Philosophy Major bad Programmer
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Dan, did you read your posting before you hit send? Your argument is simply an ad hominem followed by a supposedly conclusive statement. If this is an appropriate display of your logic, I'd hate to see what happens to one of your programs when it hits an 'if-else' statement. Let's begin. 'Philosophies are methods of restricting the way one's brain works.' Now, Dan when you make statements like this, it is good to include at least one line of justification. Nevertheless, there seems to be some ignorance on your part about what philosophy is. You seem to be suggesting that it is a belief or attitude like 'hey man, my philosophy is love everyone'. The word philosophy is greek for 'love of wisdom'. The subject matter is meta in nature. It is interpreting and understanding beliefs. Second, you should never make arguments by analogy since the analogy is never precise. You could have picked that up in a logic course in college. Finally everyone has a 'philosophy' (that's the naive sense in which you're using the word), Dan. But I fail to see this connection: studying a philosophy --> wanting a philosophy that suits (vague) one --> bad programmers. You wrote, Dan. I only distilled it. Guess that BA is good for something after all.
It's called "humour" -- apparently, this is different from "humor" in some subtle way. LOL
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I think we all know that writing software is a matter of black and white. There may be many different ways to successfully solve a given problem, but the different methods will produce concrete results - unless you are writing in Prolog, then you may not know the outcome. We also tend to find a method that ‘works for us’ and continue to use that same sequence of code to solve similar problems. A programmer working with me many years ago either had a short attention span or leaned on his professors’ admonition that everything in the world is gray… He would never reuse a snippet that worked and because we were asked to comment our code (this was back in cryptic Assembler/Fortran land) he would liberally sprinkle ‘THIS MIGHT WORK’ anywhere there was questionable logic. Lesson: Don’t hire Philosophy Majors for Dev projects!
Gray beard, but no holey tee-shirts, 50+ yrs writing software.
Frank Towle wrote:
A programmer working with me many years ago either had a short attention span or leaned on his professors’ admonition that everything in the world is gray… He would never reuse a snippet that worked and because we were asked to comment our code (this was back in cryptic Assembler/Fortran land) he would liberally sprinkle ‘THIS MIGHT WORK’ anywhere there was questionable logic.
Not sure I understand that...the logic was "questionable" yet you are still asserting that it would work absolutely 100% of the time? Or you just didn't like that the person noted that there was in fact some question as to exactly what might happen?
Frank Towle wrote:
Lesson: Don’t hire Philosophy Majors for Dev projects!
Are you referring to a senior developer who has years of experience and fails to match the culture of the group? Or who is just incompetent? Obviously then there is a failure in the interview process in that it didn't weed them out in the first place. Or alternatively didn't proactively review their product once they started and get rid of them when they failed to meet expectations. Or are you talking about a novice with no experience? Any company that hires beginning programmers and does not provide extensive long term mentoring deserves whatever happens. Those cases certainly have nothing to do with the employee.
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Dan, did you read your posting before you hit send? Your argument is simply an ad hominem followed by a supposedly conclusive statement. If this is an appropriate display of your logic, I'd hate to see what happens to one of your programs when it hits an 'if-else' statement. Let's begin. 'Philosophies are methods of restricting the way one's brain works.' Now, Dan when you make statements like this, it is good to include at least one line of justification. Nevertheless, there seems to be some ignorance on your part about what philosophy is. You seem to be suggesting that it is a belief or attitude like 'hey man, my philosophy is love everyone'. The word philosophy is greek for 'love of wisdom'. The subject matter is meta in nature. It is interpreting and understanding beliefs. Second, you should never make arguments by analogy since the analogy is never precise. You could have picked that up in a logic course in college. Finally everyone has a 'philosophy' (that's the naive sense in which you're using the word), Dan. But I fail to see this connection: studying a philosophy --> wanting a philosophy that suits (vague) one --> bad programmers. You wrote, Dan. I only distilled it. Guess that BA is good for something after all.
Hmmm, didn't somebody once observe that there is more in the world than what your or my philosophy contain? Think he was called Shakes A Spear, wrote it about 10 years ago. :) I'll have to agree with you on this one. Faulty logic leads to bad conclusions: I met a really bad programmer once, no matter what I did, he wouldn't get better. He was human. Therefore all humans are bad programmers.
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Frank Towle wrote:
A programmer working with me many years ago either had a short attention span or leaned on his professors’ admonition that everything in the world is gray… He would never reuse a snippet that worked and because we were asked to comment our code (this was back in cryptic Assembler/Fortran land) he would liberally sprinkle ‘THIS MIGHT WORK’ anywhere there was questionable logic.
Not sure I understand that...the logic was "questionable" yet you are still asserting that it would work absolutely 100% of the time? Or you just didn't like that the person noted that there was in fact some question as to exactly what might happen?
Frank Towle wrote:
Lesson: Don’t hire Philosophy Majors for Dev projects!
Are you referring to a senior developer who has years of experience and fails to match the culture of the group? Or who is just incompetent? Obviously then there is a failure in the interview process in that it didn't weed them out in the first place. Or alternatively didn't proactively review their product once they started and get rid of them when they failed to meet expectations. Or are you talking about a novice with no experience? Any company that hires beginning programmers and does not provide extensive long term mentoring deserves whatever happens. Those cases certainly have nothing to do with the employee.
Hi J, Ph.M. was 'inherited' with the project. And no, much of his logic would have to be rewritten, before the days of formal code reviews... 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' approach. This was in a package that was sold throughout the 1970's and 80's for $200K+ each copy - We relegated Ph.M. to writing report programs (report writers didn't exist) that we could quickly verify and did not let him near any LOB processing. 'Culture of the group'? We never heard of such a thing then! You just worked with who you were given, but yes, frustrating at times - one of our crew, I'm sorry TEAM, punched his hand through a plastered wall he got so mad at something, probably ME telling him he had to do something over... Training programmers was very expensive, we would have several years salary invested in someone who had never SEEN a computer let alone program one. You would have to agree today is very different! We eventually re-wrote this same package for three different platforms using basically the same design, although you couldn't say the environments were anywhere near the same. I was then asked to head up a NEW Quality Assurance department to get our lack of same under control; the first task was to quantify almost TEN THOUSAND bug reports across the now FOUR platforms - we were still selling product - 'Outstanding in our Field' There would be value in formal 'Computing History' courses to provide perspective about just how far (or not) this industry has progressed in 50 years.
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It's a generality, not true across the board. Most programmers could play football (real football, not the gay soccer kind), but few should be on an NFL roster. Now soccer, or even basketball, we could probably do. I bet most of us could flop pretty well, and we're almost all good at bitching about everyone else. :laugh:
Bert Mitton wrote:
real football, not the gay soccer kind
Funny thing that, it's in American handoval that people lie in piles grabbing each others crotches, while the real football as it's played in the rest of the world is supposed to be gay...
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Hmmm, didn't somebody once observe that there is more in the world than what your or my philosophy contain? Think he was called Shakes A Spear, wrote it about 10 years ago. :) I'll have to agree with you on this one. Faulty logic leads to bad conclusions: I met a really bad programmer once, no matter what I did, he wouldn't get better. He was human. Therefore all humans are bad programmers.
Mr. Spear was writing about a fantasy world - not reality! You write like a real Ph.D Some humans were brilliant programmers, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Charlie Bachman and many others come to mind regardless of what I did. Don't think any of them had one of those - you know (ph.d)
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It's a generality, not true across the board. Most programmers could play football (real football, not the gay soccer kind), but few should be on an NFL roster. Now soccer, or even basketball, we could probably do. I bet most of us could flop pretty well, and we're almost all good at bitching about everyone else. :laugh:
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But 100% accurate.
Actually, Edsger Dykstra pointed out in the early '90s that computer science programs were producing inferior programmers compared to other programs, most notabley physics, math, psychology...and philosophy. What you have there is simply a compulsively honest nerd. Don't blame the higher education, I assure you this set of habits probably got ingrained somewhere in elementary school.
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Bert, I've held onto this story for 40 years - I think it's humorous. But... if the shoe fits...
The story IS humorous...it's your conclusion that sucked.
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That might not imply that all programmers with philosophy degrees suck, but I will imply it, using the following logic: philosophies, like religions, are methods of restricting the way one's brain works. Pretty much anyone studying enough philosophy will eventually come across one he'll glom onto because it appeals to whatever's lacking in his own personality: in the same way that psychology students study psychology to find out why they're fucked, philosophy students study philosophy because they're trying to find a philosophy that suits them. So then, taking this, make them into programmers and see how far they get. It's almost guaranteed to be a disaster.
Edsger Dykstra pointed out philosophy majors as one of the better sources of good programmers in his article criticizing computer science programs as not producing a better crop of programmers. You see, there is very little opportunity to learn analysis in computer science, because the programs are oriented to teaching technique and theory - it wasn't until graduate school that I was REQUIRED to have adequate error handlers in my homework code, or to analyze its performance and optimize it for peak efficiency. More than half of the students my classes in the M.S. Comp Sci program had degrees in areas other than computer science. Contrast this with philosophy, where detailed formal analyses of philosphical positions and the consequences that arise from them are demanded from you starting sophomore year. Or to my major, psychology (the B.S. kind, not the B.A. kind), where in my sophomore year I had to turn in nine separate experimental reports with analysis (my B.S. program also required two semesters of BASIC programming, as our faculty believed that learning to program would help us perform statistical analyses and mathematical models of behavior as the state of the art improved). And of course there's physics and mathematics, both of them producing bumper crops of programmers every year. Computer science programs have improved a bit thanks to the criticisms of Dykstra and others...but the other fields have not themselves grown less difficult. I don't know what your background is, but the fact is, ANYONE can become a programmer without ever having to learn to write an explicit report detailing how and why their program works, and what its side effects could be if left in operation. Most programmers, in fact, are barely competent enough to leave understandable comments. About 90% of programmers are what I call "coders", as they will code whatever they're told to code. Virtually every programmer I've met who I'd consider to be in the ten percent I call "developers" had a bachelor's degree in another area, and sometimes a master's in another area as well. You might want to consider a bit more exposure to philosophy and psychology yourself, enough at least to avoid making yourself look like a bigoted pinbrain by making childishly insulting and glaringly ignorant remarks about these fields - believe me, there's plenty of room for critiques and VALID insults in both fields if only you know more about them than the fact that you don't like them. As I said earlier, your story was amusing, it's just th
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Edsger Dykstra pointed out philosophy majors as one of the better sources of good programmers in his article criticizing computer science programs as not producing a better crop of programmers. You see, there is very little opportunity to learn analysis in computer science, because the programs are oriented to teaching technique and theory - it wasn't until graduate school that I was REQUIRED to have adequate error handlers in my homework code, or to analyze its performance and optimize it for peak efficiency. More than half of the students my classes in the M.S. Comp Sci program had degrees in areas other than computer science. Contrast this with philosophy, where detailed formal analyses of philosphical positions and the consequences that arise from them are demanded from you starting sophomore year. Or to my major, psychology (the B.S. kind, not the B.A. kind), where in my sophomore year I had to turn in nine separate experimental reports with analysis (my B.S. program also required two semesters of BASIC programming, as our faculty believed that learning to program would help us perform statistical analyses and mathematical models of behavior as the state of the art improved). And of course there's physics and mathematics, both of them producing bumper crops of programmers every year. Computer science programs have improved a bit thanks to the criticisms of Dykstra and others...but the other fields have not themselves grown less difficult. I don't know what your background is, but the fact is, ANYONE can become a programmer without ever having to learn to write an explicit report detailing how and why their program works, and what its side effects could be if left in operation. Most programmers, in fact, are barely competent enough to leave understandable comments. About 90% of programmers are what I call "coders", as they will code whatever they're told to code. Virtually every programmer I've met who I'd consider to be in the ten percent I call "developers" had a bachelor's degree in another area, and sometimes a master's in another area as well. You might want to consider a bit more exposure to philosophy and psychology yourself, enough at least to avoid making yourself look like a bigoted pinbrain by making childishly insulting and glaringly ignorant remarks about these fields - believe me, there's plenty of room for critiques and VALID insults in both fields if only you know more about them than the fact that you don't like them. As I said earlier, your story was amusing, it's just th
Hmmm... I'm wondering how many sense-of-humour-failures I can notch up today. Yes, yes - you're right... except in one thing: not anyone can become a programmer: I'd say one person in a hundred probably can, in a real sense: I also don't think it's a discipline that can be taught unless you're predisposed to doing it anyway. Incidentally, I'm not defending my conclusion, and I hardly expected anyone to take it seriously, let alone waste five paragraphs attacking it. However (check your psychology degree for this one) I guess I must've touched a nerve since that's what happened.
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Bert Mitton wrote:
real football, not the gay soccer kind
Funny thing that, it's in American handoval that people lie in piles grabbing each others crotches, while the real football as it's played in the rest of the world is supposed to be gay...
In fairness, we have lingerie football[^].
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Bert, I've held onto this story for 40 years - I think it's humorous. But... if the shoe fits...
Some people are just sensitive. Hell, I'm blonde, polish, and mennonite. If I took offense at every opportunity, I'd be mad at probably half the jokes ever written.
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Bert Mitton wrote:
real football, not the gay soccer kind
Funny thing that, it's in American handoval that people lie in piles grabbing each others crotches, while the real football as it's played in the rest of the world is supposed to be gay...
Gave it a 5, tho. Funny response.
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Hmmm... I'm wondering how many sense-of-humour-failures I can notch up today. Yes, yes - you're right... except in one thing: not anyone can become a programmer: I'd say one person in a hundred probably can, in a real sense: I also don't think it's a discipline that can be taught unless you're predisposed to doing it anyway. Incidentally, I'm not defending my conclusion, and I hardly expected anyone to take it seriously, let alone waste five paragraphs attacking it. However (check your psychology degree for this one) I guess I must've touched a nerve since that's what happened.
Dan Sutton wrote:
Incidentally, I'm not defending my conclusion, and I hardly expected anyone to take it seriously, let alone waste five paragraphs attacking it. However (check your psychology degree for this one) I guess I must've touched a nerve since that's what happened
It was the tone of the message more than anything else - it's a tone I'm all too familiar with ("think you're smart, college boy?"). Unfortunately, it's never easy to tell exactly what attitude is behind the print you see on the Web without explicit markers of some sort (e.g. ). Again, and also unfortunately, you managed to quote (with nearly identical phrasing) more than one programmer I worked with in the past, and those quotes were being directed to me personally...which might have been easier to take if I didn't have twice the programming skills asleep that these individuals had on their best day. All told, it was all too easy to believe you meant what you said in exactly the way you said it...but, as my own hot buttons had been pressed, I didn't take the time to ask you if you really meant it that way before I launched my "retaliatory strike." Apologies. I do note that programming education was pretty happenstance forty years ago, and that few if any resource materials were available to assist your education unless your employer provided them. At my high school in 1974, my first BASIC course was taught using a teletype hooked in the old GE Apple Time Sharing Service, 300 baud (bits-per-second, more or less) and paper tape to store the program. We were taught the language, but not really how to use it effectively. It wasn't until college that I was introduced to structured programming and why spaghetti code was bad...but by the time I was finishing my M.S., enormous advances had been made available to anyone who could buy or borrow a book on algorithms and data structures, or even how to document your program. And still, the clueless would wind up with programming jobs. I helped hire such a total waste of space myself in 1999 for an Internet start-up...she could program, she just couldn't figure out how to read someone else's code and understand it, so she wrote everything from scratch...and while it worked some of the time, reinventing the wheels we had already built and were busily polishing was not on our agenda that year, especially since it was obvious from her code that she was not going to be giving the Turing
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Dan Sutton wrote:
Incidentally, I'm not defending my conclusion, and I hardly expected anyone to take it seriously, let alone waste five paragraphs attacking it. However (check your psychology degree for this one) I guess I must've touched a nerve since that's what happened
It was the tone of the message more than anything else - it's a tone I'm all too familiar with ("think you're smart, college boy?"). Unfortunately, it's never easy to tell exactly what attitude is behind the print you see on the Web without explicit markers of some sort (e.g. ). Again, and also unfortunately, you managed to quote (with nearly identical phrasing) more than one programmer I worked with in the past, and those quotes were being directed to me personally...which might have been easier to take if I didn't have twice the programming skills asleep that these individuals had on their best day. All told, it was all too easy to believe you meant what you said in exactly the way you said it...but, as my own hot buttons had been pressed, I didn't take the time to ask you if you really meant it that way before I launched my "retaliatory strike." Apologies. I do note that programming education was pretty happenstance forty years ago, and that few if any resource materials were available to assist your education unless your employer provided them. At my high school in 1974, my first BASIC course was taught using a teletype hooked in the old GE Apple Time Sharing Service, 300 baud (bits-per-second, more or less) and paper tape to store the program. We were taught the language, but not really how to use it effectively. It wasn't until college that I was introduced to structured programming and why spaghetti code was bad...but by the time I was finishing my M.S., enormous advances had been made available to anyone who could buy or borrow a book on algorithms and data structures, or even how to document your program. And still, the clueless would wind up with programming jobs. I helped hire such a total waste of space myself in 1999 for an Internet start-up...she could program, she just couldn't figure out how to read someone else's code and understand it, so she wrote everything from scratch...and while it worked some of the time, reinventing the wheels we had already built and were busily polishing was not on our agenda that year, especially since it was obvious from her code that she was not going to be giving the Turing
Yeah - I got lucky: my first programming teacher taught us Algol 60 (this would've been at some point in the late '70s or something): he refused to teach us BASIC ("I'm here to teach programming, not Pidgin English!") so structure came into it pretty early on, as did Dijkstra, who was a god as far as our teacher was concerned... Of course, by then I'd already been programming (at home) for several years -- I did notice that most of the students who couldn't already program by the time they started the class never really learned -- it appeared to have to be something one would cultivate in one's self, rather than just a type of course material like any other. In any event, after that came a PDP 11/34 which had paper tape readers, punch card readers, and a front panel with a bunch of lights on it where you could program the thing one instruction at a time, by putting your (binary) op code into an accumulator, putting a "store" instruction into the instruction register and then hitting the "execute one instruction" button. Beautiful. Makes you really understand how great the Pascal compiler on the thing was. I've generally tried to avoid hiring programmers to work on any of my stuff -- as a veteran of the genre, I tend not to play well with others... but I've managed to write some pretty massive projects regardless. I came to America in '93, and the idea of a programmer who knew more than one (or eight) language(s) seemed to be a revelation to the people I ran into, so life has not been dull...
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Mr. Spear was writing about a fantasy world - not reality! You write like a real Ph.D Some humans were brilliant programmers, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Charlie Bachman and many others come to mind regardless of what I did. Don't think any of them had one of those - you know (ph.d)
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It's a generality, not true across the board. Most programmers could play football (real football, not the gay soccer kind), but few should be on an NFL roster. Now soccer, or even basketball, we could probably do. I bet most of us could flop pretty well, and we're almost all good at bitching about everyone else. :laugh:
Hmm, American Football? I've long been bemused by the misnomer! Why do you a call game in which players run around carrying, throwing, and catching a ball "football", though the ball is hardly ever touched by feet? It would be more accurate to call it "hand ball". The real game of football is one of skill based on using the feet to control a ball. It is not a "game" of brute force - battery, barging and wrestling - nor of grown men rolling around on the ground cuddling each other in large groups ;) The made up word "soccer" does nothing to describe the game, but is slang derived from the word "association", as in Football Association, the body which drew up the rules of play in the 19th century.
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Mr. Spear was writing about a fantasy world - not reality! You write like a real Ph.D Some humans were brilliant programmers, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Charlie Bachman and many others come to mind regardless of what I did. Don't think any of them had one of those - you know (ph.d)
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So, let me get this straight- you hire one kid with a philosophy degree that sucks and that implies all programmers with philosophy degrees suck? Now, that's questionable logic! Or are you suggesting that an employer just shouldn't hire some one to do a job that he hasn't been formally trained to do? If that's the case, then why single out people with philosophy backgrounds? I have a BA in philosophy and an MS in computer science. Prima facie, my philosophy training may seem irrelevant to software dev, but in fact it enhances my dynamic skills. I'm willing to bet that you imagine the philosopher to be some idealistic nitwit who sits in dingy coffee shacks and smokes hand-rolled tobacco while pondering the meaning of life. But in fact, philosophy, especially contemporary analytical philosophy, is a stringent discipline exalting logic and reasoning above all things. If this kid knowingly compromised the rules of logic, then he does not have a philosophical background at all. Any first year philosophy major learns that the foundation of meaning and understanding rest on the shoulders of unyielding logic. Another thing these 18 year-old children learn that you seemed to miss is that- there exist an X does not imply that for all X.