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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."
What makes a programmer great? The software they produce? The influence they have in the markt? The money they earn?
or what makes certain programmers so much more productive than others
The most productive programmers have slashdot.org pointed at 0.0.0.0 in their hosts file.
liqbase
I hear he's really approachable in person.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
My work here is dung.
Jarosaw "sztywny" Rzeszótko
That's it... I resign!!
- suv4x4's spellchecker.
(and
(why? (am (forced 'I (to-learn (language (programming 'the-LISP))))))
(seriously?)
(what? 'the-hell)
(can 'I (program (in 'C) 'just-fine)
)
Fixed that for you.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
...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
She might have some difficulty answering the questions though, what with being dead for the last 154 years.
What's this?! The great hacker god Eric Raymond is not in this list?!
- the-codea ymond2.jpg. jpgm l
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them
http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/suit.html
http://www.self-gov.org/celebrities/images/eric-r
http://pepelucho.blogsome.com/images/eric_raymond
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bos/bos086.htm
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.ht
Everyone knows that dead people are shit at filling out questionaires.
Great voters - but questionaires? It's just not their thing.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Where are Turing, Knuth and Parnas
At least two of them are very definitely unavailable for email interviews...
No, without Godel it's incomplete but if you included him it would be inconsistent.
Ame
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 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.
Knuth is great for his theoretical work, but I don't know if he'd rank up there as an important programmer. Although I suppose someone could make an argument for it based on his work on TeX.
The real great programmers omissions I see are Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. It's hard to top creating the most influencial programming language and the most influential OS of all time. (C and Unix, obviously).
When it comes to the OS, Thompson would be a thousand times more interesting to talk to than Torvalds.
Happy people make bad consumers.
He missed Larry Wall, creator of Perl. Not that Perl makes for great programs (though the fact that Perl works so much, so often, says a lot). But because Wall's C programming of Perl is some of the best programming out there. Perl, an interpreted language, runs faster than most equivalent C programs written by lesser programmers than Wall. It runs on more hardware than almost any language, including Java (and runs better on more HW than Java). Perl has the largest free, open source archive and one of the best FOSS communities, and has since before that was considered a feature of the language. Including the source to the language itself.
Wall also wrote rn, which was equivalent to Usenet for thousands of people for many years, and patch, on which practically everyone outside the MS programming world depend.
These programs are long-lived and popular because Larry programmed them so well to do their essential function. And since he's had to deal with so many obfuscated Perl programs, even winning the Obfuscated C Programming Contest twice, I expect he has a lot of wisdom to deliver to aspiring programmers with question.
He's also probably still available to answer these questions.
--
make install -not war
Off-topic trivia - "z" is worth 10 points in scrabble in English, but only worth 1 point in the Polish edition.
Polish guy goes to the optometrist. Optometrist tells him to read the chart which starts with letters S-L-Q-W-J-Z-B-X etc. etc.. Polish guys stares and jaw falls open. Optometrist says, "what's wrong, you can't read the chart?". Polish guy goes "read it? I went to school with the guy!"
You are taking the quotes completely out of context, Torvalds wrote that minix was brain-dead, not him. It's hyperbole, not a personal attack. Tanenbaum obviously made the grade comment in jest. The actual quote is
including smiley, and then later
He was trying to be light and funny, Tanenbaum isn't an idiot. He knew linux was a solid OS, he just disagreed with how it was made, the philosophies behind it. Ohh, and by the way, this is how Torvalds responded:
Yeah, they really seem to hate eachothers guts.
Just to ram my point home, this is how Torvalds ended his first message
Two smart people having a debate. They have different philosophies, true, but they do have respect for eachother. Torvalds even says in Just for Fun that one of the major inspirations for Linux was Tanenbaums work.
Dude, if you are going to bring out the "have you even read..."-argument, make sure that YOU actually have read it. Otherwise, there is a big chance that you will look stupid, and no one wants that.