Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

ask.slashdot.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 199 posts

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#81

Post by equark »

ansy wrote: post #53

I actually subscribe to the theory put forth in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-9.html#... Essentially, "computer science" is a myopic name for what is really "process studies." It just so happens that defining processes to run on computers is forwarding the field more than any other. But in the distant future we will all un…

Emergency manuals for airplanes read like computer programs but are executed by humans.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#82

Post by pnathan »

edw519 wrote: post #16

Most code sucks because we have the fluency equivalent of 3 year olds trying to write a novel. Let's get a little more specific... Most code sucks because the programmer: - didn't name his variables what the really were - didn't understand variable state - didn't understand variable scope - didn't understand the basic concepts of iteration - didn't understand any of the algorithms he needed - wrote the same lines of…

The only tickybox that matters is the last one: if that is ticked, there's no hope for it but to put up Dilbert around your work space and sing sad songs while you work.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#84

Post by icefox »

larrik wrote: post #3

I think he's right. In college, my CS 2 class was taught by a professor very different than the rest of the teachers there. He wanted all of your programming assignments on paper[1]. Then, you'd get it back with every possible bug marked in your program, and he very rarely missed any[2]. That was the first time in college I thought "I really need to learn how to do that!" I went to a state school, so maybe all you gu…

One thing I picked up (luckily) early on was that when you are learning something the fastest way to actually learn it was try to help other people learn the same thing. For programming this meant helping out on assignments in the labs, reviewing code etc. Very quickly you find yourself seeing a wide variety of bad practices and can recognize common mistakes and good practices. As a bonus you have to actually know the answers to the questions, but it is ok because if you don't know at the start you will soon enough.

tl;dr Pretending to be an expert until you actually are seems to be one of the fastest way to learn something.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#85

Post by Zeus-TheTrueGod »

I've read the article. I am sure that when a new child is born he has, say, a 5% chance to have an ability to be a programmer. After the lucky one grown up he will get all required information and experience just because he has the ability and finally, say in 10 years, will be a good programmer. Other 95% may do everything they want, they can learn how to program, read a lot of books, do all their homework and hobby project, but they will grow up only to the certain level.

I want to believe in what I've just wrote cause that guarantee that I will not have a lot of competitors and I'll always have a job when I want

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#86

Post by true_religion »

david927 wrote: post #59
dustingetz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

meh. i work at a small shop. most of the code i see that sucks was written by competent programmers under high schedule pressure. the code is clearly not well understood anymore, but if you trace the history you can see it's due to a few years of tacking on features as quickly as possible. the technical debt surely slows us down sometimes, but hey that was a business decision, maybe even a correct one! core business…

I get tired of the "blame the shitty programmers" line of thought. We're all shitty programmers. Yet we all "understand variable scope" and "what the code was supposed to do." Some of us have such a large ego that we think it's others. No, Sancho. It's you. Code gets complex as hell very quickly. If it was building a house, it would be built in a week and architected on the fly. The person mixing the concrete, who ha…

I've seen applications with fairly large scope that have clean code.

For the most part the Django codebase has clean code, and its rapidly understandable. Where that's not true is the original SQL db, and the Forms library. Elsewhere its a dream to hack with.

I'd also praise the codebase of SQLite, and Lighttpd---these two are very clean.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#88

Post by dustingetz »

true_religion wrote: post #86
david927 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get tired of the "blame the shitty programmers" line of thought. We're all shitty programmers. Yet we all "understand variable scope" and "what the code was supposed to do." Some of us have such a large ego that we think it's others. No, Sancho. It's you. Code gets complex as hell very quickly. If it was building a house, it would be built in a week and architected on the fly. The person mixing the concrete, who ha…

I've seen applications with fairly large scope that have clean code. For the most part the Django codebase has clean code, and its rapidly understandable. Where that's not true is the original SQL db, and the Forms library. Elsewhere its a dream to hack with. I'd also praise the codebase of SQLite, and Lighttpd---these two are very clean.

good low level backend stuff takes years of iteration under static business requirements. its also a well-understood domain with many prior implementations to learn from, and the 'companies' tend to be product-based so you have much less customer pressure.

teams reacting to changing or poorly-understood requirements (think enterprise and defense software contracts) have a much harder task. nobody has solved the problem before, nobody understands the problem, and project managagement is typically forced into waterfall in order to make sales, so its not like there's time to redo things that get duct-taped together, if the duct-tape holds.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#89

Post by pasbesoin »

This makes me think of people who would try to "memorize" for e.g. science tests. They were ok as long as they could plug and chug, but they couldn't derive anything on the spot.

I'm wary of tickling my ego, but I recall not entirely seldom forgetting a formula, and so simply starting with other stuff and deriving it in the margin or on scratch paper. I think many of the instructors liked that, as well, as it showed a more conceptual grasp.

Post reply on HN