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The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#11

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #4
kisstheblade wrote: post #3

Seems to me the article is fighting some kind of giant strawman. I myself haven't experiences this kind of attitude. I really don't get what the point is, that some people have ego problems and hold pissing contests to see who is the most "awesome programmer"? Well that's a different thing, kind of "who's the best". Well for sure if you ask people in an office what their job is then I don't think that a banker who cr…

It's a thing I keep running into over and over again. I'm really happy that you haven't and that for you personally this is not an issue. Unfortunately your sample of '1' may not be representative. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-... http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163631/has-no... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5…

[deleted]

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#12

Post by cblock811 »

kisstheblade wrote: post #3

Seems to me the article is fighting some kind of giant strawman. I myself haven't experiences this kind of attitude. I really don't get what the point is, that some people have ego problems and hold pissing contests to see who is the most "awesome programmer"? Well that's a different thing, kind of "who's the best". Well for sure if you ask people in an office what their job is then I don't think that a banker who cr…

I absolutely ran into it when teaching myself programming, but it really isn't specific to programmers. I had conversations go boil down to:

Me: "I'm learning programming" Programmer: "Good luck with that (sarcasm)"

These people were dicks. I met WAY more positive and accepting people in tech during my transition, but there is still an elitist group that thinks it is special. This mentality exists everywhere, but tech seems to be special. Developers are in demand, many people don't fully understand what we do, and even when you "get your foot in the door" people..including folks on HN btw.. throw out things like "I hate pretend programmers".

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#13

Post by jacquesm »

teacup50 wrote: post #10
jacquesm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a thing I keep running into over and over again. I'm really happy that you haven't and that for you personally this is not an issue. Unfortunately your sample of '1' may not be representative. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-... http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163631/has-no... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5…

I'll be your non-strawman. Consider other fields: - Is everyone suited to be a mathematician? - What about a building engineer? - An electrical engineer? None of these things are magic. None of these things are something someone can't learn "a little" about. And yet, like programming, all of these require a great deal of effort to master any degree of proficiency; this 1) takes individual dedication, and 2) is underm…

It definitely isn't 'easy'. It's probably the hardest skill I've mastered to any degree.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#14

Post by jstuxx »

skrebbel wrote: post #2

> And let’s not kid ourselves, very very few people are programmers at the level of a Linus Torvalds, Peter Norvig or Fabrice Bellard. Imagine them telling you that you’re hopeless and you’ll never really get it so you might as well give up now. I think this is a great point that deserves repeating.

Linus Torvalds isn't really something that great. He copied an existing kernel design which had a full open API specification, it's not like he reverse engineered MS-DOS whose API was fully closed off and secret. Linus didn't bring anything new to the world, Linux is a clone of UNIX, everything that has been added to Linux was originally developed by Sun or BSD developers and then cloned for Linux.

A good programmer in my opinion is not someone who can code in C and ASM and then brag about how he/she doesn't use C++ or whatever. A good programmer is also a designer, who can bring a new design to the world which will still be used 50 years later and even after the death of the original programmer. Thus Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and the others should be in the list of the best programmers of all time not Linus Torvalds.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#15

Post by inlined »

This reminds me a lot of a friend of mine who is a brilliant designer and also very technically adept. She couldn't build an operating system, but she could build a responsive website in 1/20th the time I could. Yet she's asked me "Am I not technical? I'm getting interviewed as a non-technical founder". This "hard core" massochim pissing contest really needs to stop. It feels like we've bonded with peers who also felt excluded growing up and we've turned this exclusion into a rite of passage rather than distancing ourselves from it.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#16

Post by kisstheblade »

cblock811 wrote: post #12
kisstheblade wrote: post #3

Seems to me the article is fighting some kind of giant strawman. I myself haven't experiences this kind of attitude. I really don't get what the point is, that some people have ego problems and hold pissing contests to see who is the most "awesome programmer"? Well that's a different thing, kind of "who's the best". Well for sure if you ask people in an office what their job is then I don't think that a banker who cr…

I absolutely ran into it when teaching myself programming, but it really isn't specific to programmers. I had conversations go boil down to: Me: "I'm learning programming" Programmer: "Good luck with that (sarcasm)" These people were dicks. I met WAY more positive and accepting people in tech during my transition, but there is still an elitist group that thinks it is special. This mentality exists everywhere, but tec…

Well dicks are everywhere. Like the problem with how females are treated "in tech", well big news, women are treated badly in all male dominated fields (and pretty much elsewhere also). You think they have it easy working on a factory floor?

But in tech these things are more in the open what with our hacker news and blogs etc, and because most of people in this field actually are good people and care about this stuff and want to deal with the issues!

I myself haven't met any "elitist programmers", just regular joes (and janes!) doing their job. On the other hand I also don't operate in SF in some tech bubble i've been hearing about :)

/end rant, sorry :)

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#17

Post by teacup50 »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
santaclaus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very few people are programmers at the level of a Linus Torvalds, Peter Norvig or Fabrice Bellard. I never really thought of Peter Norvig as a 'programmer' in the sense of Linus Torvalds -- I always lumped Norvig more into the high minded computer scientist camp. It seems like the criteria by which one judges success in the two areas are very different.

Read some of Norvigs code and tell me he's not a programmer, his stuff is some of the most elegant and efficient that I've ever seen.

Putting programmers on a pedestal fits with the YC culture of marketing via lionization of technology personalties, but it's counter-productive if your aim is to actually grow in the field.

Hero worship blinds you to two simple facts, in almost all cases:

- They're not doing anything you couldn't also do if you worked at it as hard as they have.

- Like everyone, they're fallible, making mistakes, and may even not deserve the hero worship being heaped on them. Until you've worked as hard as they have to reach a sufficient level of understanding, you're not going to have as strong of a critical eye for where the erstwhile hero is doing it wrong.

Better to put no-one on a pedestal (least of all yourself).

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#18

Post by johw »

From my observations, the 'No true X' Fallacy comes into play when a person identifies himself with his skill...it becomes his identity so much that if he encounteres someone better at "his" skill, he feels his identity threatened.

This arises when the person does not really have a lot of properties associated with his identity. I saw a lot of people who were really insecure in other areas of life besides the area where their skill applies. The insecurities vanish really fast as soon as this skill is seen only as skill and the person identifies its identity with the proper properties like values, e.g. "I am friendly" instead of "I am a true programmer". Therefore I cannot imagine this being a healthy discussion.

For the ones interested in how to get a better identity and get rid of insecurities, take a look into steve andreas book "transforming yourself". You will also learn the basics of Neurolingual Programming (NLP) as a side effect

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#19

Post by teacup50 »

jacquesm wrote: post #13
teacup50 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be your non-strawman. Consider other fields: - Is everyone suited to be a mathematician? - What about a building engineer? - An electrical engineer? None of these things are magic. None of these things are something someone can't learn "a little" about. And yet, like programming, all of these require a great deal of effort to master any degree of proficiency; this 1) takes individual dedication, and 2) is underm…

It definitely isn't 'easy'. It's probably the hardest skill I've mastered to any degree.

I'm not sure anyone has mastered it; ~50 years in, we've all just barely scratched the surface.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#20

Post by Dylan16807 »

cblock811 wrote: post #12
kisstheblade wrote: post #3

Seems to me the article is fighting some kind of giant strawman. I myself haven't experiences this kind of attitude. I really don't get what the point is, that some people have ego problems and hold pissing contests to see who is the most "awesome programmer"? Well that's a different thing, kind of "who's the best". Well for sure if you ask people in an office what their job is then I don't think that a banker who cr…

I absolutely ran into it when teaching myself programming, but it really isn't specific to programmers. I had conversations go boil down to: Me: "I'm learning programming" Programmer: "Good luck with that (sarcasm)" These people were dicks. I met WAY more positive and accepting people in tech during my transition, but there is still an elitist group that thinks it is special. This mentality exists everywhere, but tec…

>Me: "I'm learning programming" Programmer: "Good luck with that (sarcasm)"

If they're actually sarcastic, they're dicks, but a slightly skeptical "good luck with that" is a pretty appropriate response for someone that has just started at a major task. Same thing if you tell me you're going to write a novel; I encourage you, but I don't assume you will automatically make it.

>throw out things like "I hate pretend programmers".

Does pretend programmer mean someone that's learning or someone that lies about what they've already learned? I've only seen derision toward the latter, someone that claims to be an experienced coder but can't code the simplest of functions.

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