Who gets higher salary a Java Programmer or a C++ Programmer?

[Martin Gregorie]

you sure that wasn't Algol-60?

Quite: http://www.xs4all.nl/~jmvdveer/algol.html

I ought to know the difference: Algol 60 on Ellott 503 and 1900 was my
first language, Algol 68R on 1900 under George III came some time later.

That was in 1977. In terms of both compile-time and run-time diagnostics
(especially the latter) the A68R compiler was streets ahead of anything
else I've seen. Quite apart from producing a readable stack dump (common
now, but not then) it showed the execution part through each procedure in
the execution stack (which path through a condition or case statement,
how many times round a for loop and why it terminated...). It was a fast,
single pass compiler too.

 

[LR]

so if texas banned people who weren't doctors from performing
open surgery you'd regard this as a free spech issue?

If Texas banned people who aren't doctors from writing about surgery,
even if their views on the subject were wrong, so long as they make
clear that they aren't physicians, or at least don't offer the pretense
of being a physician, I'd regard that as a free speech issue. Just as I
now repeat for contextual reasons that IANAL.


Although I anticipate a stunning lack of success, I will try to resist
the temptation to post anymore replies to this thread. I hope that
someone else will have the last word.

LR

 

[Noah Roberts]

I didn't claim that. I said that we are only able to talk about
points and lines because they exist, not that they exist because we
can talk about them. Your riposte suffers from the straw-man fallacy.

I'm sure that flies with others but if you put your argument into first
order logic it is quite easy to see that you ARE claiming that the fact
we can talk about points and lines shows that they exist:

Q = they exist
P = we can talk about them

"we are only able to talk about points and lines because they exist"

P->Q
P
====
Q

Furthermore, that is NOT what you said:

"Of course they exist, or we wouldn't even be able to talk about them."

This statement would be:

!Q->!P
P
=======
Q (modus tollens)

Thus you ARE claiming (we can talk about X)->(X exists)...no matter how
we look at your words.

Yet furthermore, you rewording of my statement is inappropriate and does
not contain the same statement as the original! "Your claim that
anything we can think up "exists" of course," is not equivalent to me
stating that your claim is that they exist *because* we can talk about
them. Your rewording indicates a causal relation I never stated that
you stated. If anyone is guilty of straw man then it is you.

HOWEVER! Your rewording of my statement about your statement is the
final, logical end to your claim that we can only talk about things that
exist. This would mean that at least some items exist only because we
talk about them, the act of thinking/talking about these things causes
their existence...before we talked about them they were not, afterwards
they where...and no other action or cause occurred. Unless, that is, it
is your contention that gods and dragons always existed even before we
started talking about them. At which point I would ask, "Where?"

Now, I suppose you could rightly claim that my rewording of "talk" to
"think" is inappropriate and that you only meant to imply that talking
about things means they must exist but then my original comparable
conversational ideas apply to counter: gods, dragons and other
boogymonsters. Furthermore I'd expect you to show some reason why the
act of speaking about an idea makes it more existential.

Finally, if you want to go down the "fallacy! fallacy!" route I suggest
you read about this little known version of ad hominem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

Hopefully you don't intend to indicate that because I "straw manned" you
(which I just showed is not the case) that philosophy instructors
shouldn't be expected to instruct in the alternative proposition to
P(X)->Q(X).

In conclusion, you would, perhaps, be more correct saying that the
*idea* of lines and points must exist since we can talk about them. How
could something be talked or thought about without the idea being there?
However, the idea of a thing does not, in any way, indicate that the
thing itself exists. In fact, there are many ideas about things that
can be proved impossible.

 

[matthew]

Or that get incentives from their government(s) to reduce pollution.

I've seen many people get to work from home in large companies.  There are
often conditions - one can work on a contract basis rather than directly for
the company, one can coordinate with international teams from disparate time
zones, one can work just part of one's schedule from "home" and part at "the
office".  Quite frequently working from "home" means reliably working far more
than forty hours per week, or not reliably working at least forty.

What is the fascination with working from home anyway?  I live fifty miles
from my job and still prefer to go to the office to work.  Then again, it's a
team environment and interaction with colleagues is an important component of
my work.

A hypothetical job interview:

INTERVIEWER: What sort of work conditions do you favor?

INTERVIEWEE: I prefer to work from home and get paid via direct deposit.

ER: Is that all?

EE: I require a six-figure salary, four weeks leave per year, fully-paid
medical with dental, and tuition reimbursement for my on-line college studies.

ER: How about two weeks annually at the corporate condo in the Mediterranean,
a company-paid Mercedes and an annual bonus of 50% of salary?

EE: You're kidding!

ER: Well, yes, but you started it!

there's a psychological reason to separate 'home' from 'work'
anymore... a clear separation of 'home space' and 'work space' can
help you focus while at work and relax more while at home. doing work
from home means you'll have to become a master of scheduling/tasking/
multithreading the home and the work activities.

 

[Lew]

I'm sure that flies with others but if you put your argument into first
order logic it is quite easy to see that you ARE claiming that the fact
we can talk about points and lines shows that they exist:

Sophistry and blather about "first=-order logic" aside, it was my
intent to claim that we talk about points and lines by virtue of the
fact that they exist, as mathematical entities. It was not my intent
to claim that they exist because we can talk about them. I used a
grammatical construct that I had thought made that intent clear, and
now see from your response failed to do so.

Points and lines have attributes that can be discussed, reasoned
about, and shown to contradict faulty assumptions, just as physically
existent objects can be. Their reality is not tangible, but no less
real for all that. They are not arbitrary ideas as your claimed
concept of "gods and dragons" are (and that itself is debatable), but
rigorously defined entities with clear attributes. They are not
fictional, nor are they imaginary. Statements can be made about them
that are provably true or false, unlike those about gods. This
establishes that they exist in reality, albeit not physical reality.

 

[Lew]

there's a psychological reason to separate 'home' from 'work'
anymore... a clear separation of 'home space' and 'work space' can
help you focus while at work and relax more while at home. doing work
from home means you'll have to become a master of scheduling/tasking/
multithreading the home and the work activities.

Valid points, but often in my experience it's work that's relaxing and
home that's stressful.

In good measure it's because I'm a software engineer and not a
laborer, thus work indoors in relative comfort for relatively good pay
without an excessive need to deal with people.

 

[Noah Roberts]

Sophistry and blather about "first=-order logic" aside, it was my
intent to claim that we talk about points and lines by virtue of the
fact that they exist, as mathematical entities. It was not my intent
to claim that they exist because we can talk about them. I used a
grammatical construct that I had thought made that intent clear, and
now see from your response failed to do so.

Points and lines have attributes that can be discussed, reasoned
about, and shown to contradict faulty assumptions, just as physically
existent objects can be. Their reality is not tangible, but no less
real for all that. They are not arbitrary ideas as your claimed
concept of "gods and dragons" are (and that itself is debatable), but
rigorously defined entities with clear attributes. They are not
fictional, nor are they imaginary. Statements can be made about them
that are provably true or false, unlike those about gods. This
establishes that they exist in reality, albeit not physical reality.

Again, under this description we have to say dragons exist; at least
some variations of that idea. Go check out TSR's, Monsterous Manual.

Basically you're now saying that any time I invent a system of logic
that is consistent, the things I make up in it exist even if they (and
the system itself) have nothing to do with anything that ever existed
before. Thus the invention of new forms of logic cause things to exist
(unless, again, you're to claim they always did and my question of,
"Where?" stands).

Furthermore, entities that can be constructed within the system of logic
must come into existence or always have existed. When did this set come
into existence: { x | x < sqrt(32) * 97}? Where does it exist?

I posit a point P1 and a ray moving from that point at 30 rad. Where is
this point?

So if your new claim seems to be that any idea we can *reason about*
must therefore exist?

What if all forms of thought boil down to logic manipulation?

 

[Noah Roberts]

Sophistry and blather about "first=-order logic" aside,

And, BTW, if you're to claim that my deconstruction of your statement
and the following arguments are /sophistry/ then you're either
unfamiliar with that word or are playing that game yourself.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Exactly. The making of software is not, and will never be, engineering.

The simple reason for this is that software is not analytically
tractable. There's nothing that is to software as Newton's laws, or all
the other physical discoveries of the nineteenth century, are to
mechanical engineering. And because software is manifestly vastly
nonlinear, it's quite clear that, barring a titanic theoretical
breakthrough, there never will be.

With a bridge, i can build a system of linear equations that describes
it, not perfectly, but to a high degree of accuracy, and i can put those
into a computer and solve them, and show that the bridge won't fall down
when trains run across it. My calculations are only approximations,
although pretty accurate ones, but i can add a safety factor to cover
that. I can say with a great deal of confidence that the bridge as
designed will work.

There's no analogue of this in software. There's no useful description
of a system any simpler than the system itself. I can draw UML diagrams
or write prototype code, or do a high-level sketch in some kind of
formal language, and i *might* be able to verify that those do the right
thing, but there's no way to get from there to the real thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-driven_architecture

There's
no analogue to the idea of the model being a close approximation - one
character out of place somewhere in the implementation can completely
change the behaviour of the whole system.

Floating point offer plenty of approximation.

Nor can you apply analysis of this kind to the actual program, which is
actually a closer analogue to the bridge engineer's analysis [1].

Programs that analyze source code exist and are used.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I don't consider mathematics a science. The foundation of science is
experiment: you do experiments, and from the results, you draw
conclusions about the world.

That is what natural sciences do.

It is not what math an social sciences do. Even medical
science is not always able to experiment, because knowledge
is not the only priority.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Ok, that's good to know. Thanks.

That seems to be the case for most countries except Canada.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

The brick layer only has a job because automated tools are more
expensive than him. If it were cheeper to have a human being take
C++/Java code and create machine language/bytecode, we wouldn't be using
automated tools. But I would still say that the builder (i.e., the one
who takes the code that we write and turns it into the program that the
user runs) is not designing, while the person who decides exactly what
the program will do in a given situation is.

What I'm saying is that the decision makers are the designers, it isn't
possible for a non-programmer to make all the decisions a programmer
needs to make, and those decisions are vital for correct code.

I would not be surprises if MDA tools replaced the writing
of lines of code (for most apps) sooner than machines replaced
the brick layers.

I'll take another tack... A finished product, whether it's a bridge,
building, or application is complete and not amiable to modification
(except in ways that were specifically designed into it.)

A design for a product is amiable to modification. Parts of the design
can be lifted out and used independently of the product in question.
Beauty can be found in a design, independent of the product that the
design produces. All these aptly describe C++/Java code.

Buildings get redesigned. Programs get redesigned. I don't see
the difference.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I don't know about the US, but in Europe, it is generally
illegal to appropriate a title that you don't have. In Germany,
for example, I cannot claim that I'm a Dipl. Ing., because I
don't have that title.

In most cases, the simple title "engineer", without further
qualifications, is not an academic title, so it doesn't depend
on a degree.
Yes.

Never the less, some qualification is expected.

Yes. But with few options if it is not the case.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

All of which are social phenomena. Economics is a behavioral science,
not a physical one.

There is nothing physically inherent in ferrous ore that makes it an
economic resource. It's the valuation by humans that makes it an
economic phenomenon.

Yes, economics does involve physical phenomena, but their significance
in economics is social.

Not purely.

There are also some physical aspects. Iron ore are where it is. Iron
ore is as difficult to get up as it is. Iron is desired due to its
physical characteristics. Alloys require a certain percentage of iron
and a certain percentage of chrome/vanadium to achieve some specific
characteristics. All these also affect supply and demand.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Poppycock. No philosopher of science considers mathematics a science.

Not true.

Try check which universities offer MSc degrees in mathematics.

I would say that it is almost universally considered a science.

In psychology, it's the array of physical and chemical processes which
underly nerve activity.

That is not what psychology teaches.

Neither economics nor sociology is a science.

Of course they are.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

It depends on what the application is. Someone writing a pay
program in Cobol isn't very far from the brick layer.

Don't underestimate pay programs. They can be very complex.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Yes, i struggle to imagine how you could do it without having what would
effectively be software somewhere in the middle.

I think it is only a theoretical experiment.

It would not make sense.

Since there's at least one JVM written in C++, not so.

A JVM (at least a recent one with JIT) is targeted at a
specific CPU, so taking an existing JVM written in C++ and
move to this hypothetical machine will not do any good.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I don't think that payroll is one of those. Payroll is one of those
apps with an "arbitrary" set of rules to follow. Things like the place
an individual works, where they reside, what kind of work they do,
possibly even their physical characteristics, might all make a
difference to how the app should handle that case.

Payroll is also different from some kinds of engineering apps, and I
suspect games as well, in that your results had better work to the penny
or cent or farthing. Otherwise angry hourly workers with pitchforks and
torches will show up at your cubicle. There's no margin of error for
safety, either the compensation and deductions are right or not.

There were a huge IT scandal in Denmark some years ago. The city
in Copenhagen wanted a new payroll system for all the city employees.

One of the worlds biggest consulting companies took on the
task using an ERP package from one of the biggest software
companies in the world.

After a few years they were kicked out, because they could not
get it to work properly.

Arne

 

[Lew]

Not purely.

There are also some physical aspects. Iron ore are where it is. Iron
ore is as difficult to get up as it is. Iron is desired due to its
physical characteristics. Alloys require a certain percentage of iron
and a certain percentage of chrome/vanadium to achieve some specific
characteristics. All these also affect supply and demand.

Again I stand corrected. Entirely valid points.

 

[Lew]

Nor can you apply analysis of this kind to the actual program, which
is actually a closer analogue to the bridge engineer's analysis [1].

Programs that analyze source code exist and are used.

<http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/>