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Here is some relatively startling news: a new study reveals that many college students put potential employers’ social network policies above their financial compensation when deciding what job to take.

The study focused on 2,800 college students and young adults between the ages of 21-29. One in three of those asked claimed that a flexible social media policy was more important to them than financial compensation.

The upshot is that, apparently, the young people would rather have the opportunity to play on Facebook during the workday than to get paid more.

As Alyssa Rosengarden notes, many of those entering the job market have, for their entire (more-or-less-)adult lives, interacted constantly with their friends and families through social networking sites. So, in one sense, it is no surprise that they aren’t prepared to relegate this interaction to the 5-10pm hours.

It is hard to say whether, on balance, we should take this as good news. On the one hand, it’s nice that young people aren’t prioritizing scads of money over regular interpersonal connection. On the other hand, it seems like what the survey has really uncovered is that college students would prefer a job at which they’re not expected to work all day, and while that’s hardly anything new, it’s not the most attractive thing I’ve ever heard, either.

At any rate, it certainly comes to me as news. Perhaps to you as well.

In case you haven’t heard, Google is in the middle of launching a new language for structured web programming: Dart. This is a hugely ambitious undertaking, the goal of which, according to a fascinating leaked internal memo about Google’s strategy, is “to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform”.

This, I think, has the possibility of being a big deal. Javascript was written very quickly back in 1995, and was almost immediately adopted very widely (it nicely filled a programming vacuum), despite the fact that it may be, as Robert Cailliau (one of the inventors of the World Wide Web) suggests, “the most horrible kluge in the history of computing”.

Histrionics aside, it seems clear enough that there are some significant problems with the state of affairs as it stands. As the Dart technical overview notes (and here I quote at length):

1. Small scripts often evolve into large web applications with no apparent structure—they’re hard to debug and difficult to maintain. In addition, these monolithic apps can’t be split up so that different teams can work on them independently. It’s difficult to be productive when a web application gets large.
2. Scripting languages are popular because their lightweight nature makes it easy to write code quickly. Generally, the contracts with other parts of an application are conveyed in comments rather than in the language structure itself. As a result, it’s difficult for someone other than the author to read and maintain a particular piece of code.
3. With existing languages, the developer is forced to make a choice between static and dynamic languages. Traditional static languages require heavyweight toolchains and a coding style that can feel inflexible and overly constrained.
4. Developers have not been able to create homogeneous systems that encompass both client and server, except for a few cases such as Node.js and Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
5. Different languages and formats entail context switches that are cumbersome and add complexity to the coding process.

The Dart project’s stated goals are a response to these problems. This fact (in tandem with the fact that the organization undertaking it is one of the very few that could plausibly meet those goals) should be enough to perk up the ears of anyone interested in web development.

Designers Sang Min Yu and Wong Sang Lee have an interesting proposal for your dental life. Their SavePaste design is meant to (a) eliminate the “dead space” in standard toothpaste tube design, minimizing toothpaste residue left inside the container; and (b) move from the the two-packages-one-recyclabe approach to a one-package-one-recyclabe one. Pretty neat!

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