We're using it for video and audio, desktop sharing, presentations, and IM. It's completely incapable of doing any of those things reliably. I thought Communicator was bad, then they replaced it with Lync...

@nmunro thought it was better than another one about Windows being the nightmare. Washed to add a few more tried, make it cheesier, and add more geeky detail, but 1000 characters just want quite enough. I went over the limit like 6 times.

One night, Jill was babysitting for her neighbours, just to earn a little extra cash.
Kids were asleep, parents weren't due for a couple of hours, so she got out her laptop, and continued coding a personal project.
After committing and pushing a few changes, she noticed there was a new branch she'd not seen.
"Strange," she muttered to herself. She wasn't sharing this repo with anyone, but maybe she made a feature branch and forgot about it.
As she was checking out the branch, she noticed a few commits being pushed to it live. The latest commit message was, "I know what you did last summer of code."
She freaked out, and looked at everything to do with the branch, and all of the commits. Username was WinCE, and all of the messages were threats to include platform specific code.
She heard the creak of a chair from the office. Her heart pounding, she went into the office, saw the PC on, a new set of changes ready to commit.
The commits were coming from inside the house.

Still more believable than CSI tracing someone's cell phone location via the visual basic GUI. I mean, everyone knows CSS is evil.

Everybody's there like, "hey, try entering this!" Then @buffer comments with exactly what I was thinking: what did the email say you should enter, if anything?

It actually looks like an interesting language. Especially where it describes writing other languages with it.

Syntax is hinky, but it's all about preference. Just look at objective c, and yet loads of people use it, and even prefer it in some ways.

The important part for your course is to learn programming, not to learn the language. You should be able to take what you have learnt and apply it to any language.

Just like with photography, the best CPU is the one you have with you.

Besides this nugget of useless truthfulness, more CPU is always the best CPU for compiling.
If you're asking for upgrading and faster compiling is your main target, you can probably pick up cheap decommissioned servers with multiple multi-core CPUs inside, and setup a distributed compiler across them all.

Such beautifully written pseudo code. Mine ends up as a set of scrawls on the back of a napkin.

Funny, I'm the other way round. Make me use Java and I'll blow my brains out.

HP EliteBook 8460p
Second gen i5, 4GB, 250GB HDD
In 2011 it was a 6/10, but five years on it's 1/10, because although I just use it for VPN and RDP, it's slow, has bad WiFi connectivity at times, and the keyboard is partially faulty...

@simeg I have a five month old baby, a wife, a cat and a dog. There's never spare time. Someone always needs something sometime.

@n1had I consider it every time I'm on the train, especially since I'd like to switch jobs, and learning something new would help, but then I just listen to music and sleep. It's the only time I get to myself all day.

@Jumpshot44 cost at the moment.
Had a top spec MBA, iPad mini and a gaming PC.
Then the missus announced she was pregnant, and somehow finances went south fast.

If you have a Raspberry Pi, you could always try learning about more than just a specific language. Rather, learn about operating systems by writing one, with a great course: http://cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/...
Highly recommended, and will probably teach you far more than what you'll learn by just training yourself in a new language.
A language is just a tool, and a good developer uses the most suitable tool for the job.

Do it, see what the response is like

Just had to do my own version of this rant.
I never have a good 4:55 on a Friday feeling because someone always arrives at my desk with another "quick" question/issue to investigate...

@diomonogatari I can imagine. My grandmother worked in fields in Portugal from when she was about 10 until she was 70, when she just couldn't do it any more for her health.

Had some guys that supply us a library internally (let us call it BadLib) say the same, then our code stopped running.
We (GoodLib) depend upon a fixed ABI with BadLib, so that clients can drop in an updated GoodLib with an old BadLib, or vice versa, without forcing us to recompile for every minor release.
This has worked well since way before I ever joined the company. Then they started letting another team get access to BadLib code, to manipulate it to their preferences, which they did thinking it didn't affect anybody else. Well, let's just say it's three months down the line, and we have problems almost daily with interface changes we were not aware of...

So much ++
Basically company culture where I work

@BellAppLab so good that their app never made it to market. To be fair, any app attempting to target Android, Windows Mobile (as in not Windows Phone 7) iOS, webOS, Symbian and Blackberry OS is probably doomed to fail.