My college classes gave me 1/5th the assignments my high school classes did. It was usually less than 10% of the grade. For some classes, it was completely optional.
My high school experience was the exact opposite. I had so much homework I had to do it in other classes. It was horrible. Homework is not very effective as a learning aid and is -extremely- time-consuming.
It also discriminates against working, poor and extra-curricular students, who have less time outside of the classroom, especially if harder classes have more homework. Virtually everyone in my AP classes had rich or at least upper middle class parents. The same could be said for my college because of that.
I've often wanted spaces in C. Because C makes heavy use of required punctuation, there aren't many places that a keyword can be adjacent to an identifier, or two identifiers can be adjacent, so for the most part I don't think spaces would introduce ambiguity.
Offhand, I can only think of a couple problem areas (but my C language lawyer days are long gone and I'm way out of practice--anyone else have some I'm missing?).
1. "goto foo;" could either be a goto keyword and the label foo, or a really stupid expression involving the variable "goto foo".
2. "int foo();" could be a forward declaration of the function foo, or an invocation of the function "int foo".
There would also be some questions about preprocessing. If I have something like "x pos = 12;", and I have a #define pos foo" in effect, does that apply to the "pos" in my "x pos"?
The only way to do it is to have a job where you can complete the work in less than 5 hours a day. Preferably one that gives you the freedom to leave early/come in late so long as you're doing well on your work.
No one actually works 8 hours a day and comes home to work 4 hours sustainably. I couldn't see someone doing that for more than two months without getting burned out.
This is very interesting. I'm not sure how my company culture would tolerate my leaving early, but it does seem like the most practical option for actually getting work done.
I feel like I probably have enough autonomy to do this, but it's tricky business.
Actually I have been able to do this pretty easily, but its probably because I commute an hour and a half each way to work on a train. So I get 3 hours a day to work on things I want to work on.
This has been my problem. I have spent my entire career at government contractors, so I need to record 40 hours of butt-in-seat time every week in order to make the auditors happy, regardless of the actual work done. That makes my days 10 hours from when I walk out the door to when I walk back through it, sometimes less if I spend less than an hour at lunch.
I've been doing that for 3+ years now. If you truly enjoy what you are doing in your side project it can work. If not, perhaps you are just doing it for the money?
In all fairness, most desk jobs that existed in the 50's and 60's are now heavily consolidated (it now takes one journalist and Google what it used to take 10 to do). And most factory work is either also heavily consolidated or moved overseas.
Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?
And now there are headlines about automating low tier jobs in the legal and medical professions. The old refrain about getting a degree being a ticket to a steady income is long gone.
Never mind that the latest in assembly line robotics are as flexible as humans in their movement, and can be programmed by demonstrating the basic movements a few times. You can pretty much tell Joe to walk away from his station, and roll this robot into the same place.
Some simpler financial news articles are now written by zero journalists. A program just extracts numbers from data feeds and plugs them into a template.
Sports as well. You can't have journalists cover all lower league games, but an aide has to write a log about plays, which you can use to generate some metrics and generate something that fits roughly the right tone. (example that does advertise it: http://statsheet.com/ does this for basketball)
Well, 30 years ago there was no global internet full of knowledge and allowing collaboration-- I had to go to the college library.
There was also no global internet allowing for an instant global market to be serviced from the middle of nowhere. If you started a business in podunk, your market was the podunk area. (For the most part, there was mail order and stuff, but that still had a higher barrier to entry than the internet does now.)
So I think things have gotten easier and a lot more people are doing it.
I'm interested in hearing why you think the opposite-- I bet you're observing a different trend than I am focusing on. (eg both trends can be true)
I actually started "programming" back when I was a kid working on Starcraft maps. The Starcraft editor isn't quite graphical but it definitely isn't text documents (though in Starcraft 2, I believe it compiles down to a C variant).
Starcraft has one thing that modern graphical editors don't have: reactivity. State is synchronized behind the scenes between client and server (who is also a client). You "program" predominately in response to events, which can be initiated by the game itself, player action or by another function call.
Reactivity, which is programming in response to events, in my opinion, will lead to the first useful non-notepad editors.
While that liability is nice, I think the world is better off without it. If people know they can't take their vacation with them, they'll actually take it when it's appropriate.
The liability situation is a lose-lose one. You take less vacation because you're comfortable you'll get it and the company gets a liability on the books because you work too hard.
Without the liability, you'll see a lot of people take vacation during layoffs though.
> Without the liability, you'll see a lot of people take vacation during layoffs though.
Not necessarily -- quantitatively unlimited vacation doesn't mean that the vacation can be taken without management approval of the specific timing, it just means that its not held to a fixed limit.
My high school experience was the exact opposite. I had so much homework I had to do it in other classes. It was horrible. Homework is not very effective as a learning aid and is -extremely- time-consuming.
It also discriminates against working, poor and extra-curricular students, who have less time outside of the classroom, especially if harder classes have more homework. Virtually everyone in my AP classes had rich or at least upper middle class parents. The same could be said for my college because of that.