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Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

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Re: Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

#31

Post by jhayward »

dcolkitt wrote: post #17

IMO the bigger divide is between West Coast and East Coast programming styles. I think California developers tend to be more forward-thinking, and embrace a “move fast and break things” style. Whereas East Coast devs tend to be more academic, structured and top-down. Speculatively, I’d attribute this to the lack of non compete enforceability in California. Innovation tends to diffuse a lot faster, and that’s rewarded…

I've seen this as well. The West coast division of the large company I worked at tended somewhat toward 'architecture astronaut' situations, highly abstract languages and tools and was fairly cavalier toward error cases and operational considerations.

The East coast was very opinionated about handling every single error case with case-specific logic, deviated very little from plain-old-C / non-threaded implementations and had copious operational input and tools/insight, etc.

Both had their strengths and could get caught up in cultural blindness to the others. It was an interesting challenge.

Re: Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

#32

Post by elboru »

lindy2021 wrote: post #25

Have observed a strong correlation between conscientiousness and how developed a country is. This is undoubtedly due to a self-selection bias in developed countries, where there are a million opportunities, wherein only those deeply interested in programming choose (and stick with) it as a career. Those in less developed countries don't have the same privilege, with many choosing programming as an easy ticket out of…

Another factor is that in less developed countries outsourced projects are the norm. Those projects tend to look for cheap work force instead of skilled developers. Therefore a lot of projects tend to have poor code quality. Basically you have thousands of developers working most of their career in poor implemented projects. It becomes a vicious circle.

If you live in a less developed country and you choose to work for outsource companies you have to be careful about choosing good quality projects, otherwise you could spend years learning bad practice after bad practice.

Re: Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

#33

Post by tleb_ »

lindy2021 wrote: post #25

Have observed a strong correlation between conscientiousness and how developed a country is. This is undoubtedly due to a self-selection bias in developed countries, where there are a million opportunities, wherein only those deeply interested in programming choose (and stick with) it as a career. Those in less developed countries don't have the same privilege, with many choosing programming as an easy ticket out of…

I don't see what conscientiousness means in this context, could you expand?

Re: Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

#34

Post by lindy2021 »

tleb_ wrote: post #33
lindy2021 wrote: post #25

Have observed a strong correlation between conscientiousness and how developed a country is. This is undoubtedly due to a self-selection bias in developed countries, where there are a million opportunities, wherein only those deeply interested in programming choose (and stick with) it as a career. Those in less developed countries don't have the same privilege, with many choosing programming as an easy ticket out of…

I don't see what conscientiousness means in this context, could you expand?

The amount of effort expended, e.g.

- always additive, never proactively refactoring

- a proclivity towards reaching for SO rather than reading the manual

- inconsistent formatting, number of line breaks, ordering of identifiers, etc

Re: Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

#35

Post by emayljames »

benjohnson wrote: post #5

I did witness a Japanese style in the 1990's - a book of coding blocks was being used with the primary value the coder was adding was glueing then together. Back then, I thought it was idiotic; how could a professional sit there and copy from others. I now view it as genius - save your effort for the hard problems.

“Never memorize what you can look up in books” (paraphrased) - Einstein

Re: Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

#36

Post by chestertn »

Areading314 wrote: post #27

This topic seems like a bad idea

I do not see why, everyone is being respectful. Perceiving and understanding diversity of styles is something nice which to me, as seen in other fields like mathematics, leads to new ideas and insights.

Unfortunately, seems like more people share your opinion that this post is a bad idea. Les than 30 min ago this post was in the second page of HN but now I cannot find it anywhere.

Re: Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

#37

Post by dave333 »

I started coding in the UK in assembler on tiny 64k machines and cavalier heroic coding to save space and cycles was the norm. I moved to the US coding in C and while there was no shortage of clever heroic coding, simple brute force approaches were usually tried first. Nowadays, most of the heroism is bundled in the toolset.

Re: Ask HN: Differences in Programming Style by Nationalities

#38

Post by mcint »

dcolkitt wrote: post #17

IMO the bigger divide is between West Coast and East Coast programming styles. I think California developers tend to be more forward-thinking, and embrace a “move fast and break things” style. Whereas East Coast devs tend to be more academic, structured and top-down. Speculatively, I’d attribute this to the lack of non compete enforceability in California. Innovation tends to diffuse a lot faster, and that’s rewarded…

This sounds like the age old "Do the right thing" vs "Worse is better". MIT (vs Princeton) Stanford (vs Berkeley) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
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