Episode 45 – Needs and News with Sara

Sara Ines Calderon is back once again! But, this time, she and Arsalan will be discussing the ins and outs of some web articles among other things. Have you ever stumbled upon an article on the web about programming and wondered just how much of it was backed up by cold, hard industry facts and how much might have been researched by someone less versed in tech? Well, now you can wonder no more.

Arsalan and Sara have chosen three articles that highlight today’s episode. They will talk about the content of the article versus the facts and statistics behind it. After all, how and where you get your information is just as important as the information itself. A well-informed developer can reap the rewards of staying on top of all the new trends and technologies, but taking the advice from someone who is less skilled or qualified in the tech industry topics could leave you with setbacks if you aren’t careful.

Sara Ines Calderon’s Bio:

Sara Inés Calderón is a journalist and writer who lives in Texas and California. Follow her on Twitter @SaraChicaD.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today I have Sara Ines Calderon. Sara, how are you today?

Sara: Hey, I’m doing real good. Thanks for having me back.

Arsalan: Yes. You’ve been on the show a couple of times already. People can check it out by searching for Sara Ines Calderon on www.mentoringdevelopers.com or Google it. You’ll find it. Today, we’re not going to talk about you and how you got your first and second jobs. We’re just going to talk about some stuff that’s going on in the world. There are some interesting articles that I’ve discovered and were going to talk about that. We’re also going to talk about some interesting things that I am doing. Then, you have some questions and were going to answer that and let’s see how that goes.

Arsalan: the first article that I want to discuss is “The 2016 Top Programming Languages.” It was a list that was published by IEEE. Did you read that? What did you think?

Sara: I did read it. I think it’s interesting. These lists are always kind of curious to me because I think they are flawed, depending on who is putting them together. Second, I think that all these lists are pertinent to different people in different ways. Obviously, if you’re talking about startups, finance, the medical industry, or the media, you’re going to be skewing these ratings differently. If you’re talking about educational technology versus corporate technology versus government technology, there’s going to be a variety of different contexts in there, but that’s what I thought.

Sara: It looks like these traditional, tried-and-true; object-oriented technologies are here to stay. You have C sharp, Java, and PHP. Then you also have other languages that are more geared to startups like the newer JavaScript, Ruby, and Go. One thing that we were discussing was that R was moving up, which I find super interesting for R and Python given the resurgence of data science, which I think is pretty cool. We’re actually looking for a data scientist at my job right now. I’ve never really given it much thought, but it’s a lot of skill to be a data scientist. Those are my thoughts. What do you think?

Arsalan: I think this that IEEE listing is very interesting because they are not trying to find an objective way of ranking programming languages. I think there is no objective way. But, some people do that. Some people try to look at references for that particular programming language on GitHub.com. If it’s on GitHub, then they can just do a search for how many projects in Ruby, for example, and then they have a number that they can quantify their popularity. But that’s not really accurate because not every project is on GitHub.

Arsalan: What they say is that there are certain presets that you can use and that there is a formula. So, the default preset is intended to echo the interests of the average IEEE member. So, in the eyes of the average IEEE member, the highest or most popular language is C., Well, what do IEEE members do?

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