Jupiter Broadcasting

Revenge of the Swift | CR 204

In a podcast far far away, you asked for it & this week we delivered. It’s code review time, with a twist!

Plus the FUD seems strong with the second Oracle v Google trial, we attempting to do some busting, Dropbox falling back to reality & 30 years later why we still love QBasic.

Thanks to:




Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | iTunes Audio | iTunes Video

Become a supporter on Patreon:

— Show Notes: —

Hoopla

Second Oracle V Google Trial FUD

Cost cutting at Dropbox and Silicon Valley startup

The change at Dropbox, last valued at $10 billion, shows even the most richly valued and highly funded startups are no longer immune to the changing tides of Silicon Valley.

A weaker VC funding environment and freezing tech-IPO market have forced startups of all sizes to take cost-cutting measures and focus more on profits – signifying a shift in the free-spending, growth-at-all-cost culture that had seeped through Silicon Valley over the past few years.

As startups cut back on perks and delay their IPO, employees could grow frustrated and decide to join larger, more established companies that offer better benefits and stock liquidity.

Swift School

Mike’s First Swift .app

30 years later, QBasic is still the best

Yes, QBasic is a terrible procedural language. It introduces one to concepts widely considered harmful, uses awkward syntax for implicit declarations, is not case sensitive, is non-zero-based, etc. the list goes on… When developing a skill, it is much better to acquire the right reflexes from the start rather than have to correct years of bad practice. Following this advice, I should have probably started off with the basics of the ruby language which I love. Yet, while most of those QBasic concepts are today generally considered as red flags by our peers, they each served a very specific purpose at the time: to keep the language simple and accessible, a notion that every other language has left behind in favor of flexibility, complexity and logic.

I installed QBasic on my son’s 11″ HP Stream today, having to hack a DOSBox manual installation. He double clicked the icon on his desktop and in a split second, we were in the IDE, greeted with the introduction screen which brought back so many memories to my mind