Agreed. I am a coder and philosophy was my first love.

It is just not the case that there is a sustainable career out there for every kind of passion. Non-academic philosophy doesn't pay, coding pays.

Academic philosophy barely pays as well.

Being an academic can pay, though not necessarily well. Being a philosopher however, is widely considered an affliction that prevents one from achieving much in the way of success in academia. Questions regarding eternal verities and what you are really saying when you say 'this' are distractions from the true business of the modern academic; ensuring that the most prestigious publishing is yours and that any perishing happening near your department is happening to someone else.

It's about how much you love it, right? If you love it more than life style, that's good enough. If you love your life style more than you love philosophy, then that's another story.

I understand that there might be other complications like family, people dependant on you etc. But it all boils down to what you love and how much you love.

The fact that you fight competitively means that you're not sedentary for a good portion of your time. Binge training is still training.

People who do nothing physically demanding and sit at a desk all day are a lot more at risk. And probably not enjoying a full range of activities either.

Actually, that's the unsettling thing about the latest studies... people who do physically demanding things apparently don't benefit from them if they spend the rest of their time sitting. And that describe the lifestyle of a lot of exercise-friendly "hackers," your correspondent included.

I've had consulting gigs where I was forced to write PHP apps because of management decisions. Something like this would have been helpful.

I'm guessing that your clients wouldn't be pleased with the PHP the compiler produces. It wouldn't really be maintainable PHP code for them.

Just tell them it's really good PHP.

I'd rather not be compelled to eat with co-workers at lunch. Lunch should be a time to do whatever you want. For things like meeting people/friends outside of work, having some quiet time to read a book, or going to the gym.

Some days I don't even feel like eating at lunch, and prefer to have a late lunch in the afternoon.

And why the compulsion to sit with people that I already interact with the entire day? Nothing wrong with being social with your co-workers, but it ought to be natural. This isn't kindergarten.

So should scientific and technological progress in general be like Battlestar? I would much rather it not have a known ending. If I wanted that, I'd choose religious dogma.

I think the analog in science are people who just keep doing the same old studies slightly better (ideally), publishing papers like "This year we've managed to beat down the error on parameter X to 1/3 of what was previously possible." even though it's not clear what the benefit of knowing X better is apart from assuring a continuing train of grants supporting them.

I get the feeling that dabble DB never truly solved the "excel being used as database" problem and that is why they didn't last.

I still think spreadsheets work really well for storing data (if you don't have time/money to imnplement a RDMS), plus now with google docs and dropbox there are enough ways to sync the data with other users.

EditGrid is still around and free and unlike Google Spreadsheet's broken importXML function (see: http://goo.gl/fWYDi) it has a web_xpath function that mostly works.

Also worth noting DabbleDB is one of the (few?) relatively well-known projects implemented in Squeak/Seaside as discussed here: http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&t...

I am very glad they got Seaside out before the sale: it has really helped to revitalize Smalltalk.

Seaside was pre-DabbleDB as far as I can tell from following the framework when it was in it's youth.

Uh... didn't DabbleDB also get acquired for their developers and put into maintenance mode?

Sure, but what about the app itself?

Thanks for the suggestion, I changed the title

This would be interesting especially for those of you that read Godel Escher Bach by Hofstadter

And of course Bach and Gould fans.

Could there be any better music than Bach to listen to while programming? I think not :)

A few ways:

-Ask them when they are inputting in any kind of sign up form for your product (if you have one). Probably best to make it an optional field though

-Mine the data using facebook (if your clients are on your facebook list)

-Send out a survey with some incentive, and with some q's that would gain some knowledge about them plus their date of birth