Aren't most people mediocre? Its only a handful of achievers that are the best. And that doesn't usually mean its desirable.
The Mediocre Programmer
21–30 of 95 posts
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#22> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
I gotta ask, What do you consider good? There's plenty of working software that's good enough. Made by fair programmers who don't care about lisp or FP. Is your scale of good affected by what you see here on HN? Because I feel like the front page of this site has the same effect as Facebook for skewing views of reality.
I just had an interview yesterday and took me a long time to solve a problem under pressure (few loops and some dictionaries and list and sorting), later last night at work found some complex issue debugging some packets and code. Is hard to measure what is good. I was thinking that maybe creating a project that is used by hundreds makes you a better one?
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#23> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
Simply not true?
Given exactly the same opportunity you think they cannot get comparable result? So you are saying there is genetic (dis)advantage to technical things that cannot be overcome?
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gotta ask, What do you consider good? There's plenty of working software that's good enough. Made by fair programmers who don't care about lisp or FP. Is your scale of good affected by what you see here on HN? Because I feel like the front page of this site has the same effect as Facebook for skewing views of reality.
I generally define things more in terms of "not bad" or "less bad" - to me software development is too rapidly an evolving discipline to allow for a static definition of good. But things like: - don't copy, paste and tweak a piece of code when additional parameters are a better option, - don't grossly overload a definition with parameters instead of breaking up a function. There's nuance there, and the question of wh…
> As far as FP is concerned, I think that the memory and performance penalties are often too heavy: there's certainly a place for mathematically provable programming - I just don't know what it is.
FP isn't necessary for mathematically provable programing. Dijkstra and Scholten did a ton of work in this area that conclusively demonstrated that. I can't do them justice in a post here, but to a first approximation the trick is that you reason about imperative programs as transformations on a state space, which is to say you think about functions.
A simple example: We want the predicate x = 3 to hold for all preconditions. The code "x := 3" establishes that predicate everywhere in the state space. That is to say, no matter what x was before the assignment, afterwards the predicate holds. While plenty of bytes have been spent on discussing why this is totally impracticable for real programs, whatever that means, we also have buzzwords like "defensive programming" that follow the same philosophy: we should write code such that when it has executed no matter what the state of the system was initially, afterwards it satisfies some specification.
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#25Being a mediocre professional is great! Do you complain when the guy cooking your meal at a restaurant is a mediocre restaurant cook? Or when the doctor prescribing your medicine is a mediocre doctor?
Anyone who is mediocre in their profession should still feel pride in what they do. Are you among the best? Maybe not, but you are good enough that people value what you do and that is what matters the most. If you find yourself in a position where nobody values what you do then you have a problem and need to fix it as soon as possible. But in that situation you aren't mediocre, instead your main goal will be to work hard so that you can become mediocre.
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#26Being a mediocre professional is great! Do you complain when the guy cooking your meal at a restaurant is a mediocre restaurant cook? Or when the doctor prescribing your medicine is a mediocre doctor? Anyone who is mediocre in their profession should still feel pride in what they do. Are you among the best? Maybe not, but you are good enough that people value what you do and that is what matters the most. If you find…
Be the best darn USAF cargo pilot there is!
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#27> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
Simply not true? Given exactly the same opportunity you think they cannot get comparable result? So you are saying there is genetic (dis)advantage to technical things that cannot be overcome?
[deleted]
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#28> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
Simply not true? Given exactly the same opportunity you think they cannot get comparable result? So you are saying there is genetic (dis)advantage to technical things that cannot be overcome?
Not sure if it's genetic, but if you've read the blub paradox about languages, I think there is something similar about how people think and solve problems. Maybe the higher level abstractions can be learned or maybe not. IQ is a real thing.
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#29> before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers Sure it's true, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about programming (and technically complex disciplines in general): most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer - indeed most never even cross through the gate of mediocrity. There seems to me to be a superegalitarian notion that all people given t…
These statements are perfectly compatible with one another:
“ most people that attempt programming will never be a good programmer”
“ all people given the same opportunities will be capable of achieving, if not the same, then comparable results on a given task”
Persistence is exceedingly rare. Falling short of your capabilities is exceedingly common.
Re: The Mediocre Programmer
#30Aren't most people mediocre? Its only a handful of achievers that are the best. And that doesn't usually mean its desirable.
Intellectual ability is more or less normally distributed, but even asking this question about programming is a pretty good signal you're nowhere near the mean of said distribution. I don't know, or really care for that matter, whether or not ability among the subset of the population that chooses to learn to write software is also normally distributed, but even if it is the mediocrities are still exceptional compared to the general public.