My initial reaction when hearing the soundtrack (I was a conference attendee) was to walk over to the stage to see if that was really Scooter playing. The lyrics just didn't seem nearly as offensive as most people apparently find them in light of this clearly being either the actual Scooter or someone copying them - I'm assuming the latter, because the lyrics seem a bit too juvenile even for Scooter, but knowing the band and their typical over-the-top raver campiness certainly mitigated the offensiveness of the incident. It was still fantastically embarrasing to watch, but I didn't feel especially offended as a woman at a tech conference.
The stage, btw, was in the middle of the conference venue, and this performance kicked off the conference party, just after the talks had finished for the day. The atmosphere in the room as it was happening was mostly one of embarrassed disbelief that Microsoft's PR department had apparently stereotyped the lot of us as tasteless brogrammers - with the exception of a few already drunk brogrammers clearly enjoying themselves in front of the stage.
Just to clarify: That atrocity wasn't organised by the conference, they'd just agreed to give Microsoft (their biggest sponsor) the stage for a bit to do their big Azure announcement. There's certainly a lesson for conference organisers in there about how much you let your sponsors get involved in the conference, but what happened on stage was still all Microsoft's fault.
Also just to clarify: As a woman who was actually present in the room when Microsoft decided to jump the shark, I don't feel especially offended by this (with the exception of the line about Lea Verou, which is beyond creepy). As a developer, though, I'm deeply offended that someone in Microsoft's marketing department could imagine we'd go for this kind of trash. That performance speaks volumes about the developer stereotypes sales people nurture, and that is especially offensive coming from a company like Microsoft, where you'd think company culture should perhaps lean a little more towards respecting the people who create the actual value the company thrives on.
Thank you for speaking up. Just as it's crucial that women not be silent when being excluded from tech, it's just as (if not more) imperative we hear that you're not feeling discriminated against. Especially when there is a rallying cry from men saying that you should be, or that we should hold Microsoft responsible for this great sexist faux pas.
This community is overcorrecting in a bad way and starting to identify sexism where it isn't. Usually, women don't correct this assumption. Please keep doing so. I hate that the definition of the word "sexist" is starting to evolve to mean "offensive".
Oh, don't get me wrong, there was a fair bit of sexism in that performance, in the sense that whoever wrote it clearly has a very specific idea of what his audience is like: socially inept males. You know, developers. I was just too busy being offended as a developer being faced with proof of what sales people think of us to consider being offended as a woman, but the sexism is definitely there and should be addressed.
Some of the details I've heard described as sexist, though - like how the dancers are apparently "scantily clad" - seem to be more the result of mob rage than any form of rational thought.
Yes, but not all offensiveness is sexism. This, for example, offends me as a software developer, and as someone who appreciates the effort the real guys developing Azure are putting in to supporting node. I, however, do not get the sense of being discriminated against based upon my gender. All the women I know who've seen this video think it's incredibly lame, but not particularly sexist.
I do agree :-) but IMO, the video was sexist. The point being made by jsprinkles is that all forms of offensiveness appear to being called "sexist" - he said "I hate that the definition of the word 'sexist' is starting to evolve to mean 'offensive'." which is what I'm responding to!
Because you can't automatically re-indent code. In a language like C or Javascript, I can just copy, paste and move chunks of code around and have pristine re-indentation with a keypress. In Haskell, Python, or Coffeescript I have to be very careful and have to manually re-indent if I want to move code or change scopes.
Whitespace is much better left as a purely aesthetic feature, IMO.
In the case of CoffeeScript, the appeal, in my mind, is that it's _not_ a brand new language, it's just an improved syntax and some extra language features over what is essentially plain old JavaScript. Anyone who already grasps the fundamental concepts of JavaScript can master CoffeeScript in a matter of hours. Of course, the syntax is a matter of taste, and one might prefer something like JavaScript 1.8, which comes with the same new language features as CoffeeScript, and more. But some of us (and I suspect we come mostly from Python and Ruby) prefer the concise syntax of CoffeeScript over all those curly braces and semicolons.
Well, its true the syntax of CoffeeScript is trivial, and coming from Python background myself I find it very easy to comprehend. But I also find Javascript fairly easy to work with and to be honest I rather work on my target language without the abstraction of another (at least in the case of JavaScript). Take the javascript issues covered in the presentation - they are not hard to work with as long as you treat them as part of the Javascript package (for example, var your local variables to make them local. not hard to make into a habit).
Oh, I'm absolutely not trying to bash Brendan. The fact that he managed to produce anything at all in the short time he had is profoundly impressive on its own, and the core of genius that exists in between the Bad Parts is worthy of all kinds of admiration. Also, the way I understand it, he originally intended to make a Scheme implementation for the browser - unsuccessfully, alas, but it still suggests he may well be the most amazing man in web history, even if he does know how to use a razor.
The point of the JS bashing in the slides is that the Bad Parts do exist, and CoffeeScript does a great job of routing around them, as does Strict Mode.
The stage, btw, was in the middle of the conference venue, and this performance kicked off the conference party, just after the talks had finished for the day. The atmosphere in the room as it was happening was mostly one of embarrassed disbelief that Microsoft's PR department had apparently stereotyped the lot of us as tasteless brogrammers - with the exception of a few already drunk brogrammers clearly enjoying themselves in front of the stage.