5 ms·

> My manager today was wondering if that's particularly efficient, to which I replied "he knows how to program". > I mean, the guy has a PhD in physics - I bet

> My manager today was wondering if that's particularly efficient, to which I replied "he knows how to program". > I mean, the guy has a PhD in physics - I bet that what he's doing now isn't even his final form. I don't doubt that they guy you work with is excellent and is able to seamlessly make this switch, but I have previously worked with someone who was excellent at C++, and had a PhD in something maths related (can't remember what exactly), and completely failed to get anywhere with JavaScript. As in: took 2 weeks to write a script that would take me a couple of hours, and it was still in a pretty bad state at that point. It seems that they hadn't encountered async programming before and really struggled to get their head around it. The silly thing is their program didn't actually require any concurrency so they could just have stuck an `await` on each async function call and treated it like synchronous code, but they were convinced that async-await was too complicated to learn up front so they had a complete mess tracking everything with callbacks.

blahgeek 5y ago
I won’t say someone is good at programming if he/she cannot learn JavaScript in two weeks
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Perhaps not in a general sense. But that they were certainly good enough at C++ that my employer was quite happy with their performance at those tasks. They just weren't very good at translating that to areas they were less familiar with.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I agree, you'd have to be a pretty bad programmer if you can't wrap your head around JavaScript in a couple of weeks. TypeScript even. Also, React. Babel. Grunt. Gulp. NPM. Node. Cobertura. Comfey. JQuery. Angular. Vue. Bootstrap. Flutter. Mocha. Minior. Yarn. Leftpad. Webpack. Npx. JSON. Rest. CORS. XMLHttpRequest. WebSockets. Web Storage. IndexDB. Actually, I think some of those might be Pokemon.
  - brimble 5y ago
    I've never had the experience that learning a language is harder than learning the culture and (usually bad) tools around it. Stuff like "oh no, I know the official docs say that, but no one does it that way" or "this tool is a 'hip, faster, drop-in replacement' and you'll see it recommended everywhere but the last part is actaully a lie" or "the platform says it supports this language but actually the tools are so broken that it effectively does not" et c. [EDIT] I had in mind Android, Yarn, and AWS Lambda + Java (as of a couple years ago, anyway), in order, for those examples, for the curious :-)
injidup 5y ago
And why wasn't someone there to ease him over the culture hurdle? I've taken people who had no idea about Async and baby sat them till it clicked. But left alone it would never have happened. New hires should not just be thrown a task, left alone and then be slandered two weeks later on hacker News when they get it wrong.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  A combination of bad management (nobody set up that mentoring relationship), and insecurity on their part (I tried to do just that, but they wouldn't accept the help). > New hires should not just be thrown a task, left alone and then be slandered two weeks later on hacker News when they get it wrong. They were certainly not a new hire (they'd been at the company 7 years - if anything I was the new hire!), but I generally agree. My point was merely that while some people will easily transfer their skills to different languages and domains, this won't be true of everyone.
  - wildmanx 5y ago
    > They were certainly not a new hire (they'd been at the company 7 years - if anything I was the new hire!), but I generally agree. That tends to make it harder. I've experienced quite a few people more "senior" than me (either age-wise or company-tenure-wise or both) who had trouble having the less-senior guy telling them things like suggesting different designs or code refactors. Some things were just not obvious why my suggestions were better, but they were based on experience with this particular technology. So they preferred to ignore the advice and run into the issues I and other colleagues had run into 3 years prior cause they didn't want to listen. Sadly, they didn't always have to live with the consequences since some of them moved on before the consequences became obvious, so we had to clean up the mess we were suggesting against in the first place.
  - injidup 5y ago
    Ok. That's a bit different. Somebody who has been at the company for 7 years should also have the sense to ask around. But you are also right. I've worked with mathematicians and PHD's much smarter in the domain than me who wrote spaghetti code and often couldn't see the point in good code hygiene.
yodsanklai 5y ago
> It seems that they hadn't encountered async programming before and really struggled to get their head around it. Seems totally normal. And most likely, after a few weeks this person would get the concept.
- FpUser 5y ago
  This is interesting. Personally I did not need to "encounter" async. At some point I realized that I needed it in my project (it did not have that official name back then) and had written an implementation in a few days. I also written preemptive multithreading library in ancient DOS based product with having zero prior experience. Again took me few days.
dgb23 5y ago
Can confirm, async programming - whether done with callbacks/promises/sugar is tangential here - is a conceptual stumbling block for some at first, and that includes smart programmers who haven't done much in terms of Web or GUI programming. Add the concept of static scoping and closures and you have a few things to absorb first, before you get comfortable. It has to click. Reminds me of stochastics in school, which was a subject that wasn't immediately natural for some who were otherwise very good at math in general. For me it's bit fiddling for example: I bought Hacker's Delight some months ago and first had to really work through even the most basic things on paper until it stopped to feel like magical hieroglyphs.

blahgeek 5y ago

I won’t say someone is good at programming if he/she cannot learn JavaScript in two weeks

nicoburns 5y ago
Perhaps not in a general sense. But that they were certainly good enough at C++ that my employer was quite happy with their performance at those tasks. They just weren't very good at translating that to areas they were less familiar with.
jiggawatts 5y ago
I agree, you'd have to be a pretty bad programmer if you can't wrap your head around JavaScript in a couple of weeks. TypeScript even. Also, React. Babel. Grunt. Gulp. NPM. Node. Cobertura. Comfey. JQuery. Angular. Vue. Bootstrap. Flutter. Mocha. Minior. Yarn. Leftpad. Webpack. Npx. JSON. Rest. CORS. XMLHttpRequest. WebSockets. Web Storage. IndexDB. Actually, I think some of those might be Pokemon.
- brimble 5y ago
  I've never had the experience that learning a language is harder than learning the culture and (usually bad) tools around it. Stuff like "oh no, I know the official docs say that, but no one does it that way" or "this tool is a 'hip, faster, drop-in replacement' and you'll see it recommended everywhere but the last part is actaully a lie" or "the platform says it supports this language but actually the tools are so broken that it effectively does not" et c. [EDIT] I had in mind Android, Yarn, and AWS Lambda + Java (as of a couple years ago, anyway), in order, for those examples, for the curious :-)

injidup 5y ago

And why wasn't someone there to ease him over the culture hurdle? I've taken people who had no idea about Async and baby sat them till it clicked. But left alone it would never have happened. New hires should not just be thrown a task, left alone and then be slandered two weeks later on hacker News when they get it wrong.

nicoburns 5y ago
A combination of bad management (nobody set up that mentoring relationship), and insecurity on their part (I tried to do just that, but they wouldn't accept the help). > New hires should not just be thrown a task, left alone and then be slandered two weeks later on hacker News when they get it wrong. They were certainly not a new hire (they'd been at the company 7 years - if anything I was the new hire!), but I generally agree. My point was merely that while some people will easily transfer their skills to different languages and domains, this won't be true of everyone.
- wildmanx 5y ago
  > They were certainly not a new hire (they'd been at the company 7 years - if anything I was the new hire!), but I generally agree. That tends to make it harder. I've experienced quite a few people more "senior" than me (either age-wise or company-tenure-wise or both) who had trouble having the less-senior guy telling them things like suggesting different designs or code refactors. Some things were just not obvious why my suggestions were better, but they were based on experience with this particular technology. So they preferred to ignore the advice and run into the issues I and other colleagues had run into 3 years prior cause they didn't want to listen. Sadly, they didn't always have to live with the consequences since some of them moved on before the consequences became obvious, so we had to clean up the mess we were suggesting against in the first place.
- injidup 5y ago
  Ok. That's a bit different. Somebody who has been at the company for 7 years should also have the sense to ask around. But you are also right. I've worked with mathematicians and PHD's much smarter in the domain than me who wrote spaghetti code and often couldn't see the point in good code hygiene.

yodsanklai 5y ago

> It seems that they hadn't encountered async programming before and really struggled to get their head around it. Seems totally normal. And most likely, after a few weeks this person would get the concept.

FpUser 5y ago
This is interesting. Personally I did not need to "encounter" async. At some point I realized that I needed it in my project (it did not have that official name back then) and had written an implementation in a few days. I also written preemptive multithreading library in ancient DOS based product with having zero prior experience. Again took me few days.

dgb23 5y ago

Can confirm, async programming - whether done with callbacks/promises/sugar is tangential here - is a conceptual stumbling block for some at first, and that includes smart programmers who haven't done much in terms of Web or GUI programming. Add the concept of static scoping and closures and you have a few things to absorb first, before you get comfortable. It has to click. Reminds me of stochastics in school, which was a subject that wasn't immediately natural for some who were otherwise very good at math in general. For me it's bit fiddling for example: I bought Hacker's Delight some months ago and first had to really work through even the most basic things on paper until it stopped to feel like magical hieroglyphs.