I’m working on a post about Ruby on Rails and its current hip-to-hate condition spawned by Zed Shaw’s flaming rejection of Rails.

I couldn’t wait to post this little tidbit, though:

So, the Ruby community is all excited because of this post, and the following graph showing the incredible growth of Ruby jobs versus Java:

ruby, java Job Trends

ruby jobs - java jobs

Ooh! Sexy! Ruby can’t possibly be a has-been language with a red bar like that!

Try this one on for style:

ruby, java, cobol, c++, perl, php Job Trends

ruby jobs - java jobs - cobol jobs - c++ jobs - perl jobs - php jobs

So, in short, we’re looking at more Cobol jobs than Ruby jobs and a growth rate similar to PHP. Not quite so sexy now, is it?

The Ruby people need to be happy with being the hip rebel outsiders. It’s a much better fit.

Edit: Damn it, Luke Francl already made this snark.

Edit 2: Check this out, comparing various web frameworks:

rails, struts, seam, spring mvc, grails, php Job Trends

rails jobs - struts jobs - seam jobs - spring mvc jobs - grails jobs - php jobs

rails, struts, seam, spring mvc, grails, php Job Trends

rails jobs - struts jobs - seam jobs - spring mvc jobs - grails jobs - php jobs

Popularity: 5% [?]

Does anyone know of a border-rounding solution that doesn’t suck? curvyCorners looks great in Firefox, but tears badly in IE 7 in any case other than their demo. Nifty Corners Cube doesn’t seem to do anything at all, although I can see that it put all kinds of stuff into my DOM via FireBug.

Popularity: 3% [?]

There’s been a lot of nattering about the usefulness, or lack thereof, of a college-level CS degree to a programmer. The most recent of which to cross my transom, is this post, but I think it all started with a post by Joel. The problem with this debate is that it presupposes three things, all of which are patently false, that:

1. Computer science and programming are seperate things, and that it’s possible to know one without knowing the other,


2. That it is possible, at least in theory, to teach students everything (or most everything) they need to know in “the real world”, in a reasonable amount of time (four years), and


3. That the point and purpose of a CS education is to give you those “real world” skills.

The last point is particularly important, as it raises the question: what is the point and purpose of getting a CS education, if not to give you “real world” skills? The point and purpose of a CS education is this: to teach you how to learn the real world skills you need.

Of course, this is not the answer that either the students or the employeers wanted to hear, as it has several disquieting implications for both.

Continue Reading »

Popularity: 51% [?]

I’m Dead!

At least I got an obit in the NYT.

In all seriousness — for some reason, this really upsets me.

(See this post for other posts on my Googleganger, including links to the “In the Loop” radio program I’m in.)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Highlights from In The Loop’s homage to the Flip Flop:

Save “In the Loop”!

Popularity: 5% [?]