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Advice From An Old Programmer

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Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#31

Post by orillian »

dolvlo wrote: post #15
mclin wrote: post #13

> People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. Totally

I disagree. People who code in the world of technology companies get respect, and quite a lot of it. Getting paid for your work is a form of respect.

Getting paid is only a form of acknowledgment that you worked, but it in no way denotes respect.

It simply says " to the best of our knowledge s/he did work for the duration of this pay period.

I agree that some people do get respect in this industry, but too many of us are simply cogs in a wheel.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#32

Post by RyanMcGreal »

Greenisus wrote: post #25
mattdeboard wrote: post #3

>Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. This is so very true in my experience. The way I think has fundamentally changed since programming became the primary professional/pastime activity in my life about two years ago. I'm 32, and everything from my politics to my decisions about where to live has been effected. (Whether I'm using the proper choice between 'effect'/…

effect/affect is simple: effect is a noun and affect is a verb. when you affect something, it causes an effect :)

Alas, "effect" is also a transitive verb: you can effect change, i.e. cause it to occur.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#33

Post by Peaker »

If he thinks he can learn any programming language in a week, he's still ignorant about programming languages.

I challenge his knowledge of/about Haskell, Agda, etc.

Also, I am sure there are plenty of "old programmers" who are still excited about programming languages, and think they matter.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#34

Post by paufernandez »

"they can go to hell"

"people who tell you it is are just jealous that you have picked up a skill they never in their wildest dreams could acquire"

As much as I get worked up by his writing, I think Zed Shaw always goes a little over the line...

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#35

Post by rdouble »

CrLf wrote: post #19
rdouble wrote: post #7

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre progra…

I think you missed the point. It's not about being a programmer working those fields. It's about using programming to help you in those fields, about programming not being the primary occupation.

I can agree with that, but he confuses the point by saying:

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession. People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect.

I don't agree that programmers are a dime a dozen in technology companies and that they get no respect. I also don't agree that a programmer would be happier running an fast food joint. Finally, I don't even agree that using programming in another profession as a "secret weapon" is necessarily going to be interesting. For instance, if medical records were all in a portable format, we could do all sorts of interesting analysis on them. However, there's about a decade of boring and painful 1970s style database programming needed before that's even possible.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#36

Post by shin_lao »

Programming as an intellectual activity is the only art

Programming isn't an art.

Programming is a craft.

The difference is that you can use a craft to make art, but crafting isn't always artistic.

Let's not get over our heads and consider ourselves artists because we can code...

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#37

Post by jholman »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #32
Greenisus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

effect/affect is simple: effect is a noun and affect is a verb. when you affect something, it causes an effect :)

Alas, "effect" is also a transitive verb: you can effect change, i.e. cause it to occur.

And alas, "affect" is also a noun.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/affect#Noun

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#38

Post by m_myers »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #32
Greenisus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

effect/affect is simple: effect is a noun and affect is a verb. when you affect something, it causes an effect :)

Alas, "effect" is also a transitive verb: you can effect change, i.e. cause it to occur.

And "affect" is also a noun, although rarely used.

  affect: the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily
          changes; also : a set of observable manifestations of a
          subjectively experienced emotion
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affect)

But it's still a good rule of thumb.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#39

Post by georgieporgie »

a3camero wrote: post #23
mattdeboard wrote: post #3

>Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. This is so very true in my experience. The way I think has fundamentally changed since programming became the primary professional/pastime activity in my life about two years ago. I'm 32, and everything from my politics to my decisions about where to live has been effected. (Whether I'm using the proper choice between 'effect'/…

Effecting = Doing Affecting = Being done to You effect change and change affects you. Something was done to your decisions so the right word is "affected".

There are a lot of non-native-English HN participants, and I think this sort of language pedantry 1) accomplishes nothing, as OP will likely still use the wrong word, and 2) discourages those who lack confidence in their language skills from posting what may be very insightful comments.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#40

Post by amackera »

MaysonL wrote: post #12
zwieback wrote: post #9

Some good points buried among juvenile posturing, I guess the "old" part must be irony. Would you take programming language advice from someone who has learned the language in "a day or a week"? I realize the point is the language doesn't really matter but statements like that and the general tenor of the post don't inspire me.

As an old programmer myself, who has learned many languages over the years, and written programs for pay in most of them, learning languages in a day or week is not at all unusual, or difficult. Especially after learning assembly for a few different machines, with widely different instruction set architectures.

It probably depends on how we are defining "learned". Does it mean memorizing all the functions in language x's stdlib? Is it learning the grammar of the language? Is it coding a project of x many lines of code? Have you learned a language when you can write a compiler / interpreter for that language?

The concept of "learning" a language is so hopelessly ambiguous it has almost no meaning to me.

I would say that I know enough of many languages to use them professionally, but I have deep knowledge of very few.

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