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Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

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Re: Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

#32

Post by teapot7 »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #28
arjonagelhout wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same issue. For many of the questions my answer is "all of the above, but A in context A, B in context B, etc.". Many are also not mutually exclusive. Take this example: "When debugging I typically:" > Write tests to isolate the problem In the case of math functions, or more primitive building blocks, writing tests can help ensure correctness of the underlying functions, to exclude them from the problem se…

Is the fact that the answer isn’t easy a feature or bug?

Oh a bug, surely. How is the quiz supposed to give you insights when it's unanswerable?

Re: Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

#33

Post by JSR_FDED »

This was fun, and the conclusion was pretty good (slight preference for human-friendly and concrete).

At first I was frustrated that the answers were very much “it depends”, but then I decided that (a) this is low stakes, (b) just pick the closest one as if someone held a gun to your head. End result was fine.

Re: Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

#36

Post by treeform »

andai wrote: post #22
josephg wrote: post #10

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 b…

I forget who said it, but "I don't truly understand a program until the 6th time I've written it."

That's such a good quote. I can't find it anywhere, so I'll attribute it to you.

Re: Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

#38

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #30
dang wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your preferences are so contradictory that they cancel each other out :) I got very close to centre also, just slightly on the "concrete" and "human friendly" sides. But who wouldn't want to be concrete or human-friendly?

I likewise got very close to the centre, and was surprised. If you had shown me the diagram only, and asked me to position myself on it I would have placed myself on the middle of the perimeter of the second quadrant (135 degrees along the circumference), to indicate that I strongly prefer human friendly and concrete over computer friendly and abstract respectively. And even as I was answering the questions I felt th…

Also, the ranges of possible values are not equal in each direction so the resulting compass is biased a bit in favour of abstract and human friendly over concrete and machine friendly respectively.

abstract: min=-25, max=38

human: min=-27, max=33

Which means that the circle diagram showing the result can give a bit of wrong impression imo.

Edit to add: In a frequency plot you can see also specifically how the possible score additions and subtractions are a bit unevenly distributed

    Abstract frequencies (ASCII bar chart)
     -2: ##########                               6
     -1: ##############################           18
      0: ######################################## 24
      1: ####################                     12
      2: #################################        20
         ---------+---------+---------+---------+
         (max = 24)
    
    Human frequencies (ASCII bar chart)
     -2: ##################                       11
     -1: #####################                    13
      0: ######################################## 25
      1: ###########################              17
      2: ######################                   14
         ---------+---------+---------+---------+
         (max = 25)
Abstract frequencies:

    -2:  6,  -1: 18,   0: 24,   1: 12,   2: 20
Human frequencies:

    -2: 11,  -1: 13,   0: 25,   1: 17,   2: 14

Re: Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

#39

Post by IgorPartola »

Waterluvian wrote: post #11

I tried to finish this quiz but just can’t. Every question I got was a very big, “it depends on context…” “Do you prefer strong static or dynamic or a mix?” Well… are we teaching 9th graders an intro to coding, writing a quick script to answer a bespoke data question, or writing a data processing library? “On algorithms I focus on…” Okay, well… do we care about performance? Where is it running? How often will it run?…

I took it as “when working in the kinds of things things I prefer to work on using my preferred tools.”

For example, I prefer a mix of static and dynamic typing. Even for performance optimization where technically I do all four of the options, trying to write performant code from the start is what I prefer to do when possible.

This isn’t about the right tool for the job as much as what kinds of tools to you prefer to work with when given the choice.

Re: Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

#40

Post by IgorPartola »

josephg wrote: post #10

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 b…

Same. I am dead center but this did not really give me any hard questions. For example I controversially believe that user applications do not benefit from unit testing and that manual testing is both faster and superior in quality. Similarly, I believe that for most situations Python’s optional type system is a waste of time and mental load. It is not what catches bugs.

I think both are appropriate for well-scoped library code. But application code is just not well defined enough in most circumstances to get any benefit from it. But this quiz didn’t ask that and I suspect this would swing the score quite strongly.

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