If I sit down in the couch, and move my focus to the TV and my brainpattern implies expectation of watching the TV, it should turn itself on.

If I sit down in the morning it should have learnt based on all previous mornings that I chose the morning news that I want to watch news.

If I sit down with a bowl of popcorn it should open the movies selection and let me take over using an interface from there.

If I sit down with my girlfriend it should filter the movie selection based on our previously recorded viewing history so we get the best movies for us both — if its just me it can hide all those romance chick flicks.

If I sit down wearing my Liverpool jersey and Liverpool is in fact playing a game or is mentioned in any program description it should default to showing me that.

Theres a whole lot that can be read from the environment of the device, quite a bit is technological feasible as of today (identifying a person by means of a camera and keeping track of viewing habits) and some that are slightly further out (reading your mental activity to determine that looking at the TV meant you intended to watch it.

A big thing here for me is automated personalization I think, this is a very viable next step.

Consistency in dereferencing is very important. empty() should at some point be deprecated, but fixing this erratic behavior for now is good imo.

The default value for method arguments is a shockingly bad idea for a new feature, it only supports the old, bashed upon, code quality that have been PHPs greatest legacy problem. If anything in this alley I'd like to see named arguments somehow.

I'm not so sure about property getter/setters as I find the syntax a bit awkward, all while magic methods lets you create getter/setter based APIs.

What's the deal with empty()? I've never used it myself but found people at the new place I work do use it.

Like the article said, you can't use it with function calls because empty() itself is a construct of the language and not a function. So, empty(someFunc()) is an error. You'd have to put the return value of someFunc() in a variable and test it for emptiness, or do something like if (0 == strlen(someFunc())) { /* .. */ } which is overly verbose and not fast.

For me this is a 100% deal breaker. I can understand the desire to dress up checkboxes which doesn't work great as native controls but a lot should be doable just by wrapping it in some custom stuff. Without form elements it has not compatibility with existing solutions, you can't use this to add some interactive components to an existing form and expect to native-submit that form.

We've started to see a lot of component-izing Backbone, and more will come for sure.

I'm dabbling with some of the same in our codebase, and we were meant to release a grid component that I now fear has grown too big and hairy.

Not so sure on the idea of breaking it up this far; Buttons and checkboxes are single html-elements, so if you follow this approach fully you get a lot of views for a complex app — that'll be a performance issue.

I've thrown some hackathons at work and this is the model we always use. Friday after work + dinner we brainstorm and figure out what to do and then we might prototype a bit. Saturday we meet again refreshed and hack, we dont stay up to late and might even go for beers. Then we meet for another 4-5 hours on sunday to make a wrap of it.

Personally I can enjoy both the 24-hour/whatever-hour stretch and the weekend-with-rest style, but I find the first one to require working with someone with whom we feed energy to each other so we can maintain progress — I've just met one such person in my life and he doesn't live in the same country as me anymore. So in the end I prefer the weekend style hackathon now as well.

I would look really hard for any way to even just release a single feature of it — just get _anything_ released and "working". You need to reinspire yourself here, and one hell of a good way of doing that is being pushed by peoples feedback. I know for myself that at the point you apparently are at its very easy to take a break and think you'll come back to it later — big mistake. If you can't muster the energy to release something now then chances are you wont ever.

Try to release something, gather feedback and use that loop as a motivation for doing minor, really minor, fixes and improvements. If you can manage that you can pick up new steam and in the same time learn more about what direction you should be taking.

While that is true they now encourages people to submit patches as github pull requests: https://wiki.php.net/vcs/gitworkflow

I'm curious if there is a higher percentage of programmers than the population in general who are bilinguals. After all programming requires us to learn new languages for talking to the machine, there could be a correlation in ability to learn machine languages.

Could someone make a poll here?

I speak norwegian and english fluently and dont translate in my head when using english, but I'm currently in and around central/south america and learning spanish, and when speaking spanish I at the moment translate from english so probably a long way to go before I could consider me trilingual. Whats interesting about languages is that just like programming languages two different languages are not equally adept for explaining the same situations.

I don't feel the analogy is entirely accurate. Imagine having to learn 5 "if" statements, or 10 ways to say "++". In a spoken conversation, you don't get to look up the API docs if you forgot something. However, most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

However, I do feel there's some similarities between constructing a possibly-correct sentence and seeing if it actually works, and constructing some possibly-correct code and seeing if it compiles.

> most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

Reading English is a smallish subset of fluency in English, i.e. being able to also speak, listen to, and write English. Technical specs often use simple written English, relying on example code. So I'm not sure if what non-English programmers do can be called "bilingualism".

I have started the slow road of learning Norwegian now that I live in Norway. I too have found myself wondering if a link exists between programmers and desire and ease to learn a new language.

My Norwegian, is not good, yet daily as I discover I have remembered the "methods" or the "function names" to piece together sentences it becomes easier and allows me to focus on the code.

A replacement for email should be a lot smarter and I think what pg hints at is pretty much the same as you're saying here, but broader. If I receive an invitation to something, it should end up in my calendar and whatever gadget I have on me should notify me and ask me if i wanted to participate.

If i receive a receipt it should be stored and analysed. For example if the item had a 30 day guarantee it should ask me before that if I am satisfied with it.

If i receive a shipment notice it should automatically tell me on the day it arrives and alert me when I'm in proximity of the post office that I need to pick it up.

Actually I would want almost all of my emails to be read solely by a computer so that all of these emails I didn't even see. I don't need to see that I've bought something — I know that! I need to be told when its in my post box though, or if its a license key I need my computer to pop up a question if I should apply that license.

So a good startup idea here would be something that took your email, filtered it and just removed all of the receipts/etc messages from your view, while keeping it neatly organized somewhere else for the future.

That's exactly what I'm planning to build! I'm not sure if I should go hybrid or all-in.

By hybrid I mean that people could receive regular human-readable emails, but senders could include a small url or tag that links to the semantic information (it could be an event invitation, receipt, valid email confirmation, password changing, task proposal, marketing offer, flight information, etc.).

The "smart" email client could then automatically interpret semantic emails, and act accordingly. It would also hide those emails, and only show you the relevant notification.

I think the best ideas improves first world issues while fixing third world problems. Energy generation for example, if you managed to figure out how to generate power/propulsion using a cheap and small physical object and a renewable resource you both solves first world issues and third world problems.

Education needs to catch up with the world in the first world, but if you do that in an async manner online then you can at the same time solve the problem with education in africa.