You are right about me and C++. I was locked into that dead-end for about 3 years too long. Maybe longer.

Listen, you are a smart guy, who is open minded, and relentlessly inventive. But this is not a business that rewards the muses, it rewards the players that capitalize on that ingenuity by creating product. If you want to get rewarded for your insights you need to start writing, or get into some type of evangelist position.

I think you are right. I messed up about Certive. My general feeling though was that when I was doing the dynamic stuff in the 90’s, you and others were still doing the C++ thing with Microsoft. I felt then, as I do now with other people (i.e. not you), that people really just don’t get it when it comes to programmer scalability and service scalability as they continue to make the same mistakes. I’m not trying to sound ‘holier than thou’. I’m just frustrated.

Thanks for your comment

On the hiring front, I think you have a great shot right now with Ruby. I see lots of rails jobs popping up.

Boy, do I feel your pain! I think you just gotta realize that, present company excluded, the tech industry is just a pile of herd-mentality morons. Just like every other … thing. I’ve been using Io and Ruby for years, and lately OCaml in my spare time, and it’s just shocking to me that I can’t get a job-job because I don’t know Java, C++, or C#. The world apparently considers manual memory management the true test of a programmer, not understanding and being able to use closures or program declaratively. And it’s been, what, thirty, forty years since The Mythical Man-Month showed that programmers produce about the same number of lines of code per day regardless of language, implying that terse languages would be more productive for everyone?

So there you go. Whatever it takes to be taken seriously, we just don’t have it. I think there’s a long, proud tradition of folks like us in the computer science world who just aren’t taken seriously.

I give you full props for introducing me to Python. Jon Tyson introduced me to Perl. I was introduced to Javascript by Hamilton Meyer. I think I picked up on Ruby myself by tracking Dave Thomas’ work.

I for one listen to you and respect what you have to say. But I think your coming off a little holier than thou here. Read it from where I’m sitting and it comes off like this; “I think my friends are a bunch of idiots who are only clued in as long as they listen to me.”