or whatever. Sometimes you even have to attend meetings and explain in great detail to parents and administrators how you warned the student n times, how they knew the consequences, and how they decided to behave badly anyway. And this doesn't even account for the actual teaching -- which means being on performing in front of an audience every time (think how difficult it is to write a program with collegues or your manager looking over your shoulder). And they do it every day -- to the ring of a school bell even. And when that bell rings, you'd better be at that door, taking attendance, dealing with late passes and excuses, collecting homework, and getting the group into learning mode because you've only got N minutes until the bell rings again, they shuffle out, and the next group comes in.
Teachers already love kids and teaching. What drives them away is a long list of negatives: little support from administration (especially when parents are involved), overbearing and/or micromanaging administration, way too much paperwork, too many meetings, and too much weight put on standardized testing. Large class sizes doesn't help either.
(And please don't tell me that teachers have summers off (technically, contracts end at the end of the year and start up again when the school year begins, so they are not employed during the summer). Teachers spend their summers doing professional development, getting prepared for next year (revising curriculum, tweaking tests/quizzes/homeworks), dealing with paperwork, recovering from the school year, and often doing something teaching-related for pay (running summer programs or summer school). )
Half of your wealth is very very small compared to losing custody of your kids. If she leaves, the legal system will almost always make sure she gets the kids. Unless you have kids, it's difficult to understand how horrible this is for dads.
Also, as an aside, Gitorious should consider switching to a new logo, or none at all, and then choose a lighter colorscheme for the site. The current theme reminds me of a hospital room at night.
Seriously; if you ask around and find that people really can't seem to come up with a good reason why they use Github instead of Gitorious, this is why.
Note: search around here for tips on choosing a good rate. And then factor in your history with them.
* nice guy, but a bit awkward socially
* very smart and good memory too
* has written a lot of free software, and would like others to consider making theirs free as well
Also, I wished that he would've included more technical topics in the talk.
The difference is, (AFAICT) Perl 6 also aims to be easy to use for the everyone else. Damian is extremely bright and surely wishes to have (and (I think) has helped design) a language that allows him to do some frightening and epic stuff. Larry is also a very bright guy, and is very humble, and (again, AFAICT) still requires that Perl 6 make easy things easy. "Baby Perl 6" should be easy to pick up and use.
So, the only part of the Lisp vibe I'm sensing is: yes, clever people will use Perl 6 to do clever things. But also, people who just need to get their work done in a straightforward way will be using Perl 6 as well.
My prediction: Perl 6 will have a long and steady increase in use as time goes by. This is because although there's not a tremendous amount of hype, potential users will trickle in and say, "I need to do $x"; and then as usual, Perlers will come out of the woodwork with multiple ways to quickly do $x without much trouble, and bang: you've got one more Perl 6 user.
> I'm optimistic that, within another few years (give or take a decade), someone will come up with a VCS that's both powerful and usable. :-)
Do you think Hg shares the same amount of usability as Git?
Do you mean $1.35/day? If that's the case, then I see your point: even though you're passionate about it, it (in and of itself) won't pay the rent.
BTW, for those wanting to learn more about how to use LaTeX, you might try writing your doc in Markdown, pandoc it into LaTeX, and then look at that LaTeX output in your editor.
I'll add though, that with LaTeX I had to write markup. With Markdown I just write.
I didn't know there were so many versions of Casting Spels (Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp, Clojure, Haskell). Do you have any plans to do one for Scheme?
Without a sample, we really have no idea what it is, nor whether or not it would be worthwhile to take the time to do the email signup. For example, does it show coding happening in an editor? Some kind of graphical program? Is the output animated? We really can't tell just from the title if it's something that would interest us.
+1 on offering ogv format, btw. :)