On the Nature of Things | Forum

NLP isn't the next big thing. It's the current big thing. In the last decade, tremendous progress has been made, but this is a field that requires a PhD and years of experience to make a dent in. 'Big data' is a toss up. It will be valuable in some cases but in most applications, it is just a bunch of meaningless noise.

As for Azrael's question about what to tell employers who demand unrealistic amounts of experience: smile and nod when they ask you if you're qualified. If they want 10 years of Ruby, don't say you have 10 years of Ruby experience on your resume, but say you're a Ruby expert and talk up some project you did. Ruby is yesteryear's stuff anyway. It's a horrible, horrible language. Last time I looked into web development, node.js was taking off.

Zack Morris wrote:NLP isn't the next big thing. It's the current big thing. In the last decade, tremendous progress has been made, but this is a field that requires a PhD and years of experience to make a dent in. 'Big data' is a toss up. It will be valuable in some cases but in most applications, it is just a bunch of meaningless noise.

You are right about NLP, it's big in business intelligence. As for the thing about Big Data being a bunch of noise, that's complete nonsense. I am involved with two startups that are data driven and there is TONS of work, TONS of interest and the coffers are beginning to open wide.

As for Azrael's question about what to tell employers who demand unrealistic amounts of experience: smile and nod when they ask you if you're qualified. If they want 10 years of Ruby, don't say you have 10 years of Ruby experience on your resume, but say you're a Ruby expert and talk up some project you did. Ruby is yesteryear's stuff anyway. It's a horrible, horrible language. Last time I looked into web development, node.js was taking off.

LOL, lots of programmers still think Ruby is 'the sexiest language ever made'.

ruby is the other python - i dabbled in it but saw no reason to learn yet another scripting language as im mostly doing c# with smatterings of c anyway.

they both represent "latest and cleanest" implementations of a scripting language and dont carry the messy adhoc growth and legacy support that turns the others into ugly pigs.

and zack is right about node.js and the other new template systems for javascript - speaking to all the cool young kiddies on irc who do web devel the next big thing is avoiding server side hassles at all and keeping things in the cloud.

noddy wrote:ruby is the other python - i dabbled in it but saw no reason to learn yet another scripting language as im mostly doing c# with smatterings of c anyway.

they both represent "latest and cleanest" implementations of a scripting language and dont carry the messy adhoc growth and legacy support that turns the others into ugly pigs.

and zack is right about node.js and the other new template systems for javascript - speaking to all the cool young kiddies on irc who do web devel the next big thing is avoiding server side hassles at all and keeping things in the cloud.

Yep, we use node.js daily.