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Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

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Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#251

Post by sbov »

TimJYoung wrote: post #206
fredsir wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself. If that is something that has to be done a couple of times in a projects whole life, fine. If that is how bugs are solved all the t…

I had the same reaction as you to this post, so thank you for nicely summarizing my thoughts. I'll just add: To me, the main distinction is this: you must at the very least figure out the reason for the unwanted behavior. If you don't, then you really have no idea whether your quick little fix covered up something important or not. It's one thing to investigate, find out the cause, and then say "meh, that's way too e…

Reminds me a bit of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_by_permutation

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#252

Post by avereveard »

cabalamat wrote: post #146
LoSboccacc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one million time this. as the resident tech lead I spend more time trying to get people focus on things that matters than actually designing and documenting can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display…

> we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself. Wouldn't an even simpler solution be to just use the scrolling built into browsers?

Because while default scroll is fine for scrolling pages whole, in any scrollable div that's not top level it looks out of place like a blacksmith on an iceberg.

It's a gray slab that looks like a tombstone riding a straight, dull rollercoaster and unless your site makes a point of having a '90s inspirational look there's no way to integrate them in a page so that it doesn't feel completely detached.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#253

Post by mikulas_florek »

podcastguy wrote: post #225
mikulas_florek wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notch is known to be quite a bad programmer. Or do you consider him to be 1000x better programmer just because he wrote something which earned billions? In that case he's probably 10x better programmer than Carmack

source ?

"quite bad programmer" was a big overstatement, what I meant is that he is just not 10x, but only average. Or maybe he is, the whole 10x programmer is a blurry term.

Sources: 1. you can watch him code on youtube, just search for "notch coding" 2. 0 research papers/new technologies 3. Minecraft is an average game from programmer's POV

I am not saying that he's so bad I would not hire him, I'm just saying that making Minecraft does not make him 10x programmer.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#254

Post by LoSboccacc »

fredsir wrote: post #171
LoSboccacc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one million time this. as the resident tech lead I spend more time trying to get people focus on things that matters than actually designing and documenting can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display…

> can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself. If that is something that has to be done a couple of times in a projects whole life, fine. If that is how bugs are solved all the t…

In a third party library which already touches a sensitive area that shouldn't messed with in the first place? That'd be a week of two of work, easy. Means reaching a client less. No way I'm gonna chase the white rabbit in its hole to fix something that has no side effects and zero ripercussion on other components.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#255

Post by petra »

woah wrote: post #248
petra wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect ? you are at HN, and the bubble is strong here. Heck even the large recent trend among app developers and business analysts for low-code tools, tools that require mostly GUI and some code to get pretty complex applications going, offering maybe 5x-10x (or more) boost to productivity - that trend wasn't even mentioned at HN over the last few years, even though it seems like a really important trend,…

What are some of these tools?

For enterprise software(and some IOT) Mendix and outsystems are the leaders, but there others : http://agilepoint.com/wp-content/uploads/Q2-2016-Forrester-L...

For the IOT, i believe thingworx is the leader.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#256

Post by SpaceManiac »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #250
Teckla wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs. Some level of technical excellence is required, though, otherwise complex technical debt piles up, and we are then no longer able to deliver working programs.

Technical debt on something that outer on the stack is irrelevant, there's nothing we need to build on top of this behavior

Nothing you need to build, but your customers will be building their workflow around your outer layer.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#257

Post by ram_rar »

colomon wrote: post #156
simonw wrote: post #48

In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article. There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example: "It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order…

Another great thing here: "Design sacrifice: killing 5% to get 90%." I remember a very specific example of this from Perl 6 development circa 2009. perlgeek (I think) and I had been struggling with coding up the sequence operator for a couple of months. Every time we thought we had it, someone would come up with a case that broke the system again. pmichaud (not sure if it's the same pmichaud here on HN) comes up to u…

I wish somebody writes a book accumulating such stories. Nothing excites me more than learning from history.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#258

Post by Nimitz14 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #42
Insanity wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not unimportant, the quality of said novels. 2 shitty novels a year versus one praised novel every 10 years.

Actually, I think it's the inverse. Most 2/year novelists are professionals, and it shows. Stephen King consistently wrote at about that rate. 6 months full-time is a good amount of time for a professional writer: 1-2 months for writing, and then another year or so of polishing and editing that happens in parallel with other efforts. 10 year novelists are often amateurs. That novel your next door neighbour asked you…

Two novels off the top of my head with far greater significance that anything GRRM or SK have or ever will write that took ~10 years to write: Dispatches (1968-1977) and Infinite Jest (1986-1996).

Feel free to think that a novel is something one cranks out as if it's just an object that carries no meaning, requiring no sacrifice from the author. But that's an opinion, and not fact.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#259

Post by sametmax »

Chris2048 wrote: post #218
sametmax wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can do it too, look: burden is on the you to show that "10x programmer" is not "an expression, a saying or an image". Plenty people consider the term to be not literal, and argue as such all over HN.

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/31673/10x-developer See top answer here: http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/17961... The "10 times" didn't come from nowhere, people who use the term to simply mean a great (and not literally "ten times productive") programmer ignore the origin of the term.

Oh God you are taking this seriously ain't you ?

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#260

Post by thr0waway1239 »

petra wrote: post #255
woah wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of these tools?

For enterprise software(and some IOT) Mendix and outsystems are the leaders, but there others : http://agilepoint.com/wp-content/uploads/Q2-2016-Forrester-L... For the IOT, i believe thingworx is the leader.

HN is a bubble for sure, but that may not be the reason why low-code tools are not discussed. Suffice it to say that my interest got less and less piqued with every single word in the URL you provided (I was already biased against it before even reading the report), and I couldn't get past the first few pages in the PDF before feeling bored.

I recently was looking for Java based open sourced wiki software for intranets. And I read about this software called LifeRay. To most people on these forums, LifeRay is not particularly interesting (based on searching HN for LifeRay related submissions and seeing how many comments a submission gets). The market size for LifeRay might be quite large, I don't know, but it is just not the kind of tech that people are excited enough to comment about. For example, I am fairly sure no one is going to go and read about LifeRay just because they read this blurb.

There are many different reasons for the lack of excitement as I am sure you can imagine. But the echo chamber is not the cause of the lack of discussion. Some topics are not just interesting enough, and probably never will be.

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