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Signs that you're a bad programmer

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Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#41

Post by screwperman »

ardit33 wrote: post #11
cturner wrote: post #5

I'm skeptical of these lists because people can work through things. For example, the stuff listed under "Inability to determine the order of program execution" is something that many people will get jammed on eary on as they try to take their brains (which is honed on the syntax of school level maths) into the programing world (where equals is an instruction rather than an assumptions). Another one is "Lisp is opaqu…

"It's very sweet for MIT types to make these declarations from mount olympus, but lisp is something that can take time to acquire." Don't worry. In the Valley, people from MIT don't have a good reputation as great programmers. For some reason, their education is a lot of 'theory' and less practice. Apart from Standford\Caltech, Some of the best schools that produce great programmers are your average state school. I h…

While I'm not an MIT student, I think the school puts a huge emphasis on being pragmatic ( see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530659 ). Also, given the huge disparities in abilities of the freshmen there, I'd reckon that, more often than not, an MIT education would be a humbling experience.

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#42

Post by gaius »

sophacles wrote: post #14
cturner wrote: post #5

I'm skeptical of these lists because people can work through things. For example, the stuff listed under "Inability to determine the order of program execution" is something that many people will get jammed on eary on as they try to take their brains (which is honed on the syntax of school level maths) into the programing world (where equals is an instruction rather than an assumptions). Another one is "Lisp is opaqu…

This one time I had to work at a place where a postgresql install was not only the main datastore, it was also the main system message bus by abusing notifies. Further the enterprise message bus was a homebrew thing that was written to both pass messages and do RPC, oh and be the main way to monitor if a remote site was up or not. I think both of those count as well. For those who are curious: given these were linux…

See to me, those look like homebrew solutions, and Tibco/RV or MQSeries is the proper answer.

It's easy in retrospect, but Postgres predates JMS etc by a loooong way - who's to say that wasn't the best solution at the time?

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#43

Post by jacquesm »

sophacles wrote: post #24

Oh man, I wish I had this at my last job half the team had over 50% of these symptoms, one guy had 90%. They believed, and had somehow convinced management, that they were great programmers! Some awesome practical examples from those guys below: Overheard statement "You know when I was in college I learned C. I just can't get the hang of these objects, so I try to avoid them". The guy who said this is now 34, and has…

ouch... I love the 'stop making this so complicated bit'.

While some people really don't get it I'm pretty sure that most people could learn how to program with some competence.

The only metric I've found to measure programmer competence reliably is how big a project you can manage to complete. Some people get stuck at around 100 lines, others in the thousands or tens of thousands, some can keep their rudder straight across 100's of thousands of lines.

The latter takes extreme self discipline and organization.

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#44

Post by run4yourlives »

ardit33 wrote: post #11
cturner wrote: post #5

I'm skeptical of these lists because people can work through things. For example, the stuff listed under "Inability to determine the order of program execution" is something that many people will get jammed on eary on as they try to take their brains (which is honed on the syntax of school level maths) into the programing world (where equals is an instruction rather than an assumptions). Another one is "Lisp is opaqu…

"It's very sweet for MIT types to make these declarations from mount olympus, but lisp is something that can take time to acquire." Don't worry. In the Valley, people from MIT don't have a good reputation as great programmers. For some reason, their education is a lot of 'theory' and less practice. Apart from Standford\Caltech, Some of the best schools that produce great programmers are your average state school. I h…

I think it's much simpler than that: Most good programmers are self taught. School is just increasing their exposure and nailing down some good habits.

Even fricken DeVry will help you with that if you are already motivated.

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#45

Post by run4yourlives »

sophacles wrote: post #24

Oh man, I wish I had this at my last job half the team had over 50% of these symptoms, one guy had 90%. They believed, and had somehow convinced management, that they were great programmers! Some awesome practical examples from those guys below: Overheard statement "You know when I was in college I learned C. I just can't get the hang of these objects, so I try to avoid them". The guy who said this is now 34, and has…

I'm 34. What the hell college was he going to that taught C exclusively in the mid 90s? Perhaps he was taught C++ and just didn't understand half his courses? :-)

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#46

Post by blasdel »

fhars wrote: post #30
cturner wrote: post #5

I'm skeptical of these lists because people can work through things. For example, the stuff listed under "Inability to determine the order of program execution" is something that many people will get jammed on eary on as they try to take their brains (which is honed on the syntax of school level maths) into the programing world (where equals is an instruction rather than an assumptions). Another one is "Lisp is opaqu…

The inability to determine the order of program execution is what made me give up haskell for ocaml and scala. Does that make me a bad programmer?

Don't worry, you're in good company, for example: http://janestreet.com/

I (a Haskeller) interviewed there, and ended up in an long debate with their CTO Yaron Minsky poking at warts in each other's pet languages and patterns of thought -- in retrospect we were trolling each other pretty hard just as a natural reflex.

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#47

Post by carterschonwald »

ardit33 wrote: post #11
cturner wrote: post #5

I'm skeptical of these lists because people can work through things. For example, the stuff listed under "Inability to determine the order of program execution" is something that many people will get jammed on eary on as they try to take their brains (which is honed on the syntax of school level maths) into the programing world (where equals is an instruction rather than an assumptions). Another one is "Lisp is opaqu…

"It's very sweet for MIT types to make these declarations from mount olympus, but lisp is something that can take time to acquire." Don't worry. In the Valley, people from MIT don't have a good reputation as great programmers. For some reason, their education is a lot of 'theory' and less practice. Apart from Standford\Caltech, Some of the best schools that produce great programmers are your average state school. I h…

nope not the case, I know a bunch of people at these various schools, and the crux of the problem is that theres a huge culture at MIT (and moreso than many peer schools) of celebrating herculean last minute efforts that get the grade. This is great for experimental hacking on a weekend, and "good enough" for research, but it does not encourage an incremental design sensibility, owing to its last minute nature.

This is not to say that any of these people are bad at what they do, they just have bad habits that they need to walk off, but first someone needs to tell them!

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#48

Post by [deleted] »

drusenko wrote: post #25
nbroyal wrote: post #18

Google cache for those who hit the "pageview limit exceeded" nonsense: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=clnk&#3...

wow, that's completely ridiculous. searching through their help center, they won't even tell you what the limit is, but it seems to be pretty low. just. wow.

[deleted]

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#49

Post by blasdel »

jacquesm wrote: post #43
sophacles wrote: post #24

Oh man, I wish I had this at my last job half the team had over 50% of these symptoms, one guy had 90%. They believed, and had somehow convinced management, that they were great programmers! Some awesome practical examples from those guys below: Overheard statement "You know when I was in college I learned C. I just can't get the hang of these objects, so I try to avoid them". The guy who said this is now 34, and has…

ouch... I love the 'stop making this so complicated bit'. While some people really don't get it I'm pretty sure that most people could learn how to program with some competence. The only metric I've found to measure programmer competence reliably is how big a project you can manage to complete. Some people get stuck at around 100 lines, others in the thousands or tens of thousands, some can keep their rudder straight…

LOC is a horrible metric for this, given the degree to which morons can get comfortable with copy-paste and IDE-generated boilerplate.

Gzip-bytes of source FTW.

Re: Signs that you're a bad programmer

#50

Post by jacquesm »

blasdel wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ouch... I love the 'stop making this so complicated bit'. While some people really don't get it I'm pretty sure that most people could learn how to program with some competence. The only metric I've found to measure programmer competence reliably is how big a project you can manage to complete. Some people get stuck at around 100 lines, others in the thousands or tens of thousands, some can keep their rudder straight…

LOC is a horrible metric for this, given the degree to which morons can get comfortable with copy-paste and IDE-generated boilerplate. Gzip-bytes of source FTW.

Good point, I hadn't thought of the ease with which text can be copied and how much garbage an IDE will spit out. Thanks!

Clever trick to measure the real information content of code using gzip too.

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