Le 2012-06-11 04:17, Invisible a écrit :
> Nobody is going to pay me to write a ray-tracer. Because, as cool as
> that is, it's a solved problem.  Similarly, nobody is going to pay me to
> sit around playing with compression algorithms or designing weak ciphers
> or generating pretty pictures from sound signals or...you know what?
 > These things are all very cool, but none of them actually generate
 > money.

I just spend 8 hours looking at a foetal cardiac / contraction monitor. 
  They were using a custom software made for hospitals.  Do you think 
the company that made this software made it out of the goodness of their 
heart?  No.  They made it for money.

Right before my wife told me we needed to go to the hospital to see if 
everything is ok (it was!  we're back home), I was watching expensive 
cars go reaaaaallly fast around a racetrack.  The tv channel had a cool 
graph that shoew the RPMs of the engines based on the pitch of their 
sound.  Do you think that the company that made this software, made it 
for fun?  No.  They were paid for it.

Making pretty pictures out of sounds DOES make money.


> What people /actually/ want is somebody who can migrate their SQL
> Server database to Oracle, or find a way to run a legacy MS-DOS program
> on a shiny new server farm, or something like that.
>

While these might be in higher demand, there's sometimes demand for 
quirkier skills.

>>> If I can't convince anybody to hire me to write Java (pro tip: Java is
>>> popular), then nobody is ever going to hire me to write Haskell.
>>
>> Wrong, wrong, wrong. If you're competent in Haskell and that's what
>> they're looking for, then being one of a smaller number of developers who
>> write in a language that they're using is far, far better than being one
>> of the billion people (yes, hyperbole, but there are a /lot/ of Java
>> programmers out there) who can write code in Java.
>
> It puts me in a smaller pool of employees, but it also puts them in a
> smaller pool of employers.
>

Most entreprise grade software solution, from HR, to accounts 
payable/receivable, to inventory management, to industrial control 
system has some java-based doohickie somewhere.

>>>> If the language were that unpopular, it would cease to exist.
>>>
>>> For twenty years, it /was/ that unpopular.
>>
>> Yet it still exists.
>
> See, the thing is, when you're not making a product for profit, it
> doesn't /matter/ whether it's popular or not. It doesn't /need/ to be
> popular in order to exist.
>

It's not like every single web site out there uses java, or anything 
like that...

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