I don't know, but Boston is C++. Its mixture of hacker culture, hyper-IQ academia, and classical puritan social values is sort of like implementing closures with template metaprogramming and special #ifdefs everywhere for compiler backward compatibility.
It's puritan social values plus academic liberalism plus nerds. It is backward compatible but not strictly a superset.
Comparing cities to programming languages thread GO!
It's pro-intellectual, but it's also a bit stuffy and introverted.
If you like the quiet life, lots of academic options, and very tame social gatherings then Boston is for you. If you like excitement, extraverted social culture, and lots of new experiences then I'd look at SF.
Boston has some plusses: it's a walking city... possibly the only true walking city in the country (of any size). You do not need a car. It's ridiculously safe for a big urban area. Bostonians' idea of a bad neighborhood is one without a Starbucks in eye-shot. It's very economically healthy and has a lot of good high paying techie jobs.
But some of that could be said about SF too... just not the walking city part. (Well, SF proper can be handled without a car, but all the techie stuff is in the valley which is a car-centric suburb.)
SF is a great place to build a startup, but a lousy place to live. I never felt like I could really be myself there (despite meeting hundreds of supposedly like-minded people).
Bostonians are far less friendly on the surface, but man, you can really get to know them. People are nerdy, intellectual, informed (and not just about tech), opinionated, and largely quite sane.
The pace of the city is slower, too, in a way that I appreciate. When I go to a tech event here, I'll often meet someone and spend an hour locked in conversation with them. That kind of deep, engaged conversation never happened in SF, where people are perpetually on the go, and cutting from one thing to the next.
Outside of work, Boston (and by this I specifically mean Cambridge and Somerville -- or "Camberville" as we call it) is the best place in the country to be a nerd. The place is filled with swing dancers, LARPers, grad students, cult movie screenings, comic book and game shops, and quite possibly more CTY alumni than any other city.
Simultaneously, we've got a lot of general culture, too -- lectures, theater, good food, and so on.
Stuffy and introverted? Sure, a bit. But you can get past that quickly, and discover a wonderful place to live.
Look at me, i took a 1957 strat and turned into a guitar hero controller. Call me luddite but that's just sad. And if you really care about technology, the organ is the real wonder.
What's especially sad is that pipe organs (not often from the 14th century, but still old and incredible ones) are being gutted daily to make way for digital music systems. It ends up being less expensive for churches, and frees up more seats for theaters where ranks of organ pipes take up a lot of prime space in the wings.
I'm all for digital music, I even make my own, but it's depressing to think that there isn't really a home for a dislocated organ unless you're an obsessive tinkerer with oodles of spare space on hand. Fortunately those tinkerers do exist in little pockets around the globe.
As the pipe organs replaced orchestras, the digital music system replaces the pipe organ. There will still be organ players, just as there are still orchestras. With modern electronic 'organs' allows a person to recreate even more complicated scores from a single console. In dragon pajamas, if that's your thing. e.g. http://youtu.be/f_5lYvdwgwg
We have a number of phenomenal pipe organs in Philadelphia, and I've been lucky enough to wander around behind the scenes of a couple of them. The various voices are represented by what are essentially one-note versions of the instruments they represent. Trumpets, flutes, oboes, and so forth, it was fascinating. It's very likely that the best of the best organs will remain for decades, if not centuries to come, but lesser examples of the art form will inevitably fall away as interest moves on to newer instruments and performance styles. As common as it is to lament the loss of music appreciation, music of all eras is seeing more authentic performance and attention now than perhaps ever, you just have to know where to look. I saw a 14 minute long Renaissance choir piece performed by an amazing group of chamber singers in Lawrence, Kansas earlier this year, it's probably been centuries since anyone has heard that piece, and likely never performed by singers as good as these.
If you want to see pipe organs stick around, don't just post about it online, be sure to go to where they play music on a large organ and look into who's helping keep it up.
Anyhow, the chipophone performances made me feel nostalgic, and now I'm listening to the Minibosses Megaman 2 Medley, louder than I should be. Good post
Work on an example page or design that conveys the essence of what you are trying to create. This core design prototype will help you focus on what distnguishes your project and can be used to get some early feedback. I strongly support youdigging into this project and forgetting about your age. You'll learn more from this than you can imagine regardless of its success.
While I see value in the overall message, I think the author sets up a false dichotomy that somehow suggests there's a gulf between creative invention and pragramtic diligence. This is often something I run into - this notion that creativity equals flights of fancy, non-realist, ungrounded. On the contrary, creating, is in my mind, the wisdom to use the opportunities and resources close by, whether internal or external, to be productive in ways that exceed beyond what would be easy. Creativity and results can not be separated.
The author refers to creativity as thaught in creativity seminars to BMAs, project managers etc. He elaborates on the concept as used in these classes.
Yeah, I think there's this odd view that creativity is ex nihilo, an unexplainable intercession from the cosmos that disrupts the usual ways of thinking. Since an area I care about is creativity in AI systems, we very much hope that isn't true, because simulating intercessions from the cosmos on computers is hard. ;-)
Although it's got all sorts of things I disagree with, a decent overview of, "can we nail down creativity more specifically than just 'flash of inspiration'?", and in particular how it ties in with "normal" problem solving, is Margaret Boden's book: http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Mind-Myths-Mechanisms/dp/0415...
Good point. The wisdom to use opportunities is underestimated I think. There is a lot of creativity in building something good with the tools available. I say good instead of new, because for developers the result will be something you've seen before. But under the hood, there is something that makes it quicker, more stable and more easier to use.
Sometimes creativity is not so fancy or easy to see. I think the author is talking about the fancy.
Hanson is distinguising creativity as that flash of inspiration, that occasional lucky bit of genius from the humdrum of tiny, everyday improvements in process.
Or
A good idea and $2 will get you a cup of coffee, a good idea and great execution will make you rich, famous, or whatever else it is you want.
I tend to feel this was more about stopping the potential for a move by large numbers of developers to platforms that allow targeting multiple devices with one codebase diminishing the advantage apple enjoys in having exclusive Apps.
