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However I agree with you that practicing scales is excellent for building up your "typing" ability, whether it be on the guitar or on the piano to play fast licks. Same thing with the circle of fifth to identify which mode a particular song is in, and to be able identify which key/scale/chord you choose to solo on.

But this is more philosophical than technical - you learn rules so that you can break them.

Even scales are derived from other scales "hacked" into (diatonic => pentatonic scale, the "monkey-wrench" notes are what gives it a bluesy feel). Some songs have intentionally mismatched notes from a wrong scale that clash over a chord, to evoke an eerie feeling from the listener. Similarly, a performing musician never stops playing/strumming if he/she doesn't hit the right note or finger-down a whole entire chord, you keep going on. "There's never a wrong note, only a opportunity" - Miles Davis. Even if you are a straight-edge classical pianist, you have the artistic freedom to perform your piece with accents and timbre in the constraints of the tempo and melody of the sheet music.

Similarly when you program, some people like to take time to define their interfaces and draw out the class diagrams to figure out how all of the pieces fit together. I personally, like to open up NotePad++ and start typing the first thing that comes to mind, and run compile, probably get a bunch of compile errors, so I go back and correct them and run compile again and get errors again, and so forth until I get one piece working, and I build off that piece the second piece. Sure you need to learn typing, before you program. I'm just saying that for someone who's motivated to express themselves, whether that be through programming or music, that motivation makes them get through the technical barrier, not that the other way around.

I strongly disagree that it is worse to steal something than it is to make a copy of it (EDIT: when doing so is a violation of someone else's right to sell it), especially when the "something" in question is digital data. Unlike a painting, a copy of digital data is functionally equivalent to the master - neither of them can be called a forgery, nor does one have more or less value than the other. Additionally, the ability to produce copies of data is not a talent or a skill. It is available to everyone.

This brings us to the center of the "information is free" argument: digital data is essentially worthless, because it can be copied infinitely for essentially no cost. The only way to associate value with it is to make it artifically scarce, i.e. control copying.

Information may want to be free, but the people who produce it want to be paid. The people who take the time and expend the effort to arrange or gather data often do so with the intention of selling copies for money, or with the intention of keeping one or a very limited number of copies for themselves (such as the source code for your new startup. If piracy's OK, I hope you don't mind me grabbing a copy and starting my own business.)

Sure there are users out there without JS. There are still some IE6 users out there. But in most cases you need just look at your target: If you build a SaaS service you probably focus on the early adopters, first movers or whatever you call them.

Old browser or obscure security settings are a niche. If your product focus on that niche - great, consider it in your technical setup.

After attending a horrible freelance project as a ruby/rails guy in 2009 I finally made a decision for all of my hopefully upcoming projects:

* focus on the early adopters who may understand your product without a big introduction. these people usually have the best and modern browsers available.

* optimize for Safari/Mac, Firefox and maybe Chrome

* optimize only for iPhone

* forget the rest until you have 100 paying customers. Then decide again. (100 is just a number, maybe 50, maybe 1000 — you decided)

BUT: If you know for sure, that most of your taget customers are using IE6/have no javascript support/whatever: Support it. But I doubt it.

And don't think that your startup will have the same % amounts of browsers/settings like the big sites on the web. Also keep in mind that people need to be able and willing to spend money. I can imagine someone without javascript and cookies will never (be able to) enter her/his payment information over the web into a form.

They'll be very conservative and in my opinion it's not worth the time to try to "convert" them.

TL;DR

I have to run Windows servers, use Microsoft's IDE, etc. What if Server 2012 is absolutely terrible (hey, it's happened before). What if some insanely huge security hole is discovered in IIS (again...). You're hosed. In the land of open-source you can just do a 15 minute down-time to switch to nginx (or 10+ other options), set up some new servers running a different distro, whatever.

It's just too worrying to purposefully dig yourself into a hole where you live and die by your vendor. It's not as if their products are all that great, either. I certainly wouldn't want to develop on Windows, and I'd be even less happy about forcing potential employees to do so.

1. Its NOT an Authorize vs Braintree issue. Your gateway doesn't care at all. It has everything to do with your Merchant Service Provider.

2. Different merchant service providers have different rules. For reference, Cybersource (a Merchant Service Provider, and Authorize.net's parent company) does not allow you to take a credit card payment at the beginning of a software trial period. They require you to give the trial, THEN ask for the cc info and begin the recurring payments immediately after taking the information.

Cybersource claims that this is what they are supposed to do: when you take cc info online to charge, you pass that information to visa/mastercard/whatever credit card company, who then authorizes the transaction. There is an auth code associated with this transaction, and the auth code expires eventually.

They've told me that the rules from visa/mastercard are fairly clear that you're supposed to charge once you take the info, but some Merchant Service Providers aren't very strict on that.