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How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

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Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#11

Post by Tehnix »

Except for maybe Haskell[0] and Lisp[0], I've begun to feel like there isn't any language that I can't quickly learn with how I'm able to google at the moment.

For example, I'm currently helping some fellow students with their F# assignments, even though I don't do F# at all. I just know what to google, because I know the concepts that I need translated to the specific syntax.

[0] Maybe Lisp, but Haskell is way too different from other languages in the way to programme. I'm currently learning it, but it's by far the language that has taken me the longest.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#12

Post by bdcravens »

ayrx wrote: post #6

I'll argue that good programmers need to have a working understanding of algorithms, databases, compilers and all that. Sure, it's not something you will use day-to-day in a software engineering job but it's important to know how all the low level pieces of your stack fit together in order to write good code. There's nothing worse than a programmer that fits together code snippets from Stackoverflow and similar sites…

I think it's fair to say that you can be effective without necessarily being good and vice versa.

I think the some of the best developers are those who are smart enough to have gotten a CS degree but skipped a bit of the academics. (A bit self serving: I graduated high school in 1996, had my first intro IT job by the fall of 1998, and had my first real programming job in January 2000, while my contemporaries were still in college)

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#13

Post by bdcravens »

grecy wrote: post #10

I currently work with a bunch of people who are "business majors" or whatever and are similarly self-taught in the Tech/IT/Programming space. It's interesting to watch how they work and the kinds of outputs they produce. Quite a lot of the stuff works... mostly... It's entirely untestable, not repeatable, undocumented and just stuck together with flaky glue code. Sure, if you aiming to "make it work" you can do that.…

I think it's a mindset thing; either you have the mind of a developer or you don't, degree or not. I'm self-taught, and early on I had a inferiority complex when it came to those with CS degrees. Didn't take long for that to wear off as reality exposed gaps in their ability/knowledge.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#14

Post by Tehnix »

yen223 wrote: post #4
sanxiyn wrote: post #3

This is very true, but it's a bit more complicated than that. "I'd come to understand that the answer was out there, somewhere." The answer is out there, but so is the wrong answer. Recognizing the right answer is the hard part. I also must point out that the answer is out there if you know English . Knowing English is a strong privilege. Success rate plummets if you Google programming questions in a language other t…

This is something I've always wondered - how do programmers who don't natively speak, read, or write English cope with the sheer amount of literature they have to parse to have a career programming?

Very easily. But that might be because in Denmark, it's rather the exception than the norm that people don't know english. Of course with varying degrees of proficiency.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#15

Post by bdcravens »

sanxiyn wrote: post #7
yen223 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I've always wondered - how do programmers who don't natively speak, read, or write English cope with the sheer amount of literature they have to parse to have a career programming?

I don't natively speak, read, or write English. Speaking for myself, you cope by studying English. Blood, toil, tears, and sweat are involved.

Based on the limited sample, you write it better than many "native" speakers.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#16

Post by grecy »

bdcravens wrote: post #13
grecy wrote: post #10

I currently work with a bunch of people who are "business majors" or whatever and are similarly self-taught in the Tech/IT/Programming space. It's interesting to watch how they work and the kinds of outputs they produce. Quite a lot of the stuff works... mostly... It's entirely untestable, not repeatable, undocumented and just stuck together with flaky glue code. Sure, if you aiming to "make it work" you can do that.…

I think it's a mindset thing; either you have the mind of a developer or you don't, degree or not. I'm self-taught, and early on I had a inferiority complex when it came to those with CS degrees. Didn't take long for that to wear off as reality exposed gaps in their ability/knowledge.

Fair enough.

I have a Software Engineering degree (certified Engineer), so I already have a superiority complex anyway ;)

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#17

Post by skore »

sanxiyn wrote: post #3

This is very true, but it's a bit more complicated than that. "I'd come to understand that the answer was out there, somewhere." The answer is out there, but so is the wrong answer. Recognizing the right answer is the hard part. I also must point out that the answer is out there if you know English . Knowing English is a strong privilege. Success rate plummets if you Google programming questions in a language other t…

> Recognizing the right answer is the hard part.

Very true, but even further than that: There are very few clearly right or clearly wrong answers. There are actually very few wrong answers - but there is a stupendous amount of right answers that are bad answers. Especially: bad answers for you.

Recognizing a wrong answer is the easy part. Taking a dozen or so "right" answers and selecting and condensing them into the best answer that makes the most sense for your programming context is the hardest part.

It is astonishingly easy to accrue a tremendous amount of technical debt because you just chained up solution after solution into a grotesque mix of "works, but could explode any minute".

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#18

Post by Kenji »

"But I’d never even heard of the words front-end developer or full-stack. What was Heroku? Never heard of Xcode. Wasn’t git just the thing you used to make sure your partner had access to the code you’d written? Frameworks? Didn’t you just need HTML and Javascript? What the hell was an API?!"

If you literally never heard about any of those during your computer science courses, you attended a sad, sad university.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#19

Post by brudgers »

Tehnix wrote: post #11

Except for maybe Haskell[0] and Lisp[0], I've begun to feel like there isn't any language that I can't quickly learn with how I'm able to google at the moment. For example, I'm currently helping some fellow students with their F# assignments, even though I don't do F# at all. I just know what to google, because I know the concepts that I need translated to the specific syntax. [0] Maybe Lisp, but Haskell is way too d…

Take a look at APL. There will be three.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#20

Post by [deleted] »

Kenji wrote: post #18

"But I’d never even heard of the words front-end developer or full-stack. What was Heroku? Never heard of Xcode. Wasn’t git just the thing you used to make sure your partner had access to the code you’d written? Frameworks? Didn’t you just need HTML and Javascript? What the hell was an API?!" If you literally never heard about any of those during your computer science courses, you attended a sad, sad university.

[deleted]
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