Hopefully more controversial programming opinions

2) Early on, you learn that ints and chars and floats and some_structs are fundamentally different data types. Then suddenly you're told that int%s, char%s, float%s, some_struct%s, and even void%s are fundamentally the same. Huh?

3) The fact that C uses % both to create a pointer and to dereference. These are conflicting meanings, and the unrelatedness of those two concepts is not sufficiently explained.

EDIT: Silly HN parser. I now replaced asterisks with %s.

    int *i;

As an autocrat, I'd also add another few, what I conceive to be contemporaneously controversial point of view, to the discussion:

* Code Coverage matters. Dead code is broken code. Always.

* Programming is Always in Service To The User. The User is the only way your creative, artistic, amazing, junk of spaghetti-code crud, is going to ever get Used. Use is where your software is alive. Non-use = Dead. Thus, the USER is YOUR MASTER. Serve them.

* Pretty tools are one thing, ugly tools another thing entirely. NO! WRONG! ALL TOOLS ARE TOOLS. Use what works. If you're using something because you want to, even though it sort of doesn't work, its no longer a tool, but instead an .. ingredient .. of something. Something else, perhaps something creative. Do that shit on your own time: use the tools which work, at work.

* Discussion is the only way things ever get resolved. If you hate on something about someone, discussion is the only way the problem will ever get solved, ever. Ignoring something and being afraid to discuss really secretly means 'do not want' to solve the problem. Even vile words are still yet but words, words eventually work it out. Developers who do not use words are not the scribes they're meant to be ..

He thought himself how to write Perl in a week. And then started coding. He wrote a script to automate a very tedious testing process so perfectly, we were able to reduce our test team by like 70% and test more precisely than before.

It was fully procedural code. And it looked monstrous. Our architect challenged him that it won't workout. He even challenged to rewrite it in Java, but that project never finished. He was never able to ever complete the rewrite.

It motivated me to learn Perl. Since then my life has been totally different. I've done mountains of work alone working, hacking during nights.

I learned the following things from that episode:

1. First write the program.

2. Write the correct program.

3. Write the program to run fast and efficient(scalability and all that)

4. Beautify the program.

But most people never cross 2)- The point is there are tons of people who can do this tasks related to micro optimization. The people who win in a ordinary work environment are ones who know the art of converting ideas to sell able products in the fastest way possible.

By the way that manager also wrote database clients in C++ which helped us troubleshoot our in memory databases from remote locations. Again the architect challenged to get it done Java, as before the project never completed :)

Its a fact that majority of the software world is hacked and held in existence with tools like Perl and Php. The people who care about artistic elegance are few, they often fail and generally don't matter.