Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

Abstract ↔ Concrete: -2 Concrete

Human ↔ Computer Friendly: -5 Computer-Friendly

Seeing Treeform here immediately made me think of Nim, and lo-and behold that's what the Javascript is generated from, cool!

-11 concrete, +14 human friendly lol.

> "You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code"

Sounds about right.

This was fun!

Also, I'd recommend NOT telling the test taker which dimensions they're getting scored on as it will affect the responses. For example, if you gave me a test telling me that you're gonna score me on Introversion-Extraversion and Neuroticism-Emotional Stability, then I may be more biased to answer questions to score me as an emotionally stable introvert since that's what I identify as.

Oh, and Abstract ↔ Concrete: 0 Neutral | Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +11 Human-Friendly

I landed right in the middle - -1, -2. Which seems weird because I’m very opinionated about a lot of this stuff. I like a lot of the questions but a lot of my answers felt like I was arbitrarily picking something. That’s probably why.

Eg for testing, do I want “whatever finds bugs most effectively” or “property based testing”? Well, property based testing is usually the most time efficient way to find bugs. So, yes both of those. Debugging: do I use print statements, or a debugger, or logically think it through? Yes all of those. But if I arbitrarily said I use a debugger in a multiple choice test, I don’t think that tells you much about how I code!

I do - controversially - think some of the answers are naming bad practices. Like abstraction first is a bad idea - since you know the least about your problem before you start programming it up. Abstraction first inevitably bakes in whatever bad assumptions you walked in the door with into your code. Better to code something - anything - up and use what you learned in the process to iterate on your software architecture decisions. I also generally hate modern OO and these days I prefer static types over dynamic types.

But yeah. Interesting questions! Thanks for putting this together.