Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
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Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
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Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#2Developers need to learn how to think algorithmically. I still spend most of my time writing pseudocode and making diagrams (before with pen and paper, now with my iPad). It's the programmers' version of the Abraham Lincoln's quote "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#3This is laid out pretty early on by Bjourne in his PPP book[0],
> We do not assume that you — our reader — want to become a professional programmer and spend the rest of your working life writing code. Even the best programmers — especially the best programmers — spend most of their time not writing code. Understanding problems takes serious time and often requires significant intellectual effort. That intellectual challenge is what many programmers refer to when they say that programming is interesting.
Picked up the new edition[1] as it was on the front page recently[2].
[0]: https://www.stroustrup.com/PPP2e_Ch01.pdf
Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#4re·con·nais·sance
noun
military observation of a region to locate an enemy or ascertain strategic features.
Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#5re·con·nais·sance noun military observation of a region to locate an enemy or ascertain strategic features.
Did you want to grace us with any particular relevance of this knowledge or do you just wanna keep it to yourself?
Sadly, after all these years programming, I have yet to discern any real vulnerability in the US government.
Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#6Developers need to learn how to think algorithmically. I still spend most of my time writing pseudocode and making diagrams (before with pen and paper, now with my iPad). It's the programmers' version of the Abraham Lincoln's quote "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
Question in my head is, can LLMs think algorithmically?
Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#7Wait… you have the diffs… why are you retyping the lost code by hand? What am I missing?
Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#8 I'm confident enough to tout this number as effectively true, though I should mention that no company I work with has so far been willing to delete a whole day's work to prove or disprove this experiment yet.
The effect of this was that I'd occasionally come in the next morning to find that my previous day's work had been deleted. Before I eventually installed an illicit copy of SVN, I got very good at recreating the previous day's work. Rarely took more than an hour, including testing all the edge cases.
Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#9This is laid out pretty early on by Bjourne in his PPP book[0], > We do not assume that you — our reader — want to become a professional programmer and spend the rest of your working life writing code. Even the best programmers — especially the best programmers — spend most of their time not writing code. Understanding problems takes serious time and often requires significant intellectual effort. That intellectual c…
The hardest part is finding out what _not_ to code, either before (design) or after (learn from prototype or the previous iteration) having written some.
Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
#10I would absolutely agree, for any interesting programming problem. Certainly, the kind of programming I enjoy requires lots of thought and planning.
That said, don't underestimate how much boilerplate code is produced. Yet another webshop, yet another forum, yet another customization of that ERP or CRM system. Crank it out, fast and cheap.
Maybe that's the difference between "coding" and "programming"?