Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

jacquesmattheij.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 70 posts

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#41

Post by klibertp »

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)"

Try to look at this from the programmer's point of view for a moment. Programming is a vast subject, where you're going to be constantly learning for as long as you program. It's impossible to learn programming entirely: we still don't know how to program to get the best results, we're continuously defining the field as we go on. And that's even before you take Computer Science into account!

Granted, being a dick is not a good thing, but after a while it's also hard to be enthusiastic about people who tell you they're going to learn programming. Especially if they have no idea yet about how programming is like in the "real world". Most of them are going to - in my experience - run away screaming when they see the reality of programming. And that's even before talking about how programming jobs look like.

Personally I try my best not to be sarcastic when talking to beginners, but I do try to warn them that it may be harder than they think.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#42

Post by sepeth »

ectoplasm wrote: post #30

There is a binary test for a programmer: someone with basic proficiency in a Turing-complete language. I like this answer on SO about what that is: https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/132385/what-... > In general, for an imperative language to be Turing-complete, it needs: 1. A form of conditional repetition or conditional jump (e.g., while, if+goto) 2. A way to read and write some form of storage (e.g.,…

> Note that you can be a programmer without ever having touched a computer, people have been coming up with algorithms and integrating them into systems for ages.

Slightly different, but the first episode of SICP videos helped me to reach the same conclusion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY

We can even say Newton, or Euclid wrote programs. Maybe not by sitting in front of a computer, but they described a process to calculate something.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#44

Post by dalke »

jkot wrote: post #21

> But that’s total nonsense. It’s like saying that there are only two kinds of people when it comes to swimming, those that can learn how to swim and those that can’t It is a career advice. While most people can learn to swim, professional swimming is completely different level. If my friend is going to waste years of life and thousands of dolars to study wrong field, I would be very bad friend not to warn him. BTW:…

As an ex-lifeguard, when you talk about 'career advice' I think you are referring to professional competitive swimming as a career. I tried out for the swim team, but endurance and strength needed to be a lifeguard aren't the same as competitive speed.

A lot more people are professional lifeguards than professional competitive swimmers. I think most people can train and qualify to be a lifeguard - otherwise lifeguard pay would be a lot higher. It does not cost that much to become qualified as a lifeguard for someone who is already a strong swimmer.

There are also other fields, like professional diving, where swimming is an important component, though diving does require more expensive training.

I think this ties back to the original essay - there are many professions where knowing how to swim is critical, but the specifics differ, and the same is true in programming.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#45

Post by mseebach »

zwetan wrote: post #35

It's not about being a dick and discouraging people who want to learn programming but they should know in what they are getting into: programming is hard and the learning process is a long road of many years. Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years http://norvig.com/21-days.html with that wonderful quote "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies."

It's important to distinguish being a programmer at all and being a very good programmer.

Even Norvig (condescendingly) concedes that idiot dummies can become bad programmers. The point he misses, is what Jacques refers to a brain amplification and Excel programming: even a bad programmer can reap significant benefits from programming.

My favourite consulting gig, about ten years ago now, was for some friends of a friend. They were not very technical, most of them history graduates, who'd taught themselves just enough PHP to cobble together an online history text book in an open source CMS - and sold it to a bunch of schools, and their server was now positively on fire. I helped them move to a bigger server, and migrate their search from the CMS' awful MySQL based homebrew to Solr, and they lived to fight another day.

Norvig can call them idiot dummies from his ivory tower all day long, but these guys created a business from nothing, and it's still around today.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#47

Post by [deleted] »

inlined wrote: post #15

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 fel…

[deleted]

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#48

Post by johw »

dozzie wrote: post #36
johw wrote: post #18

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 wh…

If you will learn NLP as a side effect, I would avoid the book as a plague. If the author puts such a big lie as NLP, who knows what else is false in the book?

I do not know what experiences you made so that you think NLP is "such a big lie". It is a toolbox of methods which generally do work. Many of them are applied in behavioral therapy, which is proved to have an outstanding effect on depression (as one example).

The nice thing is that you do not have to study psychology for that, but have simple methods, which are almost common sense, to deal and/or transform most psychological issues.

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#49

Post by fit2rule »

michaelwww wrote: post #29
nazri1 wrote: post #25

> There are even studies on the subject to prove that there are ‘two kinds of people, those that can program and those that can never learn it no matter how much effort they put into it’ If you're referring to the "The Camel has Two Humps" paper then perhaps you'd like to know that the authors retracted their claim: http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

Oh wow, that is amazing. The guy flipped out on anti-depressants and wrote an influential paper that he now disavows. I wasn't expecting that.

It is quite refreshing to see someone take some responsibility for their lives while they were unhealthy, I must admit. This retraction is one of the most noble things I've seen in this realm in a long time..

Re: The 'No True Programmer' Fallacy

#50

Post by dalke »

sepeth wrote: post #42
ectoplasm wrote: post #30

There is a binary test for a programmer: someone with basic proficiency in a Turing-complete language. I like this answer on SO about what that is: https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/132385/what-... > In general, for an imperative language to be Turing-complete, it needs: 1. A form of conditional repetition or conditional jump (e.g., while, if+goto) 2. A way to read and write some form of storage (e.g.,…

> Note that you can be a programmer without ever having touched a computer, people have been coming up with algorithms and integrating them into systems for ages. Slightly different, but the first episode of SICP videos helped me to reach the same conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY We can even say Newton, or Euclid wrote programs. Maybe not by sitting in front of a computer, but they described a…

"... wrote programs". I think it's better to say they wrote algorithms. A program is an algorithm instantiated for use by a machine, which might be analog or digital.

I can accept the argument that a human following an algorithm emulates a machine, but I consider it an imperfect analogy.

Post reply on HN