Since the provincial government is already giving huge tax credits to the video game industries, I'm wondering the government will be giving Amazon any financial incentives to implement that in Montréal.
A few of the main contributors are good friends of mine, so this post might be biased.
One of the nicest part of Nit in my opinion is their foreign function interface (FFI). It currently supports C and Java out of the box, and Objective-C and C++ are being worked on. I had the chance to work with the FFI a few years ago when it was still a student's master project, and I really had a blast with it. Some librairies such as libcurl[1], curses[2] and sdl[3] were implemented with this FFI.
Another great part of this language is a project being worked on by the same guy that built the FFI, and it's a cross-compiler for mobile applications called Gammit[4]. You write your app in Nit and compile to Java and Objective-C natively for Android and iOS application. The iOS part isn't ready yet, but the Android one is quite advanced with a few great examples such as a small Minecraft clone working with Google Cardboard and having multiplayer functionality.
I think that the two most important strategies are to actually pair with someone and ask questions after doing some research.
Being able to do some pair programming helped me to understand a new code base, in a language I never used before bits by bits. I could ask questions and actually helped on the issue. Asking questions is important, but as stated on the post, you should try to find to answer by yourself first. I'll actually time myself for 10 minutes, and if I can't find an answer, I'll just poke the most prominent person based on a git blame of the file that is related to my question.
This is my second week working on a Ruby codebase, without any prior experience with Ruby, or Rails (I've mostly been doing Python with Django and Pyramid for the past 3 years). I managed to get quickly up to speed this way.
Actually it's the province of Quebec and it is a tax credit for video game studios. The incentive was put in place around 1998-1999 and it is said to have been paying itself since 2005 or so from the influx of high paying job in the industry.
And winter isn't that bad, we only get -30C for a week or two in January!
I live in Québec and we have extremely low tuition fees. A 3 years program in any university will be around $1500CAD per semester, so $9000 in total. There are some variations between different universities, but of a few hundreds dollars only. It is the same tuition fee for engineering programs, political science or med school.
When my province came out of what we call the Révolution tranquille (Quiet Revolution), we had one of the lowest postsecondary education population rate in Canada. By creating a bunch of public universities with extremely low tuition fee, we have a whole different picture 40 years later with a well educated population.
That's not too terribly different from a lot of places in the US. Tuition for in-state students at public universities can run $2,000 to $3,000 USD per semester, and every penny (and then some extra) is covered by unsubsidized student loans which reasonable interest rates. After getting a 4 year degree, tuition did nothing to my pocket book and roughly 6 months after graduation I had to start paying $140/month, which is a tiny, especially in comparison to the higher salaries I got after graduation.
Without assuming too much, I'm not certain when you went to school, based on those numbers it seems a while ago.
2013-2014, average in-state tuition for 4-year public universities is just over 5,000 per semester, and that DOESN'T include housing, meals, books and other incidentals - it assumes you only pay for classes, nothing else.
Wyoming was the lowest average in 2013-14, at $4,404 for the year (2202 per semester), and under $9,000 when you include housing and meal plan - not bad, really.
Anymore, even with Pell, state grants and federal subsidized loans, students still have to come up with 1,000-3,000 per semester. So, that's where the unsubsidized and parent plus loans come in.
Source - my own institutional research at a community college for the last two years.
The main difference is that in Québec, tuition for all Universities is around that much. Tuition for a BA at McGill is $2,282.10 per year for local students, and McGill is arguably either the best or second-best school nationally.
For comparison, U of T in Ontario comes to around $6,000 p.a., or $13,000 for Engineering.
> There is no longer a prompt when websites use appcache.
Quite happy with this one. I had to develop an offline web-based application a few weeks ago and it really bugged me that I had to allow the application to use the offline cache.
IIRC most (all?) browsers prompt you when usage goes above a certain limit (5MB, I think). Firefox was the only one that asked you before the site saved a single byte.
Well, AppCache works just as an offline caching system for webpage assets (html files, images, javascripts, css, etc). So yeah it's technically possible to have a 5 GB offline cache, but the browser will need to download all the data first.
Aye. Those pesky visitors who block, purge and otherwise mess with my tracking cookies shall finally be profiled and analyzed. Great development indeed.
I am currently following a compiler class, and I must say that I am really amazed and impressed. For an assignment, we of course had to write an interpreter for our own mini language. The fealing you have after creating this interpreter was overwhelming.
For the lexer and parser, we used SableCC, an object oriented framework that generates a compiler in Java. I've never used anything else (yacc, lex, etc), so I can't compare the tool, but it provides a rich, useful and easy interface to use.
If only SableCC could compile its Java 1.7 grammar without blowing up in memory usage, I would love it even more. As it is, I used it in my research when I needed a parser. Can't recommend it enough!
kids these days, when I wrote my first compiler I had to write my own yacc equivalent, and parser
FYI: My generator allowed for dynamic resolution of shift/reduce conflicts which allows you to compile some languages yacc wont let you (languages that let you change the priority of operators for example)
Did something similar in 6800 assembly, left recursion of course limits you even more - but it helps fit that tiny tiny compiler into 2k.
I actually like yacc/bison - they're good for most purposes and deliberately designing a non-LALR (or more a non-LR) language on purpose (rather than because you don't know any better) is usually silly - you do need to 'get' the concept of building a parse tree from bottom up - assembling it from larger and larger snippets as you go
Oh and yacc/bison run about 10 times faster than equivalent I wrote 10 years before they existed so I'm not complaining
I tend to use the same bespoke lexical analyser I've used for years and hack it to suit - it includes support for symbol tables/etc and runs really fast, no need to reinvent the wheel
Quebec's law system doesn't allow that. At most he will be sentenced to a few months of detention in a youth facility. Once he will turn 18, everything will be cleared.
The article says
> " was sentenced to eight months in "open custody" at a rehabilitation home for youths, with another year spent on probation."
I think this is great, and I also think that it's great that your record is cleared at 18 (although, it's not really cleared, it's just not held against you). As a Canadian, I appreciate that rule. Kids make mistakes, and they deserve the opportunity to make things right and live a normal life (there are obviously exceptions to the rule).
This kid has skills. As others have mentioned, his parents should show him some white hat programs (although many have age restrictions), and get him internships. He has a lot of time ahead of him, and if handled correctly he can do really well for himself.
