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> I'm mildly offended by the casual use of the word "wizard" here - I don't believe that they actually exist. Neither do unicorns or nasal demons. It's a collo

> I'm mildly offended by the casual use of the word "wizard" here - I don't believe that they actually exist. Neither do unicorns or nasal demons. It's a colloquialism and you're taking it too literally. Then there's Clarke's First Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" > Different people produce different outcomes, but the difference in their output is mostly accidental. This is completely and obviously untrue. Do you believe a tightrope walker just gets lucky all the time, or that any ordinary person could do the job just the same? > Humans are not comfortable with explaining everything as luck. But I think many things are actually explained by luck, and we should take it easy. Actually, a lot of unsuccessful people are perfectly comfortable explaining everything away with "luck". That's how they stay unsuccessful. Programming isn't about "luck", it is about skill. You don't get a working program "by chance". Sure, you might land that job because you're lucky. You're lucky to live in a time and place that offers you modern computers. You're lucky to have a brain that affords you to learn this skill - but you don't become a programmer just by accident.

jshowa3 7y ago
I think this is just the opposite extreme. I've literally seen people copy and paste code that they didn't fully understand and it ended up working. In fact, one of the senior devs where I work added a piece of code with the specific comment "I have no idea how this works and I don't care" and its been used ever since. And he's not a bad programmer by any means having written probably 90% of the software we use by himself. Would you say there isn't some element of luck to that? Granted I don't think it's a dominating factor, but I do think that it is present.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Of course there's an "element of luck" to everything, just like there's a level of variance to everything, but the dominating factor is skill. Even if all you do is copy-paste code by trial and error, there's a level of skill to that too.

jshowa3 7y ago

I think this is just the opposite extreme. I've literally seen people copy and paste code that they didn't fully understand and it ended up working. In fact, one of the senior devs where I work added a piece of code with the specific comment "I have no idea how this works and I don't care" and its been used ever since. And he's not a bad programmer by any means having written probably 90% of the software we use by himself. Would you say there isn't some element of luck to that? Granted I don't think it's a dominating factor, but I do think that it is present.

gridlockd 7y ago
Of course there's an "element of luck" to everything, just like there's a level of variance to everything, but the dominating factor is skill. Even if all you do is copy-paste code by trial and error, there's a level of skill to that too.