>“I see JavaScript as the modern equivalent of BASIC. ...because of its simplicity, it is a great language for learning fundamental programming concepts.”
That's why Danny Boyle did such a good job. If the British media had been in charge of the ceremony in could have very easily been a cringeworthy ordeal featuring a cast of z-list celebrities dancing about. The inclusion of Tim Berners-Lee and the NHS section were excellent ideas.
Refuse collection is worthy and widespread but not really something the UK leads in I feel nor would it likely provide the visuals the designer was aiming for ...
I know the NHS is a huge sacred cow and is fetishised here in the UK, but I'm not sure the rest of the world would care how we pay our doctors and nurses.
a) Is "respect" really so important to you that you are willing to sacrifice a 25 year career? Surely if the pay is good and you enjoy that's all that matters.
b) By switching professions to a more "respected/cool" one do you not think you're just contributing to the problem of programmers not being taken seriously?
By using "cool", I get the impression that you're thinking more about respect from people outside work, rather than those you are working with. I think the article was talking about respect from the people you work with and work under, in the sense that if you are not respected, then you likely won't get paid what you are worth. From the point of view, point (a) is a contradiction - if you are not respected by the company you work for, the pay won't be good.
Whatever people say about "lawyers", people tend to have a lot of respect for their lawyers. It's lawyers as an aggregate that people tend to stereotype.
Part of the respect is a better pay, which is important to me as I have small children to care about. But the main reason is that so far I enjoy learning quantitative finance.
" contributing to the problem of programmers not being taken seriously"
I don't know. Maybe switching professions is an extreme thing, but gaining some knowledge in a specific domain (other than programming) is a good advice to every programmer.
Being respected in that sense is extremely important. First of all, people need to pay the bills, which you can't do if your work is viewed as a commodity and you're therefore in wage competition with 22-year-olds and outsourcing shops. Second and more importantly, for the types of people who learn programming to enjoy their jobs requires a certain amount of autonomy that isn't usually granted to non-managerial workers.
Don't look to Minecraft for an example of well written code, there are open source alternatives (Minetest in C++ springs to mind) that run rings around it. And Notch himself is well known for his inefficient magic-number and circular-reference ridden Java code. Although I can't attest to Jeb (who is now the lead dev)'s coding skill.
CS courses tend to explain what bit shifting is but not when you would use it.
For example you'll often see a lecturer drawing lots of 1s and 0s on a whiteboard to illustrate it but you're less likely to see a simple example Java program which uses shifting to get RGB values deconstructed.
So what's wrong with BASIC? It still exists...