zeemonkee

What's the hot shit right now then, if not Node?

In contrast to Finland, where each of the cases above require me turning up in person. Had I just needed to mail off a form, it wouldn't be so much an issue.

All good points - from a foreigner's perspective in either country.

I think the key here is not web/non-web but the government in question having an intelligent, joined-up registration system.

In the case of Finland, once I'd registered with the tax office my address and other details should have been registered in the system. KELA would be notified - along with all my income details - and the magistrate and police would have up-to-date records. Done, one visit to one office.

> bureaucracy is ten years behind Finland. You still need to visit an office to get anything done instead of doing things over the browser

I found this to be the case when moving to Finland; the amount of bureaucracy needed to get started as a foreigner, even one from the EU, is insane (from a British perspective).

- register with tax office

- register with KELA (you'd think registering as a taxpayer would be sufficent; but no)

- register with the Maistratti (um...)

- register with police station (hey, I've just given my address details to the tax office, KELA, and Maistratti, but let's waste another half a day in a police station in middle of nowhere, Espoo).

But whatever, glad to be doing my part to support the National Bureaucrat Jobs Program.

> it's not weird to see grown men (and brilliant devs) run around the office and shoot nerf guns at each other

1999 called, it wants its startup cliches back.

I think you want "boost" - kind of turns the meaning of the article on its head. The title is all I can see, however, because of the paywall.

Yes, to both - unfortunately personal circumstances keep me here in Finland. I'd recommend Amsterdam to anyone, however, it's a great city.

Maybe because he prefers languages where he has to do his own garbage collection ;-)

I don't know about Austria, here it's a case of "well, this is the industry standard, why do you deserve more? - oh you're a foreigner? Just be grateful we even give you a job" (even if you speak Finnish).

So, most employers don't go with it ;-)

I'm quite happy with foreign clients as they pay better and the work tends to be more interesting - the only killer is the different timezones.

I've had a similar experience in Finland - the shitty salaries (and lack of interesting work that isn't somehow tied to the sinking ship that is Nokia) are one reason I avoid Finnish companies like the plague, and just work for foreign clients.

This is the reason Finnish companies don't advertise salary, which is common in the UK and US for example - it's all collectively bargained in some way out of your control.

Probably the closest match to Snap (based on the OP's description) in Python is Pyramid:

http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/docs/pyramid.html

The routing system in particular looks quite similar.

What do you think is the best solution to the lack of capital? More Europe-wide VC funding (and networking) perhaps, so we're not so reliant on local funding?

Unfortunately this is all too typical of the tech scene in Finland. While there have been a few breakout successes (Rovio, F-Secure for example) and the tech talent in Finland is generally top-notch, much of the scene is dominated by a tight-knit old-boys network in the boardroom, unions and government.

See here for example:

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/03/03/making-growth-entrep...

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/04/03/the-best-april-fools...

Who do we have ? Jorma Ollila (again) - the arrogant twit who drove Nokia into the ground long before Elop took over. Siilasmaa, another face from Nokia. The same people involved in the Fruugo fiasco. Taxpayer money funneled through Tekes to support no-hope startups run by people who know the right people. Silly little committees - again taxpayer funded - to discuss the "future of IT in Finland" with nary a nod toward the genuinely successful startups.

The tech scene here is anemic, incestuous and poorly managed, propped up by taxpayer money through layers of government bureaucracy. Which is a shame because the tech talent is excellent. What's really needed is a more startup-friendly environment - a reduction in bureacracy, taxation reform, and a more small-business-friendly culture - but these are "hard" problems. Let's just have yet another worthless "steering group" and appoint the same guys we drink beer with in the sauna.

> It's about being a dreamer

No, that's being an idiot.

A successful entrepreneur - as opposed to someone who loses their shirt - may be a visionary and a dreamer. But they take calculated risks. You have to know when to persevere, when to pivot, and when to give up - especially if you're playing with other people's money or your life savings.

Yes, vision and confidence are important, in order to bring employees, investors and customers on board. But unless they are grounded in reality, you will fail horribly, unless you are very, very lucky.

As a counterargument (although I agree with you in this case): it was just as well George Lucas had less control over the original Star Wars films, as the prequels proved.

This might be a good explanation for this behavior:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2858603/why-is-keyword-ha...

tl;dr; use "is" only with singetons (None etc)

I've made good money fixing utter crap written by people who decided a new startup is the best time and place to learn a whole new technology at the same time.

There's so many ways for a startup to screw up - marketing, financing, hiring, pure bad luck - without throwing the whole unknown of an unfamiliar language or framework into the mix.

Unless you actually need new tech to solve a specific problem, use what you know.

There's a pre-route macro: http://webnoir.org/autodoc/1.2.1/noir.core-api.html#noir.cor...

> It's the only reason I use an Algol dialect after 10 years of writing Lisps.

Why not a Clojure stack ? Is Play itself, or Scala ?

Or expense, including accommodation.

There is very little cultural innovation either - popular entertainment nowadays consists of reboots, prequels, sequels, and karaoke hits (American Idol and the like). It's part of the same symptom I think of stagnant, litigious, bottom-line driven, risk-averse management Stephenson talks about - and it's strangling not only our technological innovation but all forms of creativity.

I've noticed that Tornado comes with its own MySQL wrapper, however I'm concerned it might have blocking issues.

Does anyone have experience with using this ?

Also, what do people use for form validation with Tornado ?

You guessed wrong:

> I remember how hard it used to be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school

> Django are learned by people already familiar with Python

If only that were true. Like the OP I've been working with mostly legacy Django codebases the last few years and much of the same issues he raises could be applied to those projects as well.

Most languages in the world have no spoken form. They all have grammatical "rules", that is they follow a certain syntax, morphology, etc.

> IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.

It's not actually that complicated, most are simple suffixes - so for example, instead of on the table in Finnish you say table-on (pöydällä). Once you learn the rules of vowel harmony and consonant mutation it's a pretty regular, straightforward language.

Why does anyone bother listening to this pontificating, clueless idiot any more ? Because he helped crash a crappy hilariously-named CMS product into the ground over a decade ago ?

I mean, I wouldn't write a blog post about the American Tea Party, for example, because I know too little of the forces of modern US politics, culture and economics giving rise to the phenomenon and would come off as a clueless idiot if I tried to do so. What makes Greenspun such an expert on the UK ?

I think a lot of the Java hate is because of the architecture astronauts who hijacked the language in the last decade - J2EE/EJB, the GoF, FactoryFactoryFactory shit and so on. I remember seeing the earlier versions of the servlet API and it was very elegant and well designed; unfortunately once the astronauts were through with it writing Java web apps became such a form of mental torture (Struts, anyone?) that even PHP was a welcome relief, let alone Rails. My hate for it came from having to use some shitty app server like WebSphere because the coding-averse CTO considered it a "standard".

Looking at more recent work such as the lovely Play framework and the influence of new JVM languages such as Clojure and Scala, it looks like things are improving in Java-land. It's still a bit dated and clunky compared to Ruby and Python (let alone Clojure/Scala or even Groovy) but it's not as bad as people make out.

OK, then, I'll go with PHP sigh.