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Great Programmers Answer Questions From Aspiring Student
NathanBFH writes "Many of the questions that make it to the Ask Slashdot pages come from young and aspiring programmers wanting to know the role math and education play in the profession, or what makes certain programmers so much more productive than others, or what the future of the craft will look like. One young programmer by the name of Jarosaw "sztywny" Rzeszótko decided to ask these types of questions (and more) to the programmers he admired the most who also, it turns out, happen to be some of the most influential computer scientists and programmers of the last several decades. The result? Most of them happily responded. The results include the following: Linus Torvalds (Linux), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Tim Bray (XML, Atom), Guido Van Rossum (Python), Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmer), David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails Framework), and Googlers Steve Yegge and Peter Norvig."
Personally, I believe it is their creative ability to solve the problem at hand in new and innovative ways. But thats just me.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
without Donald Knuth this list is *SO* incomplete.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
...it's all about answers. Those guys answered them - and everybody knows how busy they are. I think it shows something about them - their character, the way they treat other people, how helpful they're trying to be. When I was younger I met many times people who claimed to be good programmers, but every time I asked them any kind of questions answer was fairly the same: you noob go to books, online, and other abuse. That effectively prevented me from joining OSS club. If we want more good programmers, people with passion - we need to allow them to enter mainstream - by helping them, not rejecting. Everybody started some time ago, and all of us know how hard was to get over some, now basic, problems. If we show them positive way - they will learn it - and do the same to other. jackharrer
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
I think if there was anything I got from the interviews, it is that great programming skills come from individuals that have a broad background. (And what brings this out is the juxtaposition of the different viewpoints - which is a nice approach).
I'm sure you can program fine in C. But knowing low-level assembly or even machine code can make the difference between a mediocre C programmer and a brilliant one. Similarly, knowing LISP makes you think differently about how lists work within your C programs. And so on....
These guys all come from different backgrounds and have made substantial efforts to keep their knowledge honed. They also have very open minds to new ideas - (Except for Bjarne who just sounds like a grumpy bugger).
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Brevity.
An interesting thing I noticed is the disagreement of what is "math" when talking about programming. I think it's a matter where you come from. If you started with mathematics and went into programming, then I guess everything is math.
On the other hand, a self-taught programmer often sees pretty much everything as "programming". "Math" is then algebra and all that boring stuff they learned in school like trigonometry, which they never use when coding. From this point of view, graphs, trees, recursion, etc are just programming concepts and not seen as necessarily related to the underlying mathematics.
This seems to explain the confusion that occurs when a student asks "do I need math?" to an experienced professional. The student understands math as in elementary algebra, trigonomery, derivation and matrices, and wonders what's the point all of all that when probably nowhere in the Linux kernel there's any need to derivate anything.
I believe the opposite. I think people are an infinite well of potential, their decisions shape their potential. I think whether or not you become a great artist is almost solely a function of how much you choose to dedicate yourself to it. People shape themselves into great things all the time, and things they never actually intended to be nor thought they had any potential for.
I think it's a matter of mental blocks. If a person believes they can't be an artist, then they're not going to put in the necessary effort to make it happen. They won't spend anytime contemplating things like form and composition, not because they inherently lack the capacity to understand it, but because they refuse to. If they lift that mental block and purge the self-defeatist mentality, they can become as great an artists as anyone else, regardless of where their prior talent was.
I don't understand "Lisp Hate" at all. Having used C and other C like programming languages since I learned programming, 9 years back - and having learned Lisp just last year - I always consider it approaching what programming should be much closer than an Algol descended language.
Maybe Lisp shouldn't be a first language in college, so the people who do come to it can appreciate it more. That way they have the fundamentals that occur in any programming language well out of the way.
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak (write) and remove all doubt 8-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I noticed a commonality in some of their answers. More I guess the way they answered them. When they didn't know an answer, they said "I don't know". I think the ability to admit you actually don't know the answer to something is very important. How many actors, salesman, or politicians have you ever heard use those words? Not too many!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
"I think people are an infinite well of potential, their decisions shape their potential."
Not true. Some people are clearly more gifted in certain areas than others. Peoples' brains develop differently and different task competencies arise from parts of the brain that are more or less effective in different people.
While it's true that in many fields one can become an expert through years of hard work overcoming natural limits or through years of easier work in a field they are gifted in, only someone who is naturally gifted and a hard worked can aspire to and achieve recognition as a genius in their field.
Given your example, despite my huge intellect, no matter how much I studied I would still not have the skills of composition and form of Rembrandt or Michaelangelo. I'm sure, however, that I could be a quite accomplished painter but I don't have the genius for it that these men do.
Let me close with by stating that the Standard Social Science Model (where all intellectual skills are culturally determined) is bunk. Just as some people are taller or shorter, blacker or whiter, faster or slower, some people are smarter or dumber. Just as some people have stronger upper bodies or stronger lower bodies, are faster runners or swimmers or rowers or powerlifters, the brain is modular and people are better or worse at math, music, logic, spirituality, face recognition, self-control, and many of the other functions of the brain. These genetic differences in intellectual ability are just as important as the intellectual environment and need to be aligned with it in order to achieve genius-level work.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Interesting answers, but more because of the different take on things than any individual specifics.
However, I wasn't too impressed with the answers to the productivity question.
While general intelligence doesn't hurt, I think the real key to productivity comes down to maintaining an interest/passion in the craft of designing and writing code. If you care about it then you will always be trying new techniques and paying attention to lessons that can be learned. At the neurological level, one only learns (lays down new memories) for something if one is paying attention to it, and form the strongest memories when there is emotion attached to the experience (totally different areas of the brain are used for emotional memories).
A "blah" programmer just trudges through his/her work without ever really paying attention and trying to learn - they just want to get the job done and go home. A programmer more likely to climb the productivity curve will be always be excited about what they are doing, trying to do it in the best/most consise way (I'd even say correct - many probloems do have minimal solutions that can be found), trying new techniques, etc.
It's too bad that the reality of difference in programmer producticvity isn't better understood, or there might be less outsourcing. The whole premise of outsourcing is that programmers are equivalent and therefore cheaper means better value... Personally I'd prefer to seek out the programmers who are 10-20x more productive than the herd and pay them 2 x normal rather than outsource to some Indian college graduate and pay them 1/3 x normal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegance
:)
;-)
"recent"? I have been hearing (and using) that term at least since the 80s. Even back then, it was so common that even in the "Max Headroom" series, the computer hacker-type characters exclaimed "elegant!" when looking a well crafted system.
Believe me, "elegant" is neither a new fad nor a buzzword. It's simply a generic term used to mean "simple, clean, performant, comprehensible and maintainable"; that is, everything you said, but with less waste of bandwidth
Be careful when calling a word you never heard before a "buzzword". It might be a legitimate term you just happen to never have heard before, and end up looking like a newb
"I was surprised nobody mentioned the design patterns book"
programmers program, designers design. that's why.
I don't feel like it...
Spoken like a true non-programmer.
Solving trivial problems poorly can be easy; solving interesting problems, or trivial problems in interesting and elegant ways, is not easy.
My apologies in advance if you're a Turing Prize winner.
No RMS, what a pity.
I'd say that you should be able to use any language, even one that you despise, or one that you have never ever heard of before, to solve your problem in an efficient and innovative way.
There's a difference between knowing how to program and knowing a language. If you really know how to program, then learning a new language basically amounts to finding a syntax reference for that language.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I think it's a subtle reference to Python's conventional metasyntactic variables. Python was named after Monty Python's Flying Circus, and in the place of foo, bar, baz, quux, etc. it often uses spam, eggs, and sausage.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.