Programming in the 21st Century...
Live from Northern California: "Code monkeys"--an insult to simians of all species: That's what I'm saying...
I am still marveling at the fact that last spring it took Berkeley’s bCourses system six hours to read a table of 10,000 numbers off of the iClicker.com and put it into its own database. And, of course, any network timeout anywhere in those six hours would cause the process to barf completely, saving none of its intermediate state.
All this for programs running on chips that work so fast that light travels less than a foot in each clock cycle...
