What Level Programmer Are You?

I totally agree.

In most programming projects, the most important thing is maintainability, and that is relative to the skill of the maintainer.

If the maintainer is going to be junior developer, then writing complex OO design is not good, even if it makes the program more concise; if the maintainer is a business developer who is not good in math, then crafting non-trivial algorithms will throw him off, even if it means shorter program; if the maintainer is smart and willing to learn, then you can do whatever.

"Building stuff that's considered to be hard are actually the things I learned when starting out with programming."

Maybe it's not harder than other things on the list, but the author is saying that this order is the most common progression for programmers in his experience.

Reading the comments, theres a lot of disagreement (for some valid reasons) but this list is getting more hate than it deserves. If you consider that the MAJORITY of programmers are essentially corporate code monkeys this is actually a very accurate list.

If I read this list and then apply its rules to the average programmer at fortune 500 companies it is almost perfectly accurate at measuring the least to most talented programmers I've worked alongside.

In the corporate world, the bulk of developers fall into one of the following groups: guys who can barely modify a custom report, guys who can write a report, guys who can create a basic CRUD class for reuse across reports, guys who can contribute to a complex application, guys who can design a complex application, and then the guys who are hired to create the tools/languages that are leveraged when creating complex applications.

There are obviously many areas of programming that do not fall under these definitions but the AVERAGE programming (i.e. average corporate developer) probably fits very neatly into one of these definitions.

First of all, I was exaggerating the negatives of Java. There are 2.0+ programmers writing in Java every day. The vast majority of these would prefer to use another language, but that's another story.

My experience is that most 1.5+ developers, when forced to use Java, react in one of two ways. The first is to scale back their general tendency toward ambition in coding and tolerate uninspired patterns, such as objects with 25 getters and setters. This works, and it can produce quality software, but it's not fast and it's definitely not fun. The second is to follow Greenspun's Tenth Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule) which describes the process by which a skilled programmer, confronted with under-powered tools for his job, creates a personal DSL (and usually a bad one) for solving the problem. Rich Hickey and Martin Odersky are counterexamples: instead of writing shitty DSLs, they built full-fledged, awesome languages.

Are there 1.5 and 2.0 programmers in languages like Java? Absolutely. Is it common? No. Is it likely that a person exposed to only Java and C++ will ever crack 1.5? Absolutely not.

You have now introduced a definition which implies that the designers behind projects like the Windows kernel, MSSQL, and Kinect are a lower level of programmers because of the technology they use or the company they chose to work for.

You're taking it a bit far. Obviously, there are exceptions. Multiplier effects happen on bad languages, but you have to either (a) fight the language the whole way through, or (b) deliver a complex system, which ends up being a divider effect if someone other than you ever has to maintain it.

To call functional programming a 'shibboleth of good engineers' seems to exclude too many people I would call good engineers to be a good or even useful measure. I would go as far as to say that, for above average programmers, interest in and use of functional programming is orthogonal to their contribution and skill.

Disagree, unless you're taking a very strict view of what "functional programming" is. A 1.5 programmer in Python will find himself using a lot of list comprehensions. Are his Python programs likely to be "purely functional"? Absolutely not. It's not idiomatic for the language. But his code will be in a state where the average Lisper will understand what he is doing and why, and in which the average Java developer will be asking "where are the Factories?"

Yeah - to put it another way, ordered, general criteria like these will rarely be fit for the purpose of selecting the best coder for a given job. They place a huge premium on showing the widest possible diversity of knowledge, whereas what makes many programmers world-class is that they offer highly specialized skills for dealing with highly specialized applications, with which they have huge experience.