There's all kinds of 32 bit software I use that crashes or burns my CPU simply because it runs out of ram or it can't make any use of my cores/threads. You can chalk that up to just poor optimization, but what I know is that 32 bit Skyrim makes my CPU burn and 64 bit Skyrim doesn't.
there's no limitation on how many threads a 32 bit program can use. Are you writing something that needs more than 4 GB of ram at once?
Not at the moment, but I want to know how it's done for posterity when I do.
Java is probably the only language I've used that feels like it was designed by bureaucrats.
Could you elaborate on this? I don't like python's syntactically significant whitespace because I find it easier to forget to indent as opposed to using a semicolon or curly brace, but I've never thought python's flow control was unclear. New lines for new statements and mandatory levels of indentation for control flow seem intuitive for new programmers. Additionally, python's lack of mandatory main seems like it would make it easy to explain the purpose of functions. I'm not asserting that I'm right since I'm sure your experience in teaching provides a good foundation for these opinions, I just want to know why my gut feelings here are incorrect.
I'd say an equally off-putting feature of scheme is the use of polish notation. Most people recoil when they see something like
(* (+ 1 2) (+ 3 4)).
I had to use scheme at university for a semester. My conclusion at the end of it was "If this is what they call a 'functional language', I want nothing to do with any of it".
It's hard to explain in general, you probably have to see it to understand it. I have one example on hand (more on that below), but for now let's just say that no, indentation in general turns out not to be intuitive to newbies. It was a good try and I applaud the experiment, but the results are out and it's a failure.
I don't see this angle, care to elaborate?
I hear from many programmers they have been traumatized by scheme at school. Care to elaborate? I came into it by my own volition, never got bad vibes from it.
It's been a few years so I don't remember it perfectly, but I remember thinking at every step "wow, this is just artificially difficult". The operator order sucks. The (((parens))) legitimately fuck with my eyes in ways that give me a headache. In fact my own professor couldn't write it correctly during lectures because the parens messed with his eyes too. Maintaining state is unituitive compared to every other language (yes I know that's kind of the point). The entire "flow" of the language reads like fragmented nonsense and it's hard to make it "englishy", which is very important for a real production environment.
My thought process was that, if you first introduce functions as "pieces of code you want to reuse in the same program" (amending that later on in the python course to explain that you can use functions from different files with imports), students will immediately see the visual difference between the "reusable" code and the "regular" code because the former is under a function header and the latter isn't. Also, if you cover scoping with loops prior to introducing functions, students might be able to intuit that functions also have their own scope because they're both indented. Contrast this with explaining to students why
public static void main is different from static void foo.
To be fair, no one explains that to 1st year students...or at least shouldn't. My teacher handwaved all the boilerplate code in C++ in college and said "you'll learn about this later, for now just know you have to type this" and I did the same when I was teaching: I'd assign take home problems with the boilerplate shit already filled out. Even more so now, since there's a number of tools now and interpreters that'll fill in all those details for you (coderpad, hackerrank) that'll give you starting boilerplates for problems.
Were you using Racket? Was it your first programming course? Scheme is an educational tool but it's incomplete without something like the Racket IDE.
Who were the first computer programmers?
Everyone knows that computers are actually single-tape, single-head Universal Turing Machines.
Who would want to write perl-code to achieve python-functionality?
Python is the number one preferred language for data science. That has driven much of its popularity in the past 10 years. Python and RoR are different beasts for different situations. You can build a webserver in python via Flask or whatever, but fuck you for trying if you do, because you should have just picked something more well-suited for the job. Not saying you can't with python, but have fun finding a python contractor to support it: I can throw a rock and hit 3 asp.net mvc or java spring pajeets.
I wasn't aware there was any serious problem with OOP dogma these days. What sort of things did you mean?