Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people are tone-deaf too, and will never sing nor play an instrument. That's quite a telling statement. Actually, there are very, very few people who are _truly_ tone deaf. Since intonation is used extensively in nearly all human languages, anyone who truly is 'tone deaf' will have quite an issue in communication. Nearly all the time (and tbh I think it probably is just all the time), they actually just have a…
Yet people think different ways. Its easy for a musician to think "everybody knows how music works; its easy for me so its possible for everyone". The evidence suggests otherwise. I think we may all want to rethink our attitudes.
The programming talent myth
291–300 of 354 posts
Re: The programming talent myth
#292If you started programming when you were 12 and you've been programming for fun more than 4 hours a day every day since then, you are going to be drastically better than someone who starts programming in their first year of college and only does it to graduate. It feels like a bimodal distribution because you then get both kinds of programmers interviewing for jobs at the same age when they graduate from college and…
This seems like a form of elitism very specific to programming. I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and barely did programming until I began my first job out of college. In many people in the programming space, I see contempt that coding was something I didn't start until later in life. When I interviewed for Electrical Engineering positions, no one ever scoffed at me, "you haven't been computing the…
On the web and in app development, there's a far greater variety of technical bases to begin building atop, and a lot of web fundamentals that have developed culturally (rather than out of scientific or mathematic bases, where it can be clear your tools are helping).
A sometimes seen result is that those communities of developers that are "well served" by platforms perhaps "shielding" them from the sticky intertwingulated overwhelmingness of choices and protocols and systems often can't relate, don't relate to the wider body of codecrafters.
Ability to harness the best or biggest slices of culture well is a huge part of programming, and that requires more than being really good or really smart: it requires a will and energy to chase, and to always be chasing, keeping yourself unrooted from what you merely know or how you've done it. That doesn't justify a bimodal view, because there are certainly all kinds of ways people come about to programming, but I think in programming it really is different- since everything is made up and abstract, we're still figuring out general shapes. It's all a social milieu, and it requires paying attention to establish and keep authentic roots and identity, roots you'll need to contextualize what it is you do and what's coming down the pipe. Calculating impulse response is a hard task, but it has a mathematical fixity with no compare to the computer arts we use.
It's also been an extremely exciting time watching programming's recent decades. So there is some elitism of simply- why haven't you been here, enjoying the hell out of this? I think it's ok to feel that inside in a general way, I don't think that can be stopped or avoided, but how we reconcile that with the world without falling into the abundant moral hazards, how we still be good- it's doubly hard to reconcile yourself when the feeds are rife with people berating and assaulting tech culture, when you can get lost in these other people fights.
As a programmer, keep an open mind and accept many types of people as peer. As a person in the world, keep an open mind and accept that programmers are still quite high on some cyberspace utopianism and a precambrian-esque explosion of capabilities, and that just as much as you feel alienated by them, they feel alienated that a wider world excuses itself from recursing the depth and breadth of what enraptures the techie. 'The weirdo is just as scared of the normal person as the normal person is scared of the weirdo'
Re: The programming talent myth
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it really comes down to how much enjoyment one gets out of programming. If you thoroughly enjoy the process, you are more likely to put in the time and effort (in fact it will feel effortless), and you will be thinking about it all the time. Then there are those who don't mind programming, or maybe even see it as a chore, but choose to do it anyway.
Yes! Like musicians that have tunes running through their head constantly. Or poets that turn every phrase over in their minds. Did you ever dream of debugging your children? That if you could only find the right breakpoint to set, you could adjust them and fix something? Then you are truly a programmer.
Or maybe it's a sign that you should take some time off coding and not take your work home and give the other half of your brain some room to wander and explore space and time.
Re: The programming talent myth
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
"He wrote them like math formulas, and didn't understand that they got executed in order." So he had a talent for functional programming, then?
Cute, but not quite. Those are still executed in some order. Not like algebra which is a set of expressions that are all true over all time.
Re: The programming talent myth
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a form of elitism very specific to programming. I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and barely did programming until I began my first job out of college. In many people in the programming space, I see contempt that coding was something I didn't start until later in life. When I interviewed for Electrical Engineering positions, no one ever scoffed at me, "you haven't been computing the…
It's specific to programming, but not exclusively to programming; there are a few other areas where "you haven't been doing this since you could walk? Too late to be truly good": - Mathematics (at the extreme high levels) - Musical composition - Classical music performance - Painting/Visual arts - Speaking most languages - Jedi Knight
Re: The programming talent myth
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people are tone-deaf too, and will never sing nor play an instrument. That's quite a telling statement. Actually, there are very, very few people who are _truly_ tone deaf. Since intonation is used extensively in nearly all human languages, anyone who truly is 'tone deaf' will have quite an issue in communication. Nearly all the time (and tbh I think it probably is just all the time), they actually just have a…
Yet people think different ways. Its easy for a musician to think "everybody knows how music works; its easy for me so its possible for everyone". The evidence suggests otherwise. I think we may all want to rethink our attitudes.
But it's possible to get better at something with practice and to think or say otherwise is toxic. If you think it's possible for someone to rethink their attitude then you already agree with me.
Re: The programming talent myth
#297Re: The programming talent myth
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
"He wrote them like math formulas, and didn't understand that they got executed in order." So he had a talent for functional programming, then?
Cute, but not quite. Those are still executed in some order. Not like algebra which is a set of expressions that are all true over all time.
Not really. E.g. there's no ordering in function composition that isn't also in high school math. Also, you shouldn't depend on e.g. maps processing elements in a given order.
My impression is that statement ordering is easier for mediocre but competent programmers than it is for excellent programmers. The reason is that writing correct imperative code is non-trivial, but writing correct-y imperative code is pretty easy. So someone who's carefully thinking things through while learning will have a more difficult time with simple assignments, because -- at least while learning -- they're essentially trying to construct the correctness proof in their head. And that's pretty hard for imperative code.
Re: The programming talent myth
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, I hope you feel overwhelmed by the sort of guilt that only purchasing a subscription can dispel. Inspiring such feelings was my motivation for posting the link in the first place :) (I'm the lead editor of LWN.net).
Is there anything that can be done to make LWN.net look a bit nicer? There's often very good and interesting content on there - for which I'm grateful! - but the presentation really is rather a throwback to the pre-CSS days.
Re: The programming talent myth
#300Well, I just disagree. I've been doing this professionally for over 10 years and some people are bad to okay at it, and others are good to excellent. If there isn't some deep-seated reason why people fall into one group or the other, if it's just practice or whatever, fine. I don't know what the explanation is. And I don't assume it's impossible to move from one group to the other, far from it. But I would say the bi…