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There is some truth in the article. Coding is easy. It's all the other aspects of software development that are difficult. I know that the biggest hurdle for an
by nocipher 16y ago
There is some truth in the article. Coding is easy. It's all the other aspects of software development that are difficult. I know that the biggest hurdle for any programming project I've ever been involved in is deciding what will be the different parts of the system and then how those parts will interact. Once I start writing code, I can program very quickly because I don't have to make hard decisions.
Even so, a few thousand lines of a code a day is a bit much for anything non-trivial. To write that much code in a single day means that person must have done little else besides coding. Unless there was a period of about a week of design before that kind of coding, I'd expect the code to be rather kludgy because everything would be decided immediately. A few thousand lines of code, though, is definitely not something I'd consider average.
A /small/ project that added a new feature to an existing system took about 30 hours for the initial version over a two week time period and about 800 lines of code. Granted, I don't know exactly where my programming abilities lie skill-wise, but I can't imagine someone being 30x or 40x more productive than that as you suggest.
And maybe I'm just new around here, but if was going to argue for the Dunning-Kruger effect, I'd begin by arguing that I am clearly not suffering from the effect myself.
- alexkearns 16y agoWe all suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect, to varying degrees. I would never dream of arguing I don't suffer from it. I though do not go around claiming I know the truth about programming. I think that perhaps there are two types of programmer - those who like to spend most of the time researching, drawing diagrams and the such like, and the others who just get on with it. The suggestion of this article is that those who spend most of their time planning, rather than programming are somehow superior - my experience with developers has been the exact opposite.
- ntoshev 16y agoDon't worry about the lines of code you write, I'm pretty sure even Dr Norvig can't write 50 of these per day: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html