checking if a list is empty

[Hans Georg Schaathun]

On Thu, 12 May 2011 01:49:05 -0400, D'Arcy J.M. Cain
  <darcy at druid.net> wrote:
:  That's not programming.  That's using a canned app that a programmer
:  wrote that takes your unstructured input and does something useful with
:  it.  Spreadsheets are a primitive example of that.  Google is a more
:  advanced example.

You are really trying to defend the programmers' status as a modern
day priesthood, mastering a mystic art completely inaccessible to
those not initiated.  

For ages, the literate elite deliberately made the language cryptic
to protect their art and their status.  Some programmers seem to do
the same.

The fact is that it is not black and white.  There are programmers
with domain expertise, programmers without domain expertise, 
domain experts with decent programming skills, domain experts with
rudimentary programming skills, monolingual programmers, domain
experts without programming skills, polyglot programmers etc.

Only very narrow-purpose applications can be created by one of
these groups on their own, and to collaborate their abilities
must be overlapping.

-- 
:-- Hans Georg