121–130 of 175 posts
To me what is difficult about programming is to deal with huge undocumented and badly written legacy code, and also understanding tons of frameworks and APIs. Algorithms are the easy part.
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Taking a day to teach someone an entirely new (and arguably extremely backward) workflow is exasperating to you?
It's not about the workflow - it's about the fact that things like compiling files, linking libraries, are kind of basic concepts. For his prior apps (flash) he created objects using only a graphical interface (never wrote a single class), and the 'program' was a single 9000 line file where everything (all vars, functions, etc...) was in the global namespace with absolutely no organization, encapsulation, etc... Anyh…
Your fellow is abnormal to the extreme. That he's never met anyone in 10 years to tell him drag & dropping is not programming is one thing.
Making your description match a good proportion of C# developers or even Java developers just shows your irrational bias against types of programmer you obviously view as inferior.
The problem is not that he's using an IDE, the problem is he's not a programmer.
Bloody luddites clinging to their consoles.
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> "the mismeasure of man" is a garbage book by the noted fraud and liar steven jay gould. When you post like this, do you ever stop to think how you're making psychology and its supporters look? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Awards Quote: "The first edition of The Mismeasure of Man won the non-fiction award from the National Book Critics Circle; the Outstanding Book Award for 1983 from the Americ…
the opinions of ignorant journalists are not really relevant. it was strongly criticized by experts in the relevant area. do you realize how intellectually lazy you look when you form strong opinions on subjects without even doing basic research first?
If self-reference were a disease, you would be in an emergency room. You know nothing about me or the research I have conducted, apart from the fact that your argument represents an all-too-common logical error.
> the opinions of ignorant journalists are not really relevant.
> it was strongly criticized by experts in the relevant area.
So, which is it? Did journalists decide, or did experts decide? And do you know why neither of those sources carry weight in science, a field where evidence trumps eminence?
Do you know why I'm playing you along, even though you have nothing to contribute to this discussion? I just want the readers in this forum to see what passes for reasoning among psychologists and their supporters.
I think programming is easy. When I sit down to code something, it feels deterministic, and everything falls into place. I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. If I hadn't been this way when I started, I probably wouldn't have started. 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. That's a lot of time to try a lot of ways to do a lot of things, and find what works. Here's what's difficult for me, and what…
After 10 years in the industry I relate to that second paragraph far too well. What makes programming hard is that people who aren't programmers don't understand what we do.
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> The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that in the United States IQ tests as predictors of social achievement are not biased against African Americans since they predict future performance ... The flaw in the reasoning should be obvious to anyone but a psychologist -- the test outcome becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than an unbiased predictor of future pe…
the point is that they predict future performance equally for different groups, not just that they predict performance. your language is alarmingly exaggerated and pompous for someone who lacks basic reading comprehension skills and is entirely ignorant about the subject of intelligence testing.
That is false, and its falsity has been proven repeatedly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Test_bias
Quote: "However, IQ tests may well be biased when used in other situations. A 2005 study stated that "differential validity in prediction suggests that the WAIS-R test may contain cultural influences that reduce the validity of the WAIS-R as a measure of cognitive ability for Mexican American students,"[123] indicating a weaker positive correlation relative to sampled white students. Other recent studies have questioned the culture-fairness of IQ tests when used in South Africa.[124][125] Standard intelligence tests, such as the Stanford-Binet, are often inappropriate for children with autism; the alternative of using developmental or adaptive skills measures are relatively poor measures of intelligence in autistic children, and may have resulted in incorrect claims that a majority of children with autism are mentally retarded."
Just one sample from a large literature on this topic.
> your language is alarmingly exaggerated and pompous for someone who lacks basic reading comprehension skills and is entirely ignorant about the subject of intelligence testing.
Nice argument. Do give us more samples of your logically flawed reasoning. The readers of this forum will surely appreciate your credibility sacrifice.
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>> I don't agree. > Evidence trumps opinion. I understood the parent to be saying that they disagreed that "someone that smart would have known IQ is bogus", not that they disagreed that "IQ was bogus".
> I understood the parent to be saying that they disagreed that "someone that smart would have known IQ is bogus", not that they disagreed that "IQ was bogus". Yes, and because of how the post was worded, we may never know. I suspect (and acted on the idea that) he was disagreeing about my claim about the veracity of IQ testing, but that's just a guess.
Most difficult part for me is letting go. I am compelled to febreeze every bit of code smell I come across. I often rewrite large sections of working code into better structures, more readable/concise syntax, better naming of variables/functions, etc. and In the process I have at times introduced bugs. But that isn't enough to deter me. I feel like I've accomplished something but in reality I have done nothing. It's…
I can absolutely relate to that. It has happened that I find code so terribly written that needed to be modified. As nobody on the team actually understood how it was supposed to be working, I ripped it out, and rewrote it in a cleaner way. I knew this may introduce regressions, but I knew the modification I had to make would very likely do the same thing. But if there were going to be bugs, I'd rather have them come from a maintainable codebase.
> You know it's dirty back there, but it's not stopping the fridge from keeping your food cold.
Unfortunately, the more technical debt you accumulate, the more difficult it is to change anything. So, yes, enough dirt will eventually lead to "we can't do X because it's too risky/too much work". Ideally, we should all do some refactoring every week.
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Rather than focusing on the IQ remark, I'll mention that the entire point of this post is that programming is not just “sit[ting] down to code something”. A program written in a vacuum when you're sitting in your chair is useful to precisely one person at precisely one point in time: you, right now. When you're working on teams, under managers, within organizations, you're working to build something that's useful for…
This is why, when I see 22-year-old kids in interviews claiming 10 years of programming experience, that's a negative signal for me. Commercial programming is solving problems you didn't choose, in a language that's not your favourite, using existing code you didn't write, for people you would never have met outside the job, in less time than you would like. In most real situations writing the code is the easy part,…
And when you have your first 1,000,000 month you CTO (who i think reported to vint cerf ) nudges you saying this had better be right or we are both of a job.
I think programming is easy. When I sit down to code something, it feels deterministic, and everything falls into place. I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. If I hadn't been this way when I started, I probably wouldn't have started. 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. That's a lot of time to try a lot of ways to do a lot of things, and find what works. Here's what's difficult for me, and what…
My IQ is 10 non-standard deviations above and my Mensa membership card is twice-laminated. Beat that. :B