Signs that you're a bad programmer

Seems to be a good source for creating interview questions.

I'm skeptical of these lists because people can work through things. For example, the stuff listed under "Inability to determine the order of program execution" is something that many people will get jammed on eary on as they try to take their brains (which is honed on the syntax of school level maths) into the programing world (where equals is an instruction rather than an assumptions). Another one is "Lisp is opaque to you". It's very sweet for MIT types to make these declarations from mount olympus, but lisp is something that can take time to acquire. If someone isn't a natural programmer but is happy to work at it to overcome hurdles then there's nothing wrong with that.

One of the examples of bad technique is:

    Homebrew "Business Rule Engines"

Can anyone give examples of the sorts of things the author means by this? What sort of systems have people seen, and why is it necessarily a bad thing?

This is a very good article, and hits lots of very good points.

However, it seems that there is a little bit of a self-diagnosis problem. For example, if you write "voodo code" (great description), unless there is some one to tell you, how do you know? And if you write voodo code, do you know what idempotent means? There is maybe a bit of the "Blub" effect here.

Perhaps between "Symptoms" and "Remedies" there needs to be "Diagnosis" or some hints at self-evaluation or tools for self-assessment.

Its not opaque to me, i just haven't invested the effort to bother learning it yet.