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I work with a twenty-something year old right now. He graduated from high school. Had his own non-tech company for a while after high school. Decided he wanted

I work with a twenty-something year old right now. He graduated from high school. Had his own non-tech company for a while after high school. Decided he wanted to go into coding. One of the best damn coders I've worked with in 25 years. Gives the toughest, most consistent code reviews. He's the type of programmer you can build a startup around. In another comment a few days ago, I mentioned a 10x engineer I knew. Graduated from high school. Went into the military. Came out and coded. He is the best coder I've worked with. College education is not necessary to be a successful programmer. You do need to have some predisposition to coding, but you definitely don't need a degree.

pmarreck 7y ago
What languages do they use?
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  Does that matter? They probably use the right language to get the job done. Depends of the area of their work.
  - snoman 7y ago
    > Does that matter? Yes. While the evidence provided is anecdotal (that is to say: outliers exist in successfully learning anything outside of a formal education), there are languages designed to be more friendly and more fun for newcomers (Ruby, for example) while others are designed to be translate more directly to the instructions a machine might execute. More anecdotal evidence indicating that one language might facilitate informal learning better might be interesting or helpful.
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    See my answer to the same question (except posed in a far more hostile manner) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511025
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  PHP
- cr0sh 7y ago
  That doesn't matter. If there's one thing my years in this career has taught me, it's that the client(s) don't GAF what language or framework or system you used to solve their problem(s). What they care about is if you have given them a solution that solves their problem(s). They don't care how you got there. They don't care what technology you used. Just as long as you solved the problem(s) they were having, and that you did it in the time/budget allotment for the job. That said, as the solution provider you should have found out both their current use cases and potential future use cases, in order to select the tools you'll need for the immediate solution, and ideally for any updates or improvements that may be needed later on. Because they will care, for instance, if the code you wrote was in a language that won't allow them to scale up quickly and easily (assuming you wrote the rest of the system to allow for this of course), or has some other kind of issue that prevents the client from moving forward with a change. The last thing a client wants to hear is "complete rewrite using different language/framework/system" just to implement an extension or upgrade path (the best you can usually get by with is a refactor of the existing code base - but you better have a damn good reason and plan for that refactor).
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    You said a lot of words and assumed a hell of a lot of things that were not contained in my question. I simply asked a simple question out of curiosity, JFC. Does curiosity matter? For the record, all code is ephemeral so since you're going to end up throwing it away anyway one day, it doesn't fucking matter what language you start with. Pretty much any language can back-end an API until a certain (large) number of users. #ProblemsWe'dLikeToHave Twitter threw away Ruby and went to Scala; Facebook is slowly replacing PHP with... whatever, pretty much anything is superior to PHP; plenty of other companies have had to do partial or full rewrites of core functionality on a new stack. Paul Graham himself had his Lisp code tossed in a rewrite. Uber's ripping out Python and going to a bunch of other langs: https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one/ https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one/ Uber and Reddit have schemaless db backends for scalability reasons; I doubt they started out that way. And yet, Discord is still on Elixir. Isn't that interesting. But I think they're putting in pieces of Rust. So... I just asked a question.

pmarreck 7y ago

What languages do they use?

hutzlibu 7y ago
Does that matter? They probably use the right language to get the job done. Depends of the area of their work.
- snoman 7y ago
  > Does that matter? Yes. While the evidence provided is anecdotal (that is to say: outliers exist in successfully learning anything outside of a formal education), there are languages designed to be more friendly and more fun for newcomers (Ruby, for example) while others are designed to be translate more directly to the instructions a machine might execute. More anecdotal evidence indicating that one language might facilitate informal learning better might be interesting or helpful.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  See my answer to the same question (except posed in a far more hostile manner) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511025
Consultant32452 7y ago
PHP
cr0sh 7y ago
That doesn't matter. If there's one thing my years in this career has taught me, it's that the client(s) don't GAF what language or framework or system you used to solve their problem(s). What they care about is if you have given them a solution that solves their problem(s). They don't care how you got there. They don't care what technology you used. Just as long as you solved the problem(s) they were having, and that you did it in the time/budget allotment for the job. That said, as the solution provider you should have found out both their current use cases and potential future use cases, in order to select the tools you'll need for the immediate solution, and ideally for any updates or improvements that may be needed later on. Because they will care, for instance, if the code you wrote was in a language that won't allow them to scale up quickly and easily (assuming you wrote the rest of the system to allow for this of course), or has some other kind of issue that prevents the client from moving forward with a change. The last thing a client wants to hear is "complete rewrite using different language/framework/system" just to implement an extension or upgrade path (the best you can usually get by with is a refactor of the existing code base - but you better have a damn good reason and plan for that refactor).
- pmarreck 7y ago
  You said a lot of words and assumed a hell of a lot of things that were not contained in my question. I simply asked a simple question out of curiosity, JFC. Does curiosity matter? For the record, all code is ephemeral so since you're going to end up throwing it away anyway one day, it doesn't fucking matter what language you start with. Pretty much any language can back-end an API until a certain (large) number of users. #ProblemsWe'dLikeToHave Twitter threw away Ruby and went to Scala; Facebook is slowly replacing PHP with... whatever, pretty much anything is superior to PHP; plenty of other companies have had to do partial or full rewrites of core functionality on a new stack. Paul Graham himself had his Lisp code tossed in a rewrite. Uber's ripping out Python and going to a bunch of other langs: https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one/ https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one/ Uber and Reddit have schemaless db backends for scalability reasons; I doubt they started out that way. And yet, Discord is still on Elixir. Isn't that interesting. But I think they're putting in pieces of Rust. So... I just asked a question.