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How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

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Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#41

Post by badpun »

theonemind wrote: post #11
anon1253 wrote: post #7

Okay, I’m going to be a little bit far out there. A lot of this seems to be grounded in the negative. “How to deal with x” how to “do y when z has failed”. Some of it technical and some of it interpersonal. Why have we created this sphere around programming? What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? And my believe is: nothing. It’s not hard. It’s not better. It won’t “eat the world”. Heck it probably…

Eh. Most major centers of power have large computing resources changing how they do things. Wal-Mart, for instance, as a basically non-tech company, leveraged computers for stocking and supply chains and became a culture-chaging retail giant. Computers have made their way into cars, and even toasters. We have high frequency trading (done by computers) majorly affecting markets. I could probably go on like this for a…

I wouldn’t call Wal-Mart a “center of power”. They’re essentially a market player, and are powerless in the face of market forces. CIA, Kremlin, or even Wall Street (with their ability to extract wealth out of society via laws paid for in bribes) are centers of power, in the way that they really get to impose their will on others.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#42

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

pkghost wrote: post #10
anon1253 wrote: post #7

Okay, I’m going to be a little bit far out there. A lot of this seems to be grounded in the negative. “How to deal with x” how to “do y when z has failed”. Some of it technical and some of it interpersonal. Why have we created this sphere around programming? What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? And my believe is: nothing. It’s not hard. It’s not better. It won’t “eat the world”. Heck it probably…

No other profession has quite the same capacity to transform itself. Like blacksmiths, programmers are capable of building tools that not only change the way they work but enable new kinds of work to be done, often by making previously onerous tasks trivial, and giving the individual a much large potential impact. Unlike blacksmiths, programmers can share their inventions with the entire industry in the blink of an e…

If programming was like blacksmithing there would be a lot of self-built kind-of-working-but-not-really-finished-yet hammer factories, and an inexplicable upsurge in lame horses.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#43

Post by austincheney »

anon1253 wrote: post #7

Okay, I’m going to be a little bit far out there. A lot of this seems to be grounded in the negative. “How to deal with x” how to “do y when z has failed”. Some of it technical and some of it interpersonal. Why have we created this sphere around programming? What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? And my believe is: nothing. It’s not hard. It’s not better. It won’t “eat the world”. Heck it probably…

> What makes /this/ profession so different from any other?

No credentials. All it takes to be a programmer is appeasing somebody in a 30-60min interview. What other white collar career can you say that about? It takes more to be a truck driver.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#44

Post by NateEag »

austincheney wrote: post #43
anon1253 wrote: post #7

Okay, I’m going to be a little bit far out there. A lot of this seems to be grounded in the negative. “How to deal with x” how to “do y when z has failed”. Some of it technical and some of it interpersonal. Why have we created this sphere around programming? What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? And my believe is: nothing. It’s not hard. It’s not better. It won’t “eat the world”. Heck it probably…

> What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? No credentials. All it takes to be a programmer is appeasing somebody in a 30-60min interview. What other white collar career can you say that about? It takes more to be a truck driver.

Sales. Marketing. Entrepreneur (impressing VCs). CEO, in many cases (though you have to impress a handful of people, not just one).

That's with barely any thought - I expect there are more.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#45

Post by peheje »

anon1253 wrote: post #7

Okay, I’m going to be a little bit far out there. A lot of this seems to be grounded in the negative. “How to deal with x” how to “do y when z has failed”. Some of it technical and some of it interpersonal. Why have we created this sphere around programming? What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? And my believe is: nothing. It’s not hard. It’s not better. It won’t “eat the world”. Heck it probably…

Programming, in the broadest sense of the word, is hard. Even for the most intelligent people. You don't have to look much around you for crap every day it-solutions, security breaches, million dollar rocket exploding into another planet or medical radiation-equipment killing people instead of curing them.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#46

Post by juangacovas »

I find the "learn to debug" chapter refreshing. I've seen a lot of new hires on web development area who simply don't interactively debug anything, sometimes even don't log, just because "printing" is enough. IMO we need more bootcamps on fundamentals.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#47

Post by robertAngst »

durovo wrote: post #38
robertAngst wrote: post #15

>Short Proceeds to have 40 pages

Most guides are at least 200 pages long. 40 pages is not long in comparison

>Most guides are at least 200 pages long.

>Most

Most?

You mean sometimes.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#48

Post by JeremyNT »

anon1253 wrote: post #7

Okay, I’m going to be a little bit far out there. A lot of this seems to be grounded in the negative. “How to deal with x” how to “do y when z has failed”. Some of it technical and some of it interpersonal. Why have we created this sphere around programming? What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? And my believe is: nothing. It’s not hard. It’s not better. It won’t “eat the world”. Heck it probably…

Programming is special because of the outsized speculation still occurring and the willingness for tech firms to ignore regulations and morality to defeat entrenched players. The amount of money this approach can capture is staggering.

Programmers, even those of us working outside of the valley, therefore demand high wages - ultimately because of amoral unicorns and deceptive business practices. The demand outstrips supply, making programmers in other roles overvalued as well. This leads to a sense of entitlement, and a perception among programmers that we are somehow superior by virtue of our chosen career and the skills that accompany it.

This in turn leads to outsized egos, unreasonable tolerance of bad behavior, and toxic culture.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#49

Post by rightbyte »

"When it comes to actually documenting code itself, as opposed to producing documents that can actually be read by non-programmers, the best programmers I’ve ever known hold a universal sentiment: write self-explanatory code and don’t document code except in the places that you cannot make it clear. There are two good reasons for this. First, anyone who needs to see code-level documentation will in most cases be able to and prefer to read the code anyway ... More importantly however, is that the code and the documentation cannot get our of sync if there is no documentation. The source code can at worst be wrong and confusing. The documentation, if not written perfectly, can lie, and that is a thousand times worse"

This is such baloney. I understand that many programmers want barriers of entry to their chair at the office but rationalizing it is self-deception.

The author is essentially saying to write strcmp() "self-explanatory" rather than the a black box description like: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstring/strcmp/

strcmp() is useless without knowing what the return values mean and reading the code to figure it out is way more time consuming than reading the docs.

Re: How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (2002) [pdf]

#50

Post by abc_lisper »

rightbyte wrote: post #49

"When it comes to actually documenting code itself, as opposed to producing documents that can actually be read by non-programmers, the best programmers I’ve ever known hold a universal sentiment: write self-explanatory code and don’t document code except in the places that you cannot make it clear. There are two good reasons for this. First, anyone who needs to see code-level documentation will in most cases be able…

This. Most people who think they write self explanatory code are deluding themselves. While others may see architectural and compile time information, the runtime information especially that concerns with generality of the code, and things it does not do (like the complement of a set) are not at all evident.

What's clear for one person is not for another. Ancedotally, most people don't write as a good a code they think they are.

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