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I appreciate these, but in my experience it's not that relevant. The harder problems in programming are more of knowing your ecosystem. Knowing the design patte

I appreciate these, but in my experience it's not that relevant. The harder problems in programming are more of knowing your ecosystem. Knowing the design patterns necessary to create well meaning, understandable code in the first place. This is especially cumbersome when working on projects with complex data patterns. For example, working with GUI applications and C/+ can make your code a big pile of garbage really quickly because representing your data in something like an ORM is not standard, you can't do the many tricks like getters/setters in C/+, but you can in Python, or C#, etc. The benefits of VM languages are, in my opinion, not appreciated enough. In my opinion knowing the right tools for the job is far more important than how you comment your code, how you name your variables, or anything else. I wish there were more posts where people impliment an application with multiple tool sets and compare them, give insight into what some things are good for and not. "Tool Benchmarking" might be a good term for it.

rckrd 5y ago
Lucky for you #6 is "Have a wide variety of tools and know which ones to use for the job." :)
nerdponx 5y ago
> I wish there were more posts where people impliment an application with multiple tool sets and compare them, give insight into what some things are good for and not. "Tool Benchmarking" might be a good term for it. I recently started working on a project like this. It's hard work. Building a complete tool in one language takes a long time. Not to mention 2, or 5. Moreover, many (most?) programmers are only "fluent" in one or two languages. Even if you "know" a language, you might not know the full build toolchain, or you might not know common idioms, etc. Most people probably want to work on building new/interesting/fun stuff, not reimplementing the same toy program in several different languages.
- rckrd 5y ago
  I've actually found that knowledge diffusion between different languages and different types of developers can be significant - e.g., game developers work much differently than distributed systems engineers. Not always, but sometimes, an interesting knowledge arbitrage opportunity when fields start to collide.

rckrd 5y ago

Lucky for you #6 is "Have a wide variety of tools and know which ones to use for the job." :)

nerdponx 5y ago

> I wish there were more posts where people impliment an application with multiple tool sets and compare them, give insight into what some things are good for and not. "Tool Benchmarking" might be a good term for it. I recently started working on a project like this. It's hard work. Building a complete tool in one language takes a long time. Not to mention 2, or 5. Moreover, many (most?) programmers are only "fluent" in one or two languages. Even if you "know" a language, you might not know the full build toolchain, or you might not know common idioms, etc. Most people probably want to work on building new/interesting/fun stuff, not reimplementing the same toy program in several different languages.

rckrd 5y ago
I've actually found that knowledge diffusion between different languages and different types of developers can be significant - e.g., game developers work much differently than distributed systems engineers. Not always, but sometimes, an interesting knowledge arbitrage opportunity when fields start to collide.