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Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

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Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#61

Post by jpr »

joshhart wrote: post #32
abstractbill wrote: post #10

Reflecting upon my previous post, I am wondering why LISP triumphalists like Paul Graham annoy me so much? Perhaps it is because I used to be one myself, in spirit if not in syntax. And also because I now see them as a major symptom of what ails programming. Responding just to the Lisp part of this post, all programming languages suck (but not equally!). Lisp isn't designed to let you show how clever you are, it's ju…

The only language? What about Haskell's type inference and lazy computation? Or the great pattern matching. These show up in my current favorite language - Scala - but I don't exactly think this a mainstream language.

You can implement type inference and lazy computations in standard Common Lisp. You can't implement macros or proper runtime redefinition of functions in standard Haskell.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#63

Post by nellboy »

jwecker wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what his definition of intelligence is. Obviously not the same as mine. He states that the reason "triumphalists" annoy him so much is that he used to be one- and then goes on to explain himself programming something very unintelligent in form and function that took him 20 years to fix. I would paraphrase the post as "I used to be dumb and arrogant, but after 20 years I realize how dumb I was and why don…

I find that 'intelligent programmers' tend to write better code than 'programmers with intelligence'.

e.g. 'programmers with intelligence' can handle a lot of complexity and need to refactor a lot less, and thus can write messy code and get away with it.

'Intelligent programmers' understand that refactoring is essential and that clearly written, well structured code makes it easy to work with, and far less taxing on the brain.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#64

Post by [deleted] »

wisty wrote: post #26
camccann wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glorifying "hard work" as more important than intelligence is a common mistake made by intelligent people when they finally realize that sitting around being intelligent is not, in fact, sufficient to make things happen (this is often surprisingly contrary to expectations formed during schooling).

I think intelligence and attitude are both multipliers. The difference is, if you glorify attitude (to yourself) it can help you improve your attitude. Glorifying intelligence won't improve your intelligence so easily.

[deleted]

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#66

Post by [deleted] »

ckuehne wrote: post #42
strlen wrote: post #34

I agree that attitude trumps pure intelligence in general for programming projects. Indeed, pure intelligence tests (e.g., "why are manhole covers round?") fell out of favour as interview techniques at Microsoft. As far as I know (my own and friends' personal interview experience) Google never used such for programming interviews: ability to apply intelligence to the task at hand (programming, software engineering/ar…

Just to clarify: "why are manhole covers round?" is not a test of intelligence in the narrower sense. "Add the next number in the following sequence 1,4,9,16" is.

[deleted]

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#67

Post by agentultra »

jacabado wrote: post #55
agentultra wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are humans not capable of enlightenment or are we too far gone in the "me too" era to think for ourselves and learn from others? Being around a better programmer will rub off on you even if you aren't as intelligent. Intelligence isn't a hard metric you can rely upon in my experience. Otherwise intelligent people have made amazingly stupid mistakes on more than one occassion. Intelligence is only useful if you have t…

I agree completely but that shouldn't drive the way a team works. If the convention says that the code should be as clever as it could be you will have problems. If your tech lead acknowledges some limitations on the team he will have to compromise cleverness for simplicity. And everybody will still learn. I can't see why my first comment was downmodded, and it's happening for my last comments, confusing or bad gramm…

I don't think clever code implies obfuscated or difficult to read code.

Some of the most clever code I've read is conscious of when it breaks from convention.

Any intelligent person will unconsciously understand conventions and recognize their importance. They will also possess an intuition of when those conventions should be ignored, changed, or removed entirely. This is a part of skill acquisition they should be able to pass on to others in your team.

Overly strict adherence to convention only insures that the least-capable person on your team can contribute. Subsequently that person will never be encouraged to improve their skills. Blindly following convention says to me that you're willing to accept inefficiencies and poor design choices for the sake of maintainability by your least competent team member.

You need a mix; the most competent at the top to lead the least competent. Ideally everyone becomes the most competent at some point. Generally you will have people at various points on the ladder. This is a good thing.

We don't need egalitarian dogma ruffling with the food-chain. It's a pretty good system in many cases. :)

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