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Guilty. I'm pretty good at my job, but I never learned CS fundamentals and don't work in a context where this matters (I currently work in front-end JS/TS). I
by digging 3y ago
Guilty. I'm pretty good at my job, but I never learned CS fundamentals and don't work in a context where this matters (I currently work in front-end JS/TS).
I don't think it's worthless knowledge to me, but I think you're a bit blinded by your own context. I have seen many comments on HN bemoaning "Developers who don't even know X", and X is always something different.
I don't think there's a smoking gun for bad developers and it's weird to me when programmers think there is one, tbh. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge, and with something so arcane as programming, it's very easy to have no idea that you're missing some important or "fundamental" piece of knowledge
- lucaspfeifer 3y agoHere's one take: good developers learn fast, bad developers learn slow. Software is one of the fastest moving fields, so it takes a quick mind to keep up. Clearly, everyone needs some basic knowledge to program, and equally clearly, there will be gaps in every developer's knowledge. When needed, we fill the gaps as quickly as possible. If someone can learn 10x as fast, maybe they only need 1/10th the knowledge base.
- digging 3y agoThat's a good metric, but by smoking gun I was referring to individual concepts.
- hnfong 3y agoI generally agree, in other languages it suffices to just tell juniors "don't use floating point if you can avoid it". And integer types are less messy to reason with (just need to learn the 32-bit and 64-bit ranges). But in your specific case (of JS/TS), _all_ the normal numeric variables are in IEEE 754 floating point...