Now you too can keep notes like you're playing [Wilmot's Warehouse](http://wilmotswarehouse.com/). Really reminds me of that game and how I floundered at creating a warehouse that was organized such that my spatial brain could actually remember where everything was.

Writing, honestly. I get absorbed into stringing words into entire worlds, complete with flowery descriptions and characters of my choosing. I find that I can write anywhere, be it on laptop or paper, so it affords me more movement than programming.

It's not that I want something more creative than programming, I consider programming to be equal parts art and skill. I want something more flexible, not tied to a company that requires me to work in ways that I don't find productive (looking at you stand ups). However, for now I'll be following the money and writing on the side, although it does get draining to split most of my day's effort into two creative professions.

I like to write too, but most of non-fiction authors don't really make $$$.

If you look at some of the comments condemning him for not backing up his preferences with statistics it makes sense that he should preface his questions with something to provide levity. I don't know why programming communities are so touchy about their tools, particularly JavaScript frameworks. It must be a sort of buyer's satisfaction to convince themselves that they made the correct time investment.

Ah, got to love the subscription pop-up with a close button that doesn't work. A timeless web design principle.

Aside from that, when will we get past the requirement for data structure knowledge for positions that center around web design? Data structure knowledge is available at my fingertips throughout the work day. Why must I memorize implementation boilerplate for an interview?

Is it 20% to generate something like this, which balances parentheses without syntax? If so that is seriously surprising.

  function getBalance (parenStr) {
      var count = 0;
      for (var i = 0; i < parenStr.length; i++) {
          if (parenStr[i] === '(') { count++; }
          else if (parenStr[i] === ')') { count--; }
      }
      return count === 0;
  }

Most programmers that have any business getting hired should be able to do that. The problem is that when you interview people, you don't get a good sample of the population: The worse you are, the more interviews you have to do, because you get declined a whole lot.

In a previous job, a question like that would not even get a 20% pass rate, but it also have a lot to do with where we were sourcing our employees: If you are talking to generic contracting firms that employ people in giant, generic behemoths, you WILL get a lot of terrible candidates from them. From the powerpoint architect that hasn't written a line of code in weeks, to people that just had a job at big megacorp, and did the minimum possible not to get fired (and, in some of those corps, that's really little).

It got that bad that there were employer patterns that we considered resume black flags: Spent one year in MasterCard? Well, they hire pretty much anyone for a year, and they just don't get renewed, so we will understand that experience as 'you weren't good enough to work there, and most people there suck'.

wouldn't that just see if there are an equal amount of parentheses, not whether or not they're balanced?

For example, your code would return true for ")())((" even though nothing is balanced. I was thinking more of a stack; push to stack only on opens, pop on closes, if we get a close before an open is on the stack, then we return false.

But I only thought about it for a few minutes so it's rather rudimentary.

I agree. The Clojure syntax comparisons are probably due to the popularity of that language, compared to Scheme or other Lisp dialects. Perhaps a comment section in addition to the annotations would provide more insightful discussions.

Yeah to many of us old timers, it feels strange when new FP afficionados only know about Clojure and Haskell like languages, without realising that we already were doing FP for a few generations even if the languages never became mainstream.

On the other hand, it is great that those people jump in with their new ideas and help the community go forward.

Does Fermat's Library offer a printer-friendly version of the paper?