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I’m not sure how to express it very well, but I interact a bit with people who I’d consider “good” programmers. I don’t think I’d correlate it with experience o

I’m not sure how to express it very well, but I interact a bit with people who I’d consider “good” programmers. I don’t think I’d correlate it with experience or effectiveness at a job, a good many of them haven’t even made it out of school yet. But they tend to be able to internalize programming/mathematics concepts that by many are considered difficult or complex. I know some will disagree with this, arguing that things related to experience like domain knowledge, ability to effectively work and lead in a team, understanding business needs, etc. and I don’t want to diminish the importance of these things in a professional context. However, I think there’s a good bit to programming that’s more purely technical and more related to raw intelligence (IQ or whatever you want). These people are able to easily understand things that I can’t seem to put together in my head very well.

throwawayboise 6y ago
I'm not sure how relevant it is today but one litmus test I found years ago was how naturally they grasped the concept of a pointer. If a programmer grokked pointers that was a good indicator that s/he was on the path to being a good programmer. It's probably just a proxy for being able to think at a level of indirection.
- deleted 6y ago
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- setpatchaddress 6y ago
  This was one reason I thought programming the classic Mac was great training — the nature of the memory manager, where most data structures were double-indirected pointers and the inner pointer could move at will -— you had to understand pointers or you’d never be able to produce a stable program. Edit to add: and yeah, I’m also not sure it’s relevant outside OS-level programming, which most people never get near at this point.
scsilver 6y ago
I wonder, is being able to see a leetcode problem that relies on a generalization of merge sort to solve, never having learned merge sort, and coming up with a merge sorting approach the kind of person who can be a programmer. Does this person even exist(like how many people in the world have that strong of abstract reasoning skills to be able to pull that off).

throwawayboise 6y ago

I'm not sure how relevant it is today but one litmus test I found years ago was how naturally they grasped the concept of a pointer. If a programmer grokked pointers that was a good indicator that s/he was on the path to being a good programmer. It's probably just a proxy for being able to think at a level of indirection.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
setpatchaddress 6y ago
This was one reason I thought programming the classic Mac was great training — the nature of the memory manager, where most data structures were double-indirected pointers and the inner pointer could move at will -— you had to understand pointers or you’d never be able to produce a stable program. Edit to add: and yeah, I’m also not sure it’s relevant outside OS-level programming, which most people never get near at this point.

scsilver 6y ago

I wonder, is being able to see a leetcode problem that relies on a generalization of merge sort to solve, never having learned merge sort, and coming up with a merge sorting approach the kind of person who can be a programmer. Does this person even exist(like how many people in the world have that strong of abstract reasoning skills to be able to pull that off).