It's another absurd attempt of the publishers to control everything and everyone. Unfortunately, this is technically cheap now. But as I talked to a publisher recently, it's increasingly more difficult to regulate all the copyrights of anything anyone wants to publish. They dig make a trap only to end in it themselves. As publishing any content becomes too hard, publishers themselves will switch to alternatives. I think it's a good opportunity for CC and PD content to expand and become mainstream.
I know exactly why I get rejected: for having Masters in Economics (read: Applied Maths), not CS, for not knowing by heart all normal forms till the 6th, for using but not knowing the formal definition of Dependency injection pattern.
I see how it works on the other side. I was the first guy at a new project in a wealthy company. We needed a genius, and we hired one from the first try. He solved all the Python puzzles I gave, and knows a lot just out of university.
The problem is that we need to extend the app, which is boring and a bit repetitive, which takes discipline, not rare talent. So we see such guys coming. They learned Python on their own, out of joy, don't know many things. But our boring work will be a challenge to them. So, why not hire?
My superstar fellow says they're retards, the management asks to not bother even calling them back, and I have no strong point in their favor.
I got a decent programming job only at 28. Though I coded a few programs since I was 17, only at 26 I was assumed at a "developer" position, as PHP junior dev. Then learned Python and used it wherever possible, and at 28 got full-time Python developer job, now I'm 30 and work as Python Team Leader.
Several years ago things like lambda functions, scope and closures were weird and hard to comprehend for me. It took time, but after all you can become fluent.
As I see now, it doesn't take as much brilliant mind as it takes just "flight log hours" to handle complex problems. A guy who won a national programming olympiad (Russia) told me he won by "outsitting" the others, ie. he took more time to prepare and knew more cases. Although it was a disappointment for him (that problems became all the same and boring), it's a nice surprise for us: we (not-CS-graduates) can eventually cover the "flight hours" gap.
This makes me wonder why Brits prefer to courageously make jokes at Putin's regime (with which I'm fine, they're deserved), instead of just going to the Big Ben palace and giving a boot to the same kind of governors sitting there.
When I wrote in PHP (and it lasted 10 years just to let you know), I would say exactly the same. PHP tasted better than, say, C++ Builder.
As we use to say in my country, "never tried things sweeter than carrot". I mean that was about me: I didn't know better things existed.
All that is done better in Python:
5. You don't need many of functions you use in PHP, for instance, _real_escape_string is not needed when you can do cursor.run("SQL Query param1=? AND param2=?", [param1, param2])
6. You can get help on functions in coding shell:
>>> help(open) # help on file opening function
or even
>>> open? # in IPython
With that I look into online or PDF docs quite rarely.
7. That's even faster in Python: you try things out in the shell, then save the shell session (IPython) and copy the code you need into the working file.
Moreover, while in PHP I was adding var_dump's everywhere, reloading a page 10 times before reaching the source of a bug, in Python I just do $ python -m ipdb same_script.py and have the debugging shell in the place I need, and it takes a minute of two to find the source of a bug.
They'll have to invent something really new or have an uphill battle, because GitHub now relies a lot on network externality. In simple words, it is the effect that you chose a popular network for the number of projects on it. I do submit bug reports to projects on BitBucket and GitHub, and not to private bugzillas/tracs (I'm tired of registering and confirming every time.)
I can see that as I comprehend English more, tend to start being more offencive in it. 8 years ago I started Italian and now I know a deal of swear words, but not sure if I can produce them when, say, an Italian drops a thing on my foot. By the moment I can say something offencive, the peron will have 1-2 seconds to apologise.
I'd say new languages really disarm you. I can barely argue in Spanish, least to say an offencive word (although I've seen the famous Tano Pasman, el hincha del River), and not at all in Portugese.
Also, isn't it curious: we all know a bunch of swear words in our languages. We get to know them at early age, probably as soon as we have a need for them. But it takes years to get exposed to obscenities in a foreign language: books don't print them. Dictionaries often omit them. Radio and podcats also deliver correct content.
It's another absurd attempt of the publishers to control everything and everyone. Unfortunately, this is technically cheap now. But as I talked to a publisher recently, it's increasingly more difficult to regulate all the copyrights of anything anyone wants to publish. They dig make a trap only to end in it themselves. As publishing any content becomes too hard, publishers themselves will switch to alternatives. I think it's a good opportunity for CC and PD content to expand and become mainstream.