[ale] First look at Winders 8

[Mike Harrison]

Shapiro waxed poetic:
> So heck, maybes this is the Way the World will Go, and us happy hard-workin' coders will merely be weird old fossils in a universe of
> sunglasses-wearing HTML writers.

In the real world, where bandwidth, CPU, memory,
and -long term- reliability and maintainability are issues,
fossils like us kick ass,

I can get more done with just a shell on a far away linux system than most 
"developers" can do using the latest IDE and kewl language of the week.

10 lines of perl can be a powerful thing.

Three weeks ago I tought a young man to not trust his IDE with all the 
supported options and commands. His code would not connect. It did not 
have: CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER and CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST as options in his 
IDE, he did not RTFM. While the people that built the drop down pick-list 
of PHP options may have had valid reasons for not including these standard 
options, he had become so dependant upon these crutches he was limited by 
them. He had to connect to an internal IP address with a self-signed cert. 
Impossible he said.. He was not comfortable with a shell on the production 
server, or scp.. or.. or.. and was cutting and pasting code chunks from 
Eclipse into a server side web based file browser.... But he was very 
bright.

A recent email from Antony exposes that he is playing with ssh, scp, 
Geany, jEdit and vi and learning to "get naked with code" in his words.
Antony is starting to understand where an IDE is useful, and that there 
are sometimes more appropriate options. It is A tool, it should not be
your only tool.

The role of us old fossils is to expose follies and teach.
Sometimes with a clue bat in our hands.