Oh good whatever you believe in.

Frank, when I found out that their SDETs were writing test code in C++ around that Bing joke and asked the guy in charge (during the phone screen) what the test devs thought about it, he just flapped.

Guy failed to be abled to articulate in the language we were speaking in, he was so flapped. 

I'm going to be very kind to the hiring manager dweeb, and omit his name here. But *the guy didn't know shit from shinola* and wanted me to worship his (absent) education before he would give me an onsite interview. 

I said: "Why aren't they using something like F#?"

He didn't know what I was talking about. The hiring manager for the Bing team had *never even heard about F#!!!* 

The only people other than hard core external nerds who know what that is are hard core nerds who live in what they call "Dev-Div" at MS, which is where they have people who can actually speak things like grammar, environment, and virtual machine, but these folks can't change anything either. Too much chasing the whims of the Ballmers of the world, as usual. 

At least when B.G. was running the company, they had an actual engineering culture. Even if that engineering culture happened around systems programming and low cults.  

It's actually up to us. I really believe that. 

C

P.S.

I don't want to waste any more bandwidth on this list because I'm recognizing now that I'm way off-topic; that said, feel free to write directly if that's what you want to do, but let's get this boring crap off of squeak-dev, where miracles happen for small kids in places where they're otherwise treated as commodities. 

It's more important to see about improving the future than it is to complain about what is, and so I am remiss. 

On Jul 11, 2012, at 7:29 AM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11 July 2012 15:27, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Below.
>> 
>> On Jul 11, 2012, at 6:46 AM, Stefan Marr <smalltalk at stefan-marr.de> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On 11 Jul 2012, at 15:29, Casey Ransberger wrote:
>>> 
>>>> After all: an operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Should there be one?
>>> 
>>> No, there shouldn't be one: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
>>> Singularity is much more a high-level language [VM] than it is a classical OS.
>>> 
>>> Ah, but oops, it's from Microsoft...
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Stefan Marr
>>> Software Languages Lab
>>> Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>>> Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium
>>> http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr
>>> Phone: +32 2 629 2974
>>> Fax:   +32 2 629 3525
>> 
>> Most of my friends hail from Microsoft now. All of them have quit the company and taken options at Seattle startups.
>> 
>> Singularity is pretty cool except... like most MS research projects, it probably won't ever leave the lab.
>> 
>> Their research arm is (in that modern sort-of way) really great. But they tend to make (at the end of the day) big ass computer tables which people kind of laugh at as useless. The real problem with Microsoft Research, in your present intrepid author's meaningless opinion, is that they *don't ever ship anything that anyone wants or needs.*
> 
> Largely I agree. They do tend to fund interesting languages though: F#
> and Haskell are both interesting, practical languages. (No, really.)
> Of course, that might not fulfil the "anyone wants" part. Side effect
> free programming? Bah!
> 
> frank
> 
>> And Apple sold out the geeks. Welcome to 1984, ladies and gentlemen!
>> 
>> ;)
>> 
>> What's the alternative? Shanty towns both. Linux and BSD. I say: let's get rid of both.
>> 
>> C
>