In my experience, you're rather inaggerating. I'm not even 10y into my career and if I get to actually code for 2h a day, that's already a success. Most of my time nowadays is documentation, meetings, jira, research and calls with the clients.
What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk?
3 years ago by Mac to c/programming
agressivelyPassive 15 points 3 years ago
pinchcramp 4 points 3 years ago
I think it heavily depends on the size and (management) culture of your employer. My most recent gig had me sit in way too many meetings that were way too long (1hr daily anyone?), dealing with a lot of tooling issues and touching legacy code as little as possible while still adding new features to our main product on a daily basis. Obviously "we don't need a clean solution. We're going to replace that codebase anyways, next yearβ’".
The job before that had me actually code for about 80% of the time, but writing tests is annoying and slows you down and we don't have time for that. Odd how there was always time for fixing the regressions later.
agressivelyPassive 6 points 3 years ago
I think it's also a question of how you position yourself. Without noticing it, I've developed a kind of "will to power" in the sense that I want to shape the product we're working on. So instead of just sitting in my corner and working on ticket after ticket, I'm actively seeking conversations with stakeholders to find out, whether it even makes sense to implement it as described in the ticket, or propose new ideas, etc.
Also, my mother taught me (by virtue of being completely untechnical) how to explain complex problems and systems in a way that non-technical people understand. So if "a developer" was needed, management often enough volunteered me.
I could pull myself mostly out of this stuff, but I'd get even more frustrated not being able to at least try to make things a bit better. So I'm putting on the headset once more.
pkill 2 points 3 years ago
also microservices in my experience worsen this sort of bitrot where the amount of usual duplication it involves means that even if you manage not to have poorly documented spaghetti magic that gets updated once in an eon in one service or two it still might be elsewhere and this
- discourages refactoring due to the duplication
- harms consistency
- encourages lousiness because your stuff might mostly work on a surface level with the rest of your system because you only expose APIs and don't need to worry that much about how your methods will be called. Which might seem convenient to use and implement in an ideal scenario, but could easily become troublesome to debug if anything goes wrong.
abbadon420 4 points 3 years ago
I really don't mind any of it though.
pinchcramp 2 points 3 years ago
Different strokes for folks I guess π€·ββοΈ
BrianTheeBiscuiteer 12 points 3 years ago
If you're lucky this statement is actually true 5% of the time.
Isoprenoid 10 points 3 years ago
So roll a d20?
Feathercrown 3 points 3 years ago
Remove technical debt: Programming (Intelligence) or Programming (Wisdom), DC 15 to 20
Create technical debt: Programming (Charisma), automatic success
halloween_spookster 45 points 3 years ago
Myth: software engineers replicate value similar to a factory worker making the same item over and over
Truth: software engineers are closer to artists than factory workers IMO. We find and create new value, not replicate existing value
callouscomic 26 points 3 years ago
And just like artists, the vast majority aren't very good at it.
ShroOmeric 20 points 3 years ago
Well that's true for every field.
agressivelyPassive 10 points 3 years ago
But programming is definitely more open to the idea of people just showing up and claiming to know stuff. You wouldn't trust Steve to build a bridge just because he watched a bunch of engineering videos on YouTube.
pearsaltchocolatebar 1 point 3 years ago
Eh, I'm naturally good at it. I got shoved into the programming UIL group in school with absolutely no background in programming and tied for 3rd place.
But, I really don't enjoy doing it.
coloredgrayscale 9 points 3 years ago
Why are you in programming related communities if you don't enjoy it?
pearsaltchocolatebar 7 points 3 years ago
I browse by all
Plus, I have to do light coding for my job (script writing)
BrianTheeBiscuiteer 16 points 3 years ago
That's the difference between a programmer and a computer scientist, but even I (a computer scientist) I'm not an expert in hardware, networking, or OS level operations because that's not my daily focus.
Landless2029 12 points 3 years ago
I compare my career to the medical field. Sure there are some crossovers but lots of specialties.
Would you consult a dentist about your bowel movements?
UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT 6 points 3 years ago
I don't even remember my times tables anymore!
abbadon420 7 points 3 years ago
I know my wife sets the table at 6 o'clock
jadero 5 points 3 years ago
I call that the "nerd equivalency problem". I think it's the source of much (most? all?) of the problems with software that comes out of organizations that are not programming shops by nature.
"We're not moving fast enough (or, "I have this great idea!"), hire another nerd!"
The problem also exists within individual programmers ("sure, I can do that UX/UI thingy, just let me finish building this ray-tracing thingy"), but that's just an ordinary cognitive weakness that affects us all (thinking that being expert in one field makes one expert in all). It's the job of proper leadership to resist that, not act as though it's true.
tatterdemalion 36 points 3 years ago
That a "working" prototype with no tests is just as good as a carefully-designed and well-tested feature. I see this happen so often that a coder puts a prototype in front of a product manager or exec and they are like, "this is exactly what we need, now! Ship that!" And then misery ensues for all of the engineers that need to maintain this piece of garbage. As managers pressure the engineers to build new features on top, they inevitably break fundamental parts of it, and without a confident leader to demand that tech debt is paid off, that product will consume the souls of many desperate coders.
In contrast, if you do it right the first time, there will be significant parts of code that never need to change, and the parts that do need to change will be much easier, because it will be obvious if it breaks the tests.
nilclass 9 points 3 years ago
That sounds super familiar :D
Anyway, a prototype is not a bad thing, if the managers know the difference. It's easier said than done to "do it right the first time" if you don't know how / what to build. Prototypes can be built to validate hypotheses and generally figure out what works, then build the real thing afterwards.
tatterdemalion 8 points 3 years ago
Yea I should have clarified. Prototypes are a great idea. The problem occurs when you say, "this is good enough we can improve on it as we go." Yea good luck balancing priorities when everything breaks from tapping your keyboard too hard. You MUST NOT MERGE the prototype.
asyncrosaurus 5 points 3 years ago
The company I work for is smort
This is every company I've ever worked for. If other people didn't vouche for their own tests, I'd assume automated testing was a myth.
Strawberry 4 points 3 years ago
hey it's job security
waz 4 points 3 years ago
I like puting my prototype code in namespaces like "garbage" "trash" "throwaway" etc to emphasize how unfit for production. I've no concrete evidence of it's success, but I like to think it dissuades other team members from using it where they shouldn't.
firelizzard 3 points 3 years ago
As my first job out of college (when I didn't know what I didn't know) I was hired to build a bespoke inventory system for a manufacturing company. My prototype became a production system the second I showed it to one of the engineers. The next three months of my life were a living hell as I frantically fixed bugs on a live system. Lesson learned.
pkill 1 point 3 years ago
oh yeah and the overt emphasis by suits on frontend development because it feels more tangible. like yeah sure we can add a follow button in a couple lines of code... granted you want to allow duplicate requests by non-signed in users or users that block each other with no manual approvals support, no protection against CSRF and the followee not getting notified
pantyhosewimp 12 points 3 years ago
Computer programming is to computer science as telescope operation is to astronomy.
abhibeckert 7 points 3 years ago
A better analogy is writing vs writing.
Do you know how to hold a pen and draw letters? You can write. Do you want to write a best selling novel? Yeah that's a different skill.
pkill 1 point 3 years ago
CS is also what most problems on leetcode and the like are about. Programming is just application of CS concepts, usually wrapped in several layers of abstraction, to domain specific problems. But I've never seen a job posting for a computer scientist specifically, yet we all know how it often looks like.
ICastFist 35 points 3 years ago
"Programming is just writing code"
Programming is, first and foremost, understanding what the fuck you want/need the computer to do. That means that some programmers (mostly analysts) may understand workflows and processes better than the people whose job depends on their knowledge of said things.
Daxtron2 12 points 3 years ago
People don't realize that as you get better at programming, the amount of code you write goes down. At least in my experience, my work day has shifted to 80% thinking about what I'm going to write and then about 20% actually writing it.
spartanatreyu 10 points 3 years ago
1 hour of planning can save 10 hours of work.
1 hour of research can save 10 hours of planning.
okamiueru 2 points 3 years ago
It was the job switch that landed me in that situation. A change from a small company where about 70% was actual productivity, to a large corporation, in a team where there was severe issues with planning and working on the correct problems. So far it's been 6 months of... well, wondering if I'm missing something, or a bigger picture somewhere, to trying to turn the ship in the right direction. If it's still like this in another 6 months, I'll consider a change of scenery.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer 35 points 3 years ago
I've got a lot of these.
Programming is not doing leetcode problems all day long. Those problems can be a good brain exercise or a good prep for a [misguided] technical interview but in a real programming job you have next to no chance of running into problems like those. Even if you do, you're an idiot if you spend hours toiling away at a problem that somebody else already solved much more efficiently than you will. Your boss doesn't give a crap if you pulled all of the code straight from your brain.
Programmers are not hackers. The reverse might be true but hacking is about finding problems (and exploiting them) while programming is about fixing problems.
A programmer can do anything that involves code. Maybe not quite this succinct but I think most will assume you can write a mobile app or a website just because you say you can code. Websites, games, apps, and so on are written in code but they all involve different technologies, toolsets, and standards. I'm sure I could fumble my way through any kind of software but don't expect it done quickly if it's not my area of expertise.
agressivelyPassive 11 points 3 years ago
Especially regarding the first one: this seems like a very US-centric thing - or maybe a non-german thing. I've been in a bunch of interviews on both sides of the table here in Germany and I've literally never encountered a single leetcode question. At all.
abhibeckert 3 points 3 years ago
Programmers are not hackers. The reverse might be true but hacking is about finding problems (and exploiting them) while programming is about fixing problems.
You have to find a problem before you can fix it. All good programmers are hackers.
fkn 1 point 3 years ago
I don't think either is actually true. I know many programmers who can fix a problem once the bug is identified but wouldn't be able to find it themselves nor would they be able to determine if a bug is exploitable without significant coaching.
Exploit finding is a specific skill set that requires thinking about multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously (or intentionally methodically). I have found that most programmers simply don't do this.
I think the definition of "good" comes into play here, because the vast majority of programmers need to dependably discover solutions to problems that other people find. Ingenuity and multilevel abstract thinking are not critically important and many of these engineers who reliably fix problems without hand holding are good engineers in my book.
I suppose that it could be argued that finding the source of a bug from a bug report requires detective skills, but even this is mostly guided inspection with modern tooling.
pkill 1 point 3 years ago
Yeah take for instance ransomware. That is easy since a lot of your targets might distrust regular user input but be much less cautious about stuff that should presumably be only accessible internally but isn't actually even properly locked behind a VPN gate so a simple credential stuffing would do and from then onwards it is actually easier than a physical kidnapping since you don't need to worry about using physical force to ensure your victim submits, doesn't escape or recognize you. But then you need to actually be smart to make sure you don't de-anonymize yourself in the process, don't render your operation just some temporary disturbance by ensuring your victim doesn't just restore their backups if your goal is a denial of service until you get paid and not expecting ransom for not releasing breach data.
Or take carding. Not technically super difficult, especially with the whole illusion of security that many non-technical users have (ie the infamous padlock when I can literally set up a phishing site with letsencrypt that'd log all the form data in minutes), but then good luck cashing out on that with all the KYC on virtually every crypto exchange out there and all that granted 3DS doesn't stop you.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer 2 points 3 years ago
Programmers have the source code right in front of them, hackers usually don't. It's quite amazing what they can do taking shots in the dark.
pkill 1 point 3 years ago
depends. Desktop code, sure, reverse engineering from assembly takes some time but some good dissasemblers might be able to produce some C skeleton to start from. Though you might get lucky just exploiting the supply chain of bloated open source with a hellton of vulnerabilities deps/infra like glibc, apache or sudo.
But web code? Sure, minifiers exist but not every website uses them and even if their do, thanks to all the new stuff since ES5 you can for example spend way less time doing something like finding a Math.random() based, ergo cryptographically utterly broken PRNG.
Or for example you can easily rule out whether the website uses header-to-cookie based CSRF protection by just checking the console on any authenticated write-like request. The rest could be automated with things like zaproxy or selenium/curl-impersonate/puppeteer scripts.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer 1 point 3 years ago
"Hacking" also has plenty of specialties like programming. When I think of hacking my first thought is remote, non-http services. Webservers are fair game for hacking but they're also meant for public consumption so I'd guess monitoring is a bit more severe (not that companies don't skimp on intrusion detection).
pkill 2 points 3 years ago
tbh the biggest upside of competitive programming sites was when I finally learned some Scala so that I can feel smug about my elegant one-line solutions dabs in a very specific way that makes my arms resemble a lambda /s
BrianTheeBiscuiteer 2 points 3 years ago
Yeah, it has helped me learn about Rust. I mean I still don't know Rust but it made me realize it's not for the faint of heart.
cyclohexane 34 points 3 years ago
Requiring a candidate to know a specific programming language is stupid. Nearly all of the commonly used languages in industry are similar.
It's maybe more valuable to require knowledge in a specific framework, where knowledge is less transferrable between popular frameworks. Nonetheless, I personally rather hire an engineer that solves problems and learns flexibly rather than one that happens to know the right tech.
AnyOldName3 7 points 3 years ago
I'd say this is pretty dependent on the language. For example, with C++, you need to micromanage (or at least benefit from micromanaging) a lot of things that you can get away without knowing about at all with other languages. That stuff takes time to pick up if you're self-teaching as you can write stuff that looks like it works without knowing its half as fast as it could be because you aren't making use of move semantics, and if a colleague is teaching you, then that's time they're not spending directly doing their own work. On the other hand, someone with Typescript experience could write pretty decent Javascript from the get-go.
CodeMonkey 2 points 3 years ago
C++ is unique in that it is wildly dominant in its niche. I am sure that any developer who has worked with another object oriented, manually memory managed, systems programming language (are there any other popular ones out there?) should have no trouble picking up C++.
AnyOldName3 1 point 3 years ago
There are other rarely-used C++-like languages that fit your criteria, and they basically all aim to eliminate the kind of thing I was talking about. If someone was used to one of those and tried picking up C++ for the first time, they'd probably end up with working, but unnecessarily slow C++, having assumed the compiler would do a bunch of things for them that it actually wouldn't.
The popular low-level systems programming languages that aren't C++ are C and Rust. Neither is object-oriented. C programmers forced to use C++ tend to basically write C with a smattering of features that make it not compile with a C compiler, and produce a horror show that brings out the worst of both languages and looks nothing like C++ a C++ programmer would write, then write a blog post about how terrible C++ is because when they tried using it like C, it wasn't as good at being C as C was. Rust programmers generally have past experience with C++, so tend to know how to use it properly, even if they hate the experience.
frezik 3 points 3 years ago
I used to agree, but now I'm not so sure. There are huge time savings in having someone already familiar with a specific technology. They've ran across an issue before and can quickly find the solution.
For example, I started learning Elixir a little over a year ago. I struggled with how to get it to change data in place, and the answer is that you don't. You work with data in an immutable way; you make a copy with the change made and throw away the original. Once you get used to it, this works very nicely, and Elixir has quickly become one of my favorite languages. However, few other languages force you to work immutably, and nobody does it voluntarily. It takes a bit to get your head around it, and you'll take a lot longer on any given task until you do.
neomachino 2 points 3 years ago
I generally agree with this, there's specific circumstances but for the most part its true.
I went from a C# position to PHP, to Python, to perl all with little or no experience with what I was jumping in to. There's different nuances and the syntax might take a bit to get used to but as long as someone understands the how and why of what their code is doing that can be pretty easily transfer to most other languages. It's all about the fundamentals.
onlinepersona 2 points 3 years ago
It's not a black and white issue. "Jack of all trades, master of none" vs "expert of one". Both have their place and I think it's better to have a mix than just one or the other.
I've seen python newcomers writing code as if they were writing in another language. They don't know about dataclasses, operator overrides, __init__ vs __new__, metaclasses, __init__.py vs __main__.py, @property, match, the walrus operator, or assignments, or the common pitfalls of python like mutable defaults, type hints, and a bunch of other things.
Knowing a language in-depth helps write DRY code, avoiding common pitfalls, handling things better like debugging, profiling, and other tooling, and avoiding pitfalls of the language, which newcomers have to first learn, regardless of how their experience with other languages.
A lot of stuff is transferable, for sure, but every language uses different idioms, covers different paradigms, and so on. It's good to have at least one expert on the term to teach others, and to have people flexible enough to switch of willing to learn. Having only experts can mean a static team unwilling to experiment or use better programming languages or technologies. Having only beginners or mediors of a language can produce functional, but sub-optimal code. YMMV
CodeMonkey 1 point 3 years ago
It is better to find a developer that has experience with the language features you use rather than one that is experienced in the exact language you use. For example, I work on distributed systems in Java/GoLang/Python. We want candidates that understand how to write concurrent logic and stay away from people who are just Java web developers.
The big issue is doing a coding interview with candidates. We have a standard straightforward problem that candidates need to solve by filling in a stubbed out method. We have it in Java and have ported it to GoLang. If we have to interview a candidate who does not know either of those languages, we would need to find a language that the candidate knows and we know well enough to port the problem to. We would also have some difficulty digging in to design specifics like choice of concurrency primitives.
driving_crooner 33 points 3 years ago
Thar just because you solved a particular problem in 10min, all other problems are going to take 10min too.
vause 27 points 3 years ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425
WalrusByte 22 points 3 years ago
What's funny about this comic now is the second one has become very attainable in the years since it was released. The concept still applies though. Some things are a lot harder than they seem on the surface.
snooggums 25 points 3 years ago
Somebody spent the money on a research team and five years is why it is very attainable now.
Someone trying to write the code from scratch would still take a research team and years to replicate it from scratch.
WalrusByte 6 points 3 years ago
Oh yeah, for sure
randy 13 points 3 years ago
And here I was thinking of https://xkcd.com/664/
Ephera 32 points 3 years ago
This one's a hot take, but: That Python is easy.
I've had to work with it in three projects in the past five years and I consider it one of the hardest programming languages, for anything but very short scripts.
You don't get proper compiler assistance, unless you have 100% test coverage. You don't get a helpful text editor. You don't usually get helpful type hints in libraries you use, so you have to genuinely just study the documentation and/or code. You get tons of quirky behavior in the stdlib, build tools, async stack, imports. You get breaking changes in minor versions of the language.
I find writing code in Python extremely mentally taxing, because you just get so little assistance, that you have to think of everything yourself.
agressivelyPassive 21 points 3 years ago
Dynamically typed languages all suffer that fate. There's a reason Typescript literally has that feature in its name.
What does help though is type hinting. You "just" have to enforce it and its fallout in your entire codebase.
Ephera 12 points 3 years ago
Yeah, we invested a lot of time into type hinting and checking, but mypy would never exit without warnings and errors, because many libraries we were using had no type hints.
It was also just exhausting/cumbersome, having to write type hints everywhere, as there's no type inference.
But yeah, we always joked that someone should create TypeScript for Python β Typhon.
abhibeckert 3 points 3 years ago
Part of the investment has to be only using libraries that have type hints.
But yeah - I definitely prefer strongly typed languages. Or at least languages like Swift where you have to jump through a few hoops to have a dynamic type (in Swift there is an "Any" type but you have to write a bunch of code checking what the variable contains before you can actually worth with it). Basically you have to convert it to a static typed variable before it can be touched. Thankfully there's pretty good syntax for that. Including an arbitrary way to convert almost anything to a string (essential for debugging).
Ephera 15 points 3 years ago
I'm sorry to say this, but PyCharm is precisely what we were using. I do consider it the best Python editor, but it's several classes below IntelliJ for Java/Scala/Kotlin or even the extremely new RustRover for, well, Rust. And I'd say roughly at the level of KATE (a non-smart text editor) with just the rust-analyzer language server hooked up.
It is extremely impressive what PyCharm manages to analyze in Python, but other languages offer similarly good tooling out of the box, or make such analysis much easier by having static types.
driving_crooner 6 points 3 years ago
I don't know if i qualify as a full programmer, I'm an actuarie but 90% of my work is in python, 5% SQL and 5% excel. I love python because is flexible as fuck, I can connect to the SQL server, send the queries to a pd.DataFrame, process the information, scrap some webpage for adicional information needed, and finally export to an excel file that the accounting team can use. I don't write fully functional programs, but small specific scripts for different tasks. R is another popular programming language between actuaries and statisticians, but I haven't find anything that R can do, that I can't in python.
SorteKanin 7 points 3 years ago
I donβt write fully functional programs, but small specific scripts for different tasks.
This is exactly why your experience is different and you like Python better than many others. You are using Python as it was meant to be used and where it excels; for small scripts.
When people say they don't like Python they mean that Python does a really, really bad job when it comes to larger systems. Static analysis becomes exponentially more important in larger systems and Python has basically 0 of that.
But as long as you stick to relatively small stuff (less than a few thousand lines), Python is pretty nice and fast to develop in.
pkill 2 points 3 years ago
also just plain readability. Indentation-based scoping is horrible for larger codebases. Maybe if it was a purely-functional language like Haskell where this sort of scoping works better and all effects are tightly contained. But most larger codebases tend to use python in OO way and that can get messy pretty quickly. Damn, if python had a piping operator like elixir that'd be of a lot of help, actually. Plus there is so much legacy code in a language that had e.g. ternaries long before adding something seemingly so fundamental as switch-case.
Feathercrown 2 points 3 years ago
I'd say if you program then you're a programmer. What you're thinking of is more of a software engineer, ie. someone who architects and creates software.
alsimoneau 2 points 3 years ago
I'm a scientist that has been coding almost exclusively in Python for the past decade and I strongly disagree.
Python is great at being the glue that holds everything together, and everything crunchy part of the program is being handled by a library anyways.
I code with two terminals, one for iPython and one for vim. And you don't need anything else. The beauty of Python is that it's not a language that is so full of boilerplate that you need an IDE to type it for you to be remotely productive.
Overall, Python is a language made to be used by people that need to make something that just works and don't need to spend years learning programming paradigms and industry practices. Fortran and C are so unwieldy in comparison and everything more modern lacks the expansive and diverse libraries of Python.
SorteKanin 5 points 3 years ago
Iβm a scientist
And this is exactly why you like Python. You haven't had to use it at a truly large scale. See also my comment here: https://feddit.dk/comment/5769585
Feathercrown 5 points 3 years ago
Overall, Python is a language made to be used by people that need to make something that just works
This is why you find it easy, and why the person you replied to finds it a big pain. The friction other languages would give you exists to provide structure on a larger scale that makes that guy's work easier. Like you implied, different languages for different jobs.
pkill 3 points 3 years ago
especially if the other person uses some stupid bloat like MIUI. I assume under the hood it must be a real hot mess if in the process of adding new features they broke support for standard stuff if last time I needed to do something on two people's xiaomis these shitboxes didn't show a password below the wifi qr code and it has this thing with accent colors derived from wallpaper but absolutely no control over it unlike in standard android despite the fact that it landed two major releases ago.
stevecrox 30 points 3 years ago
Technical Leads are not rational beings and lots of software is developed from an emotional stand point.
Engineering is trade offs, every technical decision you make has a pro/con.
What you should do is write out the core requirements/constraints.Then you weigh the choices to select the option that best meets it.
What actually happens is someone really likes X framework, Y programming language or Z methodology and so decides the solution and then looks for reasons to justify it.
Currently the obvious tell is if they pitch Rust. I am not saying Rust is bad, but you'll notice they will extoll the memory safety or performance and forget about the actual requirements of the project.
abhibeckert 26 points 3 years ago
Currently the obvious tell is if they pitch Rust
I would amend that to "if they pitch any language".
The best language is almost universally "whatever we already use" or for new projects "whatever the team is most familiar with". It should occasionally be reconsidered, and definitely try out new languages, but actually switching to the new language after trying it out? That should be very very rare.
stevecrox 6 points 3 years ago
The team/organisations knowledge is a huge factor but its easy to fall into a trap where no matter what the problem is the solution is X language.
If I have an organisation that knows C# and we need to build a Web Application. I would suggest we need to learn Node.js and Typescript and not invest in a solution that turns C# into web pages.
fuzzzerd 2 points 3 years ago
Wait, are you seriously overlooking ASP.NET and suggesting c# tes learn typescript and node to build web apps?
I get that it's a hypothetical, but typescript and node shouldn't be the first stop on the we need to build a web page train for folks already in the c# wagon.
rodbiren 28 points 3 years ago
No programming language, development philosophy, or technology can save you from projects and business lacking clarity. Your ability to communicate and be understood is as/perhaps more important than the quality of your ideas. Consistency is better than perfection.
stoly 27 points 3 years ago
Honestly? The people who say "learn to code" as the solution to getting a better job. Only some people can do this.
Also the idea that tech "just works". Have had freshly-minted CS/info types suddenly realize why the phrase "back away slowly" exists.
Asafum 8 points 3 years ago
I learned this the hard way like 3 times lol
I keep trying to "better myself" by learning programming, but I'm just a fucking moron, I'm not capable. That and I really have 0 interest in it, but I can't make enough to survive as a single individual being a fucking moron...
pkill 4 points 3 years ago
only if the definition of success excludes having a stable, well paying position working for someone. I wrote some websites for fun at the age of 13, got into Linux at 12 but does anyone care? No, because that's not commercial experience and that's what matters in the world of job postings written mostly by non-technical people.
stoly 1 point 3 years ago
Yeah, that's totally exactly what I was saying, thanks for being charitable in your interpretations.
People who do what I suggest are very interested and driven, and will pursue a career in these fields.
jasory 2 points 3 years ago
Nope. I only learned to use computers as an adult, and only learned programming incidentally as a tool for other work.
The truth is that it's actually much faster to learn as an adult, you just have more momentum if you start as a child.
cyclohexane 24 points 3 years ago
Some programmers are software engineers. They solve problems, sometimes problems with great ambiguity or non-straightforward solutions.
And some programmers are... code technicians? They understand and write code, but their job seldom involves problem solving. Often times, they're asked to code an already solved problem, or mostly solved.
This is not a diss. I was in the second camp for a while. But it hurts your career to stay in that. So be careful.
souperk 1 point 3 years ago
Totally agree, I had the fortune to read Domain Driven Deign by Eric Evans early in my career. While, the book may be outdated, it helped me understand that my job is to turn the unknown or ambiguous into code. I find that much more exciting than being a coder.
MaoZedongers 12 points 3 years ago
I'm bad at math and struggled heavily through calc 2 and barely passed with a D+ but had little issue with data structures and algorithms (except when the algorithms were written in math notation, but still got through it after being explained in a logical set of steps instead).
Landless2029 10 points 3 years ago
Nail on the head.
The reason programming curriculums are so math heavy is because of teaching logic.
You're either right or wrong in math. There is ONE answer to the formula. You can sometimes get there different ways though. The logic on your path is the key.
lolcatnip 2 points 3 years ago
When I was in college I took a symbolic logic class taught by the philosophy department that was indeed useful. OTOH, I was told later it was originally created as a CS class and only moved to the philosophy department for political reasons.
Redkey 11 points 3 years ago
I'd argue that you do need to be good at math to be an effective programmer, it's just that that doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means. You don't need to know all the ins and outs of quadratics, integrals, and advanced trigonometry, but I think you do need to have a really solid, gut-level understanding of basic algebra and a bit of set theory. If you're the sort of person whose head starts to swim when you see "y=3x+2", you're going to find programming difficult at best.
callouscomic 6 points 3 years ago
I don't think it's so much about the actual math, but learning good logic and problem solving skills, which math helps with.
CodeBlooded 22 points 3 years ago
The misconception that weβre the person to go to to fix your printerβ¦
..I mean we probably can fix it, but itβs a waste of our timeβ¦
namingthingsiseasy 22 points 3 years ago
This one might be a bit controversial, but has rung true in my general experience. Probably a lot of exceptions to these rules, but here goes:
You don't really know a programming language until you understand a fair amount of the standard library and how packages/modules/dependencies work. Syntax is pretty easy, and any mainstream language will work just fine for solving basic leet-code style problems. But when you really spend a lot of time working with a language, you're going to spend more time learning about common libraries and how to manage dependencies. If you're working with a language like C++ or Java, this could also include build systems and how to use them.
Another precursor to being able to say that you know a language is that you should also be familiar with best practices (ie. how to name modules, how to write documentation, etc.) and common pitfalls (undefined behavior, etc.). This is one of the hardest parts about learning a new language in my opinion, because the language may not necessarily enforce these things, but doing them the wrong way can make your life very difficult.
owsei 6 points 3 years ago
That's what I hate about javascript, it doesn't warm you about undefined behavior, it just throws.
I used to not really care about that, but after learning C and Rust, damm, I wish there where result types everywhere
spartanatreyu 9 points 3 years ago
Some small nits to fix:
C has it's own undefined behavior.
JS has confusing behavior, not undefined behavior. Its specs are well defined and backwards compatible to a fault, making some things unintuitive and harder to learn if you don't learn the history of the language.
Problems with both should be avoided by learning and using standard practices. (Don't pretend C is object oriented, always use
===instead of==in js, etc...)
In complete agreement:
- Result types are awesome, all future languages should be designed around them.
firelizzard 2 points 3 years ago
Counterpoint: knowing a programming language doesn't matter if you can solve problems. A competent programmer can pick up a new language and be productive within a few months. That is, a new language within the same paradigm - going from a imperative language to a functional language can be a drastic shift, but going from one imperative language to another is easy. If you can't do that as a intermediate to senior developer, you're not a competent programmer IMO.
The real skills of a good programmer are things like problem solving, debugging, understanding how to write readable and maintainable code, etc. Having deep knowledge of a specific programming language or languages is helpful and enables you to work faster, but if you're only a skilled developer in the languages you know - if you aren't capable of pivoting those skills to another language - you aren't a skilled developer IMO.
namingthingsiseasy 1 point 3 years ago
Agreed overall, you will still be competent switching from one language to another, but intricacies and nuance matter a lot here. You may have enough knowledge to solve problems, but will you have enough knowledge to avoid creating new ones too? Like performance issues, or memory leaks, or other unwanted behavior? C++ is a great example here: someone that's smart but inexperienced might just be dangerous enough to start writing classes with dumb pointers without overriding the copy constructors, and this is just a recipe for disaster.
I think it would take more than a few months to develop the kinds of experience that you need to be aware of these issues and avoid them. And while C++ is a very easy example to point out here, pretty much all languages have their share of footguns to be aware of, and it just takes time to learn them. A "deep knowledge" of a language is not just about being faster and more productive; it's also about not creating more issues than the ones your solving.
firelizzard 1 point 3 years ago
I think the degree of footgun danger depends a lot on the language and the application. I agree that C and C++ are dangerous until you really know what you're doing, though IMO most of the danger comes down to memory management and that's a portable skill, once you've learned it. That being said, I don't have a lot of experience with C++. C was my first language so I'm used to plain old normal boring pointers (are those "dumb pointers"?) and I've never understood why C++ needs 9 billion types of pointers.
Go has one particular footgun - loop range variables. Other than that, IMO high-level, garbage collected languages don't have major footguns like that. My first job was writing a bespoke inventory system for a manufacturing company, and I wrote it in a language I'd never used before - C#. In five years the only major issue that had was due to my inexperience with SQL and had nothing to do with C#. And though I haven't written nearly as much code, I'd say the same about Java, Ruby, Python, and JavaScript.
QuazarOmega 18 points 3 years ago
Anyone can, but not everyone needs to
QuazarOmega 10 points 3 years ago
I didn't want to say that because it sounds mean, but yes, pretty much
abbadon420 4 points 3 years ago
Not everyone should
hawgietonight 16 points 3 years ago
Myth: code can be ugly as long as it works, don't spend company time on making it look good or on minor optimizations.
The truth is that you can tell when effort has been put into a job. Even if it just works, the lack of discipline means that in the end it will be difficult to maintain and probably will fail in unexpected situations.
Every language has its conventions, but if I spot more than a line of separation between blocks of code, that is a common telltale sign of noob. Run from that shit.
hawgietonight 6 points 3 years ago
One line is fine if used wisely, everybody does it for readability. The issue is when you need more than one.
Fermiverse 2 points 3 years ago
PEP8 is looking at you
Feathercrown 5 points 3 years ago
The idea is that often you could be using actual logical separations (functions etc.) instead of whitespace. IMO whitespace has its place though, including for this.
pkill 3 points 3 years ago
uhh seen this shit with some rewrites with no regards to your code being idiomatic to the point of it all feeling almost verbatim. Like some PHP devs getting confused by the lack of classes in Go and instead of using method receivers and composition over inheritance creating one 250-line behemoth public function to replace a PHP class.
Feathercrown 1 point 3 years ago
Oh no
At work I'm currently trying to chop up a 3500 line file into multiple components... separation of concerns, people! To be fair it's like the oldest one we have so there's a lot of cruft in there.
saintshenanigans 16 points 3 years ago
Gamers demanding changes saying "it's literally one line of code"
vrighter 15 points 3 years ago
that doing more work, takes more time.
Gamers are especially guilty of this.
"that 2013 game runs at a smooth 60 fps. This medern game running at quadruple the resolution with raytracing sometimes dips to 58 fps on the same hardware. Devs must be lazy, they just need to add OPTIMIZATION to the game
onlinepersona 0 points 3 years ago
I don't know what it's called, but it's a common phenomenon: available room will be exploited. It's exactly why computers nowadays don't feel faster than computers from a decade or two ago: they do so much more because they can.
Stuff like electron would've been impossible in 2000 or 2005: it's just a behemoth in terms of computational needs and power consumption. Earlier computers would've struggled endlessly with it. Current hardware however makes it seem as fast as previous tech.
space 13 points 3 years ago
When you release something, your work is not done. You have to maintain it, fix bugs, release patches, and probably the worst part, keeping it up to date.
For example, Apple decides to deprecate some API, or decides to switch cpu architecture, or for the millionth time change how app signing works, or add some new security feature that breaks your app. Now you need to make your app work properly on the new platform, switch APIs, all the fun. Or, there's some critical vulnerability in library you used and customers are deleting your app from their computers (a lot of companies use automated scanners that check against published CVEs). It's most fun when you learn that the new version that fixes the vulnerability completely breaks compatibility with the old one and now you have to rewrite all the code that used that library.
Also, maintaining open source projects is not fun. It's a lot of work, in most cases unpaid, thankless, and building a community around a project is really hard.
souperk 10 points 3 years ago
Myth: You are lazy.
Truth: It's highly probable you are neurodivergent.
While, accurate numbers are not available, I have seen people estimating that 20% of people working in FAANG are neurodivergent. If coding comes naturally to you but the laundry is your mortal enemy, it's worth learning about ADHD/ASD and other common disorders. Being a coder can be a sign, the immediate feedback helps a bunch of us, or as Russel Barkely says "when you solve a problem on a paper, NOTHING HAPPENS".
Edit: Rephrase.
frezik 5 points 3 years ago
That Python is the most readable language. Merely forcing an indentation style is only part of the issue. Python programmers have a tendency to write a bunch of named parameters all on one line, and it's a mess.
Even the automated documentation can't make it right. What the hell is this shit?
class werkzeug.test.EnvironBuilder(path='/', base_url=None, query_string=None, method='GET', input_stream=None, content_type=None, content_length=None, errors_stream=None, multithread=False, multiprocess=False, run_once=False, headers=None, data=None, environ_base=None, environ_overrides=None, mimetype=None, json=None, auth=None)
This is not enlightening. It might as well go on the shelf next to the worst regex you've ever seen. The automated doc generator needs to break these up to put one arg on each line, or just omit it altogether and let the detailed docs handle it.
It's not just the doc generator, either. I see this kind of style all the time in Python code. It's unreadable and it also makes it harder to figure out diffs when a parameter in the middle is changed (though it's helped by color coding for pull requests on GitHub and the like).
It's almost like the language attracted a bunch of people who thought indentation was the only thing you needed to make readable code. No further thought put into it.
BehindTheBarrier 2 points 3 years ago
I don't disagree that this is hard to read, but I feel it's worth mentioning python has a pretty acceptable style guide. The problem is, it's far less common in python to bundle parameters into some holding object. So here you have massive function that has to accept a lot all at once. In use it's probably not as bad looking however.
And at least, it actually explains all the damn parameters. It's a lot nicer than seeing functions parameters you don't understand, and all you have is the name. This is not limited to python either
frezik 3 points 3 years ago
There are plenty of other languages that have named parameters but no holding object. You format it like this:
some_func(
foo: 1,
bar: 2,
baz: 3,
)
And this works fine. Of course, not everyone does that, but I almost never see it done in Python.
This style comes into conflict with rules that functions shouldn't be longer than 20 lines for whatever. The solution to that is to be relaxed about the line count rule. I'd rather see 40 trivial lines than 20 with everything crammed up.
BehindTheBarrier 1 point 3 years ago
Completely agree with that, we have the same issue in C# where I work. Just waiting for the day I get to push and update to our shared code style (editorconfig) to force that.
frankenswine 3 points 3 years ago
It is cool
theherk 1 point 3 years ago
There are no absolutes, and most of these βmythsβ are at least true to some extent. Much like any paradigm (worse is better, whitebox testing, lbyl vs eafp, etc), none are universally best. And all are helpful to know about.
frankenswine 1 point 3 years ago
It is fun
JackGreenEarth 8 points 3 years ago
That's subjective. I find coding fun.
frankenswine 3 points 3 years ago
i didn't want to flood the thread - there's more where that came from
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That programming as a career means you're going to spend writing nice, clean code 80% of the time.
It's rather debugging code or tooling problems 50% of the time, talking to other people (whether necessary or not) about 35% of the time and the rest may be spent on actually spending time doing the thing you actually enjoy.
I may be exaggerating, but only a little.
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