3 ms·

Its only gate-keeping if people want to be past the gate. I'm not talking about deterring people who are interested. The vast majority of people do not want to

Its only gate-keeping if people want to be past the gate. I'm not talking about deterring people who are interested. The vast majority of people do not want to be programmers and would not enjoy programming. Delaying the moment the actually have to do something difficult with a programming language is not especially heathly. How would you feel about a career in football sold to you on the basis of table pong? Keep playing the pong, and then one day, you're face is in the dirt and you drop out. The self-esteem hack psychology of the 60s-90s equivocated encouraging people with lying to them, as-if the only way we can get programmers is by lying about what programming is about. This isnt encouraging anyone, it's lying to them.

exelius 8y ago
I think you’re confusing “programmer” with “10x programmer”. Plenty of people are capable of implementing business logic in code. Very few are capable of designing that logic — they’re the 10x programmers who know all about data structures, algorithms, etc. You can’t run a business expecting every employee to be a rockstar. It just doesn’t scale. So you skill it down and put the high-skill people where they can have the most impact.
blowski 8y ago
It sounds like we have a different definition of programming. For me, programming is producing code that gets executed by another piece of hardware or software. The complexity of the code is not part of the definition. Nor is your understanding of the hardware/software involved.
- mjburgess 8y ago
  Enjoying programming is enjoying programming. The way it is sold, sometimes, is not as programming. Unless you've experienced this sales pitch you're not going to connect with the point i'm making.
  - kchr 8y ago
    Care to give an example pitch from the real world?
singingfish 8y ago
Perl isn’t difficult in the same way that the English lnguage isn’t difficult. Easy to get started with, takes a long time to master. Fortunately for us die hard perl types it’s quite capable of cleanly solving all normal dynamic language problems, and some seriously abnormal ones. And because of the insanely good backcompat in perl we’ll see the pendulum swing back to perl 5 some time in the next decade.

exelius 8y ago

I think you’re confusing “programmer” with “10x programmer”. Plenty of people are capable of implementing business logic in code. Very few are capable of designing that logic — they’re the 10x programmers who know all about data structures, algorithms, etc. You can’t run a business expecting every employee to be a rockstar. It just doesn’t scale. So you skill it down and put the high-skill people where they can have the most impact.

blowski 8y ago

It sounds like we have a different definition of programming. For me, programming is producing code that gets executed by another piece of hardware or software. The complexity of the code is not part of the definition. Nor is your understanding of the hardware/software involved.

mjburgess 8y ago
Enjoying programming is enjoying programming. The way it is sold, sometimes, is not as programming. Unless you've experienced this sales pitch you're not going to connect with the point i'm making.
- kchr 8y ago
  Care to give an example pitch from the real world?

singingfish 8y ago

Perl isn’t difficult in the same way that the English lnguage isn’t difficult. Easy to get started with, takes a long time to master. Fortunately for us die hard perl types it’s quite capable of cleanly solving all normal dynamic language problems, and some seriously abnormal ones. And because of the insanely good backcompat in perl we’ll see the pendulum swing back to perl 5 some time in the next decade.