What Makes Great Programmers Different?
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Chris Losinger wrote:
why do programmers love to talk about themselves so much?
Uhhmmm... Isn't the article referenced writen by a journalist not a programmer? :confused:
beats me, but that's not the point. the point is that there's a steady stream of posts here (and elsewhere) where programmers muse about how special and smart programmers are. do other professions spend this much time patting themselves on the back?
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The difference between good and bad programmers, is laziness, IMHO. The good programmer uses their laziness, wisely. The bad programmer, well, they don't.
"the meat from that butcher is just the dogs danglies, absolutely amazing cuts of beef." - DaveAuld (2011)
"No, that is just the earthly manifestation of the Great God Retardon." - Nagy Vilmos (2011) "It is the celestial scrotum of good luck!" - Nagy Vilmos (2011) "But you probably have the smoothest scrotum of any grown man" - Pete O'Hanlon (2012)That has always been my motto. "Program like the laziest person on earth" (I've actually told this to a fellow co-worker). It's ultimately why I am successful in my career. When I approach a problem, the questions I ask myself are: 1. What's the quickest way to get this done? 2. How can I minimize the amount of time spent in "RMA-land?" 3. How can I minimize the lines of code without compromising the integrity of the application? 4. How can I spend more time writing replies on forums than actually doing my job? :laugh: I'm known for my speed and accuracy in programming. I don't consider myself one of the "greats," but if you want to be a hero as a programmer, you have to adopt the ethics of laziness on a grand scale.
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beats me, but that's not the point. the point is that there's a steady stream of posts here (and elsewhere) where programmers muse about how special and smart programmers are. do other professions spend this much time patting themselves on the back?
Chris Losinger wrote:
... there's a steady stream of posts here (and elsewhere) where programmers muse about how special and smart programmers are ...
Sounds like a case of "P"rogrammer envy. The posts, here at least, seem to be discussing the premise of the article.
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That has always been my motto. "Program like the laziest person on earth" (I've actually told this to a fellow co-worker). It's ultimately why I am successful in my career. When I approach a problem, the questions I ask myself are: 1. What's the quickest way to get this done? 2. How can I minimize the amount of time spent in "RMA-land?" 3. How can I minimize the lines of code without compromising the integrity of the application? 4. How can I spend more time writing replies on forums than actually doing my job? :laugh: I'm known for my speed and accuracy in programming. I don't consider myself one of the "greats," but if you want to be a hero as a programmer, you have to adopt the ethics of laziness on a grand scale.
4 posts for this year and a member for 6+ years. I have never seen you in the community before. :) I like your item #4. :thumbsup:
"the meat from that butcher is just the dogs danglies, absolutely amazing cuts of beef." - DaveAuld (2011)
"No, that is just the earthly manifestation of the Great God Retardon." - Nagy Vilmos (2011) "It is the celestial scrotum of good luck!" - Nagy Vilmos (2011) "But you probably have the smoothest scrotum of any grown man" - Pete O'Hanlon (2012) -
4 posts for this year and a member for 6+ years. I have never seen you in the community before. :) I like your item #4. :thumbsup:
"the meat from that butcher is just the dogs danglies, absolutely amazing cuts of beef." - DaveAuld (2011)
"No, that is just the earthly manifestation of the Great God Retardon." - Nagy Vilmos (2011) "It is the celestial scrotum of good luck!" - Nagy Vilmos (2011) "But you probably have the smoothest scrotum of any grown man" - Pete O'Hanlon (2012) -
I don't agree with some of the author's decisions. Personally, I'd LOVE to read "... an article on building your own DBMS in less than 100 lines of JavaScript". And you never know, publishing something like that might go a long way in helping that individual along the road to being a great programmer. I'm sure there are plenty of people on the internet who would like nothing more than to help that potential author ...
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beats me, but that's not the point. the point is that there's a steady stream of posts here (and elsewhere) where programmers muse about how special and smart programmers are. do other professions spend this much time patting themselves on the back?
Chris Losinger wrote:
do other professions spend this much time patting themselves on the back?
How many sports media outlets are there? How many journalist awards are there? How many awards for authors are there? You know that there is a waiter olympics?
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Chris Losinger wrote:
do other professions spend this much time patting themselves on the back?
How many sports media outlets are there? How many journalist awards are there? How many awards for authors are there? You know that there is a waiter olympics?
so programmers are just as narcissistic as everyone else. not special at all.
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Yes. One had to laboriously put together a NOR gate, NAND gate or J-K flipflop. Then the engineers decided these circuits can be built as Small-scale IC's and we got those. Then they decided, we could have adders, counters, timers, etc., without having to design them from scratch. Then they put together calculators capable of doing 4 functions. From there, they have taken us to systems on a chip. Software Engineers, on the other hand, still laboriously hand-crank out code. Objects are supposed to be reusable. What object is reusable? Can I go find objects in the marketplace like I can find a gate array or an Intel processor chip? Software Engineering is a joke. A bad one at that.
Seriously?? My first job I wrote an email program in assembly code. Then we made a compiler for a primitive "C-like" language. Then we got an honest to good K&R 1.0 C compiler. Then there was C++. Then garbage collection... There has been a lot of good Engineering that has gone into Software. The only reason Hardware Engineers and Chip designers seem to be more of an engineering discipline is that it costs so damn much when they screw up. Nobody will trust an undisciplined engineer to design hardware or silicon -- they can't afford it. Unfortunately the cost of creating and fixing software is so much less, that nobody thinks anything of hiring some cowboy with no discipline to write software for them.
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That has always been my motto. "Program like the laziest person on earth" (I've actually told this to a fellow co-worker). It's ultimately why I am successful in my career. When I approach a problem, the questions I ask myself are: 1. What's the quickest way to get this done? 2. How can I minimize the amount of time spent in "RMA-land?" 3. How can I minimize the lines of code without compromising the integrity of the application? 4. How can I spend more time writing replies on forums than actually doing my job? :laugh: I'm known for my speed and accuracy in programming. I don't consider myself one of the "greats," but if you want to be a hero as a programmer, you have to adopt the ethics of laziness on a grand scale.
I disagree. IMO, the great plague of contemporary programming is that hard-working programmers are the heroes. A smart Chinese said some 2.5K years ago that a good general only wins easy battles - or rather, he only wins battles which are already won. We don't fight enemies, as programmers, we fight complexity. The smart and lazy programmer will go out of his way to beat complexity into submission by only solving simple problems. The star programmer of today will create huge and complex, and above all costly solutions (both to create and to maintain) to any problem. Don't believe it? Take any enterprise app out there, and have a good look at it. All (I mean really all) apps of this type I have seen constantly spend more computational effort on the inner workings of various framework and library components than on doing something useful. If a tiny change goes against the grain of the underlying technology, it's often dropped, being too expensive. Yet all involved enterprisey programmers, management, users etc. find it awesome, and would in fact be panicked in case somebody proposed a simplification. At least that's what I was able to observe over the last ten years or so.