7 ms·

Hamming: "dubious that great programmers can be trained.."

40 points by BlackJack 14y ago

I'm currently reading "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" by Richard Hamming. The book is based off of lectures he gave in a course by the same name. Here are a few paragraphs that I found thought provoking: "I made the comparison of writing software with the act of literary writing; both seem to depend fundamentally on clear thinking. Can good programming be taught? If we look at the corresponding teaching of "creative writing" courses we find that most students of such courses do not become great writers, and most great writers in the past did not take creative writing courses! Hence it is dubious that great programmers can be trained easily. Does experience help? Do bureaucrats after years of writing reports and instructions get better? I have no real data but I suspect that with time they get worse! The habitual use of "governmentese" over the years probably seeps into their writing style and makes them worse. I suspect the same for programmers! Neither years of experience nor the number of languages used is any reason for thinking that the programmer is getting better from these experiences. An examination of books on programming suggests that most of the authors are not good programmers. The results I picture are not nice, but all you have to oppose it is wishful thinking - I have evidence of years and years of programming on my side." What do you guys think? I disagree with his creative writing analogy because I don't think creative writing courses were taught much in the past, but otherwise I feel it's spot on.

atomical 14y ago
Does he give examples? I'm thinking of specific examples of: "An examination of books on programming suggests that most of the authors are not good programmers."
- BlackJack 14y ago
  No he doesn't. I figure it's less relevant today because it's much easier to find examples of good code via open source projects, and online resources like Zed Shaw's books.
vijayr 14y ago
How is creative writing comparable to programming? Writing, painting etc is more of creative process than programming, which is more logical than creative. There are infinite ways of writing a short story, but there aren't too many ways of writing a program for binary search, no?
- ankurdhama 14y ago
  Programming is a creative process if you actually know what is programming. Programming is about coming up with an idea of a system that could fulfill a purpose and then implementing and evolving the system over a period of time. I don't think there is anything more creative then programming, if only you understand what programming is about. In creative writing you express your thoughts using any of the human's natural language and in programming you do the same using a programming language and both requires logical and creative thinking. Just that in programming you can see your thoughts coming to life which makes it much more cool.
- chippy 14y ago
  Creative writing is a good analogy. All artists have to be taught, even if they teach themselves. Same with programming. When asked to say, draw a picture of this house, most trained artists, who have learnt the mechanics should be able to do a faithful rendition of that house. The same with a small program, most trained programmers will be able to make it, using their skills. However, where both great artists and great programmers are the same is that they bring something more than the sum total of the parts to their work. This something more is what cannot be taught.
  - thirdtruck 14y ago
    I want to recommend "The Artful Edit". It takes an all too infrequent approach to teaching how to edit and actually shows the before-and-after work of great authors. In this case, the reader sees quite a bit of Fitzgerald's process deconstructed. Having seen the changes required of the first draft, it left me with much higher hopes for leveling up my own writing.
- gbaygon 14y ago
  Art in programing is expressed through arquitecture more often that with algorithms.
  - nealabq 14y ago
    Perhaps so. Yet there can be great art in 15 lines.
sonabinu 14y ago
"It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech." -- Mark Twain http://www.movesinstitute.org/~mcgredo/HammingLearningToLearn/chapters/Hamming01.pdf http://www.movesinstitute.org/~mcgredo/HammingLearningToLear...
- Jacob4u2 14y ago
  That is a fantastic read. Just had to say it was worth more than an upvote.
  - boi 14y ago
    +1
  - sonabinu 14y ago
    thx
- sunnybythesea 14y ago
  That's a great write-up. Thanks!
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- geophile 14y ago
  Can you post a link to the winner?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrajav 14y ago
    The examples grandparent posted of great code (not sure why they deleted, it was a great comment!): https://github.com/alecthomas/voluptuous https://github.com/alecthomas/voluptuous https://github.com/halst/schema https://github.com/halst/schema
gmkoliver 14y ago
The writing example isn't that sound. First he asks if you can teach 'good' programming, but then expects 'great' programmers to come of it. Rhetoric like that smells a little fishy. Then he rests his conclusion, that great programmers can't be trained, on the point that we have perfect knowledge of every great writer that ever wrote? I don't buy it.
- thirdtruck 14y ago
  Agreed. While someone who saw my writing as a college freshman might have thought they had discovered a "natural", that would have ignored the years spent unwittingly honing my craft in online roleplaying environments. Until we find a very proficient author with a demonstrable lack of writing experience, we have to assume they received direct or indirect training of some kind. The burden of that disproof lies with the proponents of the "natural/gifted" hypothesis.
subsystem 14y ago
To continue the analogy... most sceenwriters, copywriters, columnists etc. probably did take creative writing classes.
- thirdtruck 14y ago
  Probably. And even self-taught creatives are taught. They only differ in kind from others in that someone (a teacher, a parent) installed - or arguably re-installed - the wetware equivalent of a compiler and headers on an otherwise consumer-orientated OS.
jakejake 14y ago
I've worked with and trained quite a few people over the past 15 years and, though I don't really say it to anybody, I do think great programmers are born not made. Though you can be made into a pretty good programmer that can be a great player on a team. And you can also be a great programmer who is lazy and doesn't live up to their potential. But you can see it in their ideas and way of solving problems.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
I firmly believe great programmers can be trained, but it's not going to happen after six months. I firmly believe in the 10000 hours rule, and I think it applies here as well, but to become a great programmer, that has to be 10000 hours of: * writing a lot of code, * reading other people's code, * evaluating and re-evaluating the code you've written and read, * learning and using different paradigms, languages and tools, and * being mentored by a great programmer who can teach. And, not surprisingly, these are all things that nearly anybody you consider a "great programmer" would have done to get to that point. Very few people who are not already inclined towards programming are going to be willing to put that kind of effort in. As a result, while I firmly believe great programmers can be trained, I think there are very few who actually are. In the end, I'm not even sure that "trained" can even be used as a classifier. I think a better classifier would be "self-selection". So, can a person who has not self-selected to be a programmer become a great programmer? Can a person who has not self-selected to become a basketball player become a Michael Jordan? Genetics may say yes one in a billion times, but most likely not. It may be easier for programming, thou, because you can spread those 10000 hours out over 15 years while still making a reasonable salary utilizing the mediocre skills you have today. Salary is a strong motivator, but I would be most people are willing to stay at the mediocre level.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mcartyem 14y ago
  Two things people who put 10,000 hours have in common are: - They are naive and believe they can conquer the world - or are discouraged about their original inability and hide it. - They share a sense of destiny in what they do. They can't imagine a world where they wouldn't be working any more in their medium. So if you wanted to predict who will become a great programmer you could look for naivety and commitment. You could look for people who can't tell what they've accomplished. And which continue to obliviously work on (naively ambitious) things only because noone was around to stop them.
jt2190 14y ago
Note that Hemming is using the word "training" precisely, to contrast with "education": > * Education is what, when, and why to do things > * Training is how to do it > Either one without the other is not much use.
- lambda 14y ago
  Ah. That, then, changes the meaning of this quote entirely. If he's merely saying that training alone, as opposed to a combination of training and education, is insufficient, then that is much more plausible. I was reading the original post as including what he defines here as "education" in "training".
stiff 14y ago
Those lectures from Hamming are available online on video: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30&feature=plcp http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30&...
aristus 14y ago
Short term, he is right. Long term he's like that patent officer claiming that everything had already been invented. http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/08/pascals-apology.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/08/pascals-apology.html
jt2190 14y ago
Hemming's point can be summed up with this pithy question: Do you have n years of experience, or n * 1 year of experience? Spending years on the job learning nothing or barely learning lots of programming languages does not make one into a great programmer. My mother taught creative writing, and it's exactly the same. Writers got good ultimately by writing, not by reading books about writing or taking classes on writing. (edit: Let me add that this is a central problem faced by educators: The good ones know that they can't teach/train success directly, rather that the students must take that training and educate themselves about how to use it to achieve their own success.)
- summerdown2 14y ago
  > Writers got good ultimately by writing, not by reading books about writing or taking classes on writing. I'm not sure this is true. I've had a little success in short story writing, and have been pushing myself to get better over quite a few years now. At least for me, writing seems necessary but not sufficient. I have to: * Write * Think hard about what I write * Critique other writers * Read books by people who know the subject * Write some more The key seems to be reflecting as well as writing. It's essentially a constant struggle to improve rather than just cranking the handle. I think that's why the answer to: > Do bureaucrats after years of writing reports and instructions get better? is no. They're not striving to be better.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
akg 14y ago
I think what makes one great in craft is deeply caring about the craft. It's not just a means to an end, it is something one truly feels passionate about. When one has that visceral calling for something, I think they find ways to get better at what they do. The greatest attribute of humans is that they adapt and learn. I know several people who could be great programmers, in terms of the ability to solve complex problems, but they do not care enough about their code to do so; which is fine, they find passion elsewhere. Programming is not for everyone, but I do think that it can be learned over time with patience, passion, and practice.
edwinnathaniel 14y ago
HackerNews has always been enamored with the perception of the so called Great Programmer that seemed to attract the next logical discussions: productivity and compensation. In a big scale software product, great programmer is only marginally important. In a startup, great programmer is definitely useful provided they do not come with "baggages" and asking for top notch compensation (how would you maintain your company's financial health if you are paying him tons of money and giving him stocks while it is your dream, passions, goals, and livelihood that is on the line). Programmers love to talk about great programmer because that is their dream: fame, money, and freedom. The real great programmers keep writing good code and act normally like any other workers...and I do not think that the bar is that high...most of us painted it otherwise.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  I don't think you should underestimate the essential contributions that great programmers make to large-scale software products. They can: - Keep the entire system in their heads, which is of great help to other programmers who have questions about how the code works. - See several steps ahead and thus avoid pitfalls that may not be obvious to others. - Design stable and maintainable architectures. - Debug nasty bugs that others on the team may never be able to solve. - Mentor less-advanced programmers. Without at least a handful of really good programmers to lead the way, a large development project probably has a very small probability of success.
  - edwinnathaniel 14y ago
    I've yet to meet someone who can keep the entire complex, humongous system in their head (we're talking about a system that have been developed for 5-7 years with at least 20 smart developers where things keep changing/updated/fixed, etc). I think you're stretching that point too far. Point #2 is more in the experience, a good developer (not necessarily great) can do this in any given day provided that he/she has the right experience. You don't know what you don't know => all others would either be 50-50 or intuition (a.k.a luck). Point #3 can be done by "good enough" developer as well. The fact that we have plenty "good enough" software systems that requires little to less maintenance running today is a proof of my statement. Point #4 debugging is about focus and patience. Give it to a decent programmer without time-limit and he'll figure it out, eventually. Point #5 any decent developer who have good communication skill can do this. I think we are guilty of underestimating "good" developer and overestimating (or plain worshipping) great developer.
Confusion 14y ago
When asked, greater writers and programmers will both emphasize study and practice. They recognize they were once bad writers and programmers and got better via study and practice. I see no reason to doubt these self-reports. I think Richard Hamming is out of his depth here, as evidenced by his use of naive anecdotes and analogies. If programming is like writing, it is like a severely restricted writing exercise, where you can only use certain grammatical structures, where you have to define a lot of words explicitly and where your stories have to explain to a machine how to achieve a slew of mundane goals.
- pyalot2 14y ago
  It's a fact that you cannot become better at something without doing it. But it is not guaranteed that you become better at something because you're doing it. The personality traits that let you become a great writer or programmer are not innate in everybody. And for the most part you can't reshape a personality to have the right traits. It's not talent, but the right precondition to make use of the practice.
  - Confusion 14y ago
    It is practically guaranteed that you will become better if you 'study and practice', which implies the explicit goal of becoming better. It's almost impossible to become worse by practicing with the explicit goal of becoming better. I don't have any reason to believe there exists such a thing as an identifiable "personality trait that let's you become a great writer or programmer". Perhaps a predisposition towards "being good at what you do" and "practicing and studying to become better" is such a thing, but when I speak for myself I know such tendencies can thoroughly change over time. I believe it's easy to engage in armchair psychology, while simultaneously thinking ourselves members of a special breed.
    - pyalot2 14y ago
      Becoming better isn't the same as becoming great. I don't think there is such a thing as an identifiable personality trait, not in the way you mean it. Yet I'll propose to you a simple proof of two points. The first point is that there is more going on than simply applying yourself. And the second point is that whatever that is, it has to do with your personality. To the first point: If there was a recipe to greatness (the Amadeus, Shakespeare, Einstein, Goedel, Knuth kind) then everybody would simply do it and we'd be a race of supermen. So obviously any argument for the existence of such a recipe has to be fundamentally flawed. This presents us with a paradox, as we do know that great people did apply themselves to become what they are, and we know that within bounds everybody is equipped with the same mental facilities. How do we reconcile this? To the second point: Great people applied themselves over decades and tens of thousands of hours. This level of commitment can neither be forced upon you, nor can you make yourself do it with discipline. You will have to find a drive inside yourself to do it. All things being equal and your personality being fully formed as you enter your teens, the answer obviously is that how that happens is your personality. You cannot predict how the personality of a person will interact with that persons life and goals, so there is no "identifyable". But with hindsight you can analyze a person and see what made somebody apply himself consistently for decades. And every person is different, so you cannot predict if a person will become great or not.
pyalot2 14y ago
Let's clear some facts first: - You're not born a programmer, there's no such thing as "talented" - Different people have wildly different levels of skill/proficiency in programming. - Skill in programming invariably takes time to acquire, nobody has become a great programmer after programming for a week. With that being said, what the author aims for is to predict who will become a great programmer, not just an average one, he's looking for the 99.9th percentile of programmers, for the 0.1%, the ones which outrank 1000 of their peers. For most of the profession/craft of programming that doesn't matter. You're certainly looking for people to hire in the 80th percentile and above but between 1:1000 and 1:5 there's a huge difference. We know that you can train people to become proficient enough in programming to be useful in it. As to the difficulty of "training" great programmers, it takes a long time and a lot of hours, persistence and passion to become one. Probably in the order of 10 years, 10'000 hours. Not everybody can do that. The simple fact that different people have different preferences, priorities, etc. ensures that most people on the path from beginner to great programmer fall somewhere along the wayside. But those few with the stamina to persist, who push themselves, for a decade or more, those people have a shot. So can you train personality traits that will allow you to pull trough? I think it's unlikely. You can show so-inclined persons the way, and if they have the right personality they can walk it, and you can train them on walking the path well. But you can't reshape their psychology to fit the path.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
bjoe_lewis 14y ago
I would like him speak to Peter Norvig.
- sonabinu 14y ago
  yep, 10000 hours of programming
kenko 14y ago
"I made the comparison of writing software with the act of literary writing; both seem to depend fundamentally on clear thinking. Can good programming be taught? If we look at the corresponding teaching of "creative writing" courses we find that most students of such courses do not become great writers, and most great writers in the past did not take creative writing courses! Hence it is dubious that great programmers can be trained easily." That's just a staggering misuse of "hence".
michaelochurch 14y ago
The proverbial "10,000 hours" is not enough. Here are some problems with that. * You get 5 focused, highly effective hours in an average day, possibly 6 days per week. You can work productively for 10-12 hours in a single day, but it's not effective in the long run. As an absolute maximum, your harvest for something as difficult as programming is going to be about 1500 hours per year. So if you really max it out, you're going to need 7 years to become a great programmer. That's if you're maximally efficient and control your own schedule. * What you mentioned about bureaucrats becoming worse writers is probably true. It takes deliberate practice. It takes feedback and interaction and exposure. It may require a mentor. In fact, one of the most important "meta" skills is knowing when to recognize people are better than you, and to learn from them. Otherwise, you might be practicing doing things wrong. Most people at their paid jobs are doing just that, because the corporate world is one of oppressive mediocrity. * The software industry sucks. Most of the work is busywork and most of the shit being done is being done wrong. Few people get any deliberate practice at their paid jobs. In fact, I would say that most paid software work is negative toward long-term greatness, because it forces you to do things wrong. Programming is an especially hard thing to become really good at, because (a) to become a great software engineer, you must interact with the real world, but (b) the vast majority of the real world is dismally broken, and 99% of the real shot-callers are idiots who've never even seen a line of code except in the movies.
jrvarela56 14y ago
Two important issues to take into account: 1) The use of "worse" or "better" keeps the conversation very subjective. Better in what sense? What metrics are you using to measure the skill? 2) Deliberate Practice: same as with physical training if you practice in ways that strain your capacity, it will grow as long as the necessary amount of time is put into the activity. Highly recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performers-EverybodyElse/dp/1591842948 http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performer...
lambda 14y ago
Hmm. I'm not so sure about his analogy with writing. Of course, most people who take creative writing don't go on to become great writers; that pretty much goes without saying, most people in any field don't go on to become "great" (the very definition of "great" is that it's exceptional). So that part is a tautology. Now, I wonder about how many people who go on to be "great writers" received training in writing? Of course, "creative writing" as an academic discipline is rather new, but English has been around as a discipline for years. From a quick poll of the authors mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century_in_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century_in_literature and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century_in_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century_in_literature, almost every one had at least a college education, mostly in the humanities (which generally require a lot of writing, and train you in writing). And most of them have worked at lower-level writing jobs before becoming great writers; copy editors, journalists, corporate writers, and the like. Several of the more recent "great writers" of the late 20th and 21st centuries have indeed gone through creative writing programs. So his analogy, at least, seems to be false. How about in writing software? Well, as I mentioned, it's pretty much tautological that no training program can produce entirely great programmers. The purpose of training is to turn lousy programmers into mediocre. Mediocre into passable. Passable into good. Good into very good. And very good into great. You are not likely to train all of your lousy programmers into great; so claiming that training does not produce great programmers is attacking a strawman. I have seen plenty of people who have gotten a degree in computer science who are lousy programmers. And I have seen great programmers with no formal education. But on the whole, when I've looked at programmers with equivalent amounts of experience, but where one had formal training and the other did not, I would prefer the one who had some formal training. People who have not had formal training tend to not have much experience with reasoning about algorithms, or invariants, that can make their code a lot better. While its true that nowadays we have many libraries and tools that mean that the average programmer can just use built-in data structures and do a pretty good job, I've seen enough code that was so horribly inefficient that even a little bit of algorithmic analysis upfront would have been helpful. Or a lot of code where someone just hacked away at a problem until they had something that worked, rather than trying to formulate a model that would underly it and keep the code well-organized and understandable. And among those programmers who are self-taught but great, they have put in deliberate practice, and deliberate study, even if its on their own. So sure, there are some people who are just untrainable; I've worked with some of them. And there are some people who are naturally brilliant and able to study independently. But all else being equal, I think that deliberate training definitely has value in improving the quality of programmers as a whole; and so yes, training will lead to more great programmers.
mikevm 14y ago
What's the definition of a good programmer anyway? It seems rather vague to me. Someone who writes clean, readable code? Someone who writes efficient and elegant algorithms? Which is it?
mcartyem 14y ago
When you look back at when you started programming and where you are now, what surprises you the most? What turned out to be the opposite of what you originally thought it would be?
thirdtruck 14y ago
Based on years of research by folks like Cal Newport and Scott H. Young, the bureaucratic world epitomizes the antithesis of an efficient learning environment. To learn, one needs: * A constant influx of new and increasingly difficult challenges. * Opportunities to step back and review prior learning, in order to develop a more holistic understanding. * As rapid and accurate feedback as possible. As learning animals, we love video games because they hit all of those buttons of ours in rapid succession. The start-up world hosts a disproportionate amount of innovation and technical proficiency for the same reason.

40 points by BlackJack 14y ago

atomical 14y ago

Does he give examples? I'm thinking of specific examples of: "An examination of books on programming suggests that most of the authors are not good programmers."

BlackJack 14y ago
No he doesn't. I figure it's less relevant today because it's much easier to find examples of good code via open source projects, and online resources like Zed Shaw's books.

vijayr 14y ago

How is creative writing comparable to programming? Writing, painting etc is more of creative process than programming, which is more logical than creative. There are infinite ways of writing a short story, but there aren't too many ways of writing a program for binary search, no?

ankurdhama 14y ago
Programming is a creative process if you actually know what is programming. Programming is about coming up with an idea of a system that could fulfill a purpose and then implementing and evolving the system over a period of time. I don't think there is anything more creative then programming, if only you understand what programming is about. In creative writing you express your thoughts using any of the human's natural language and in programming you do the same using a programming language and both requires logical and creative thinking. Just that in programming you can see your thoughts coming to life which makes it much more cool.
chippy 14y ago
Creative writing is a good analogy. All artists have to be taught, even if they teach themselves. Same with programming. When asked to say, draw a picture of this house, most trained artists, who have learnt the mechanics should be able to do a faithful rendition of that house. The same with a small program, most trained programmers will be able to make it, using their skills. However, where both great artists and great programmers are the same is that they bring something more than the sum total of the parts to their work. This something more is what cannot be taught.
- thirdtruck 14y ago
  I want to recommend "The Artful Edit". It takes an all too infrequent approach to teaching how to edit and actually shows the before-and-after work of great authors. In this case, the reader sees quite a bit of Fitzgerald's process deconstructed. Having seen the changes required of the first draft, it left me with much higher hopes for leveling up my own writing.
gbaygon 14y ago
Art in programing is expressed through arquitecture more often that with algorithms.
- nealabq 14y ago
  Perhaps so. Yet there can be great art in 15 lines.

sonabinu 14y ago

"It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech." -- Mark Twain http://www.movesinstitute.org/~mcgredo/HammingLearningToLearn/chapters/Hamming01.pdf http://www.movesinstitute.org/~mcgredo/HammingLearningToLear...

Jacob4u2 14y ago
That is a fantastic read. Just had to say it was worth more than an upvote.
- boi 14y ago
  +1
- sonabinu 14y ago
  thx
sunnybythesea 14y ago
That's a great write-up. Thanks!

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

geophile 14y ago
Can you post a link to the winner?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jrajav 14y ago
  The examples grandparent posted of great code (not sure why they deleted, it was a great comment!): https://github.com/alecthomas/voluptuous https://github.com/alecthomas/voluptuous https://github.com/halst/schema https://github.com/halst/schema

gmkoliver 14y ago

The writing example isn't that sound. First he asks if you can teach 'good' programming, but then expects 'great' programmers to come of it. Rhetoric like that smells a little fishy. Then he rests his conclusion, that great programmers can't be trained, on the point that we have perfect knowledge of every great writer that ever wrote? I don't buy it.

thirdtruck 14y ago
Agreed. While someone who saw my writing as a college freshman might have thought they had discovered a "natural", that would have ignored the years spent unwittingly honing my craft in online roleplaying environments. Until we find a very proficient author with a demonstrable lack of writing experience, we have to assume they received direct or indirect training of some kind. The burden of that disproof lies with the proponents of the "natural/gifted" hypothesis.

subsystem 14y ago

To continue the analogy... most sceenwriters, copywriters, columnists etc. probably did take creative writing classes.

thirdtruck 14y ago
Probably. And even self-taught creatives are taught. They only differ in kind from others in that someone (a teacher, a parent) installed - or arguably re-installed - the wetware equivalent of a compiler and headers on an otherwise consumer-orientated OS.

jakejake 14y ago

I've worked with and trained quite a few people over the past 15 years and, though I don't really say it to anybody, I do think great programmers are born not made. Though you can be made into a pretty good programmer that can be a great player on a team. And you can also be a great programmer who is lazy and doesn't live up to their potential. But you can see it in their ideas and way of solving problems.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

I firmly believe great programmers can be trained, but it's not going to happen after six months. I firmly believe in the 10000 hours rule, and I think it applies here as well, but to become a great programmer, that has to be 10000 hours of: * writing a lot of code, * reading other people's code, * evaluating and re-evaluating the code you've written and read, * learning and using different paradigms, languages and tools, and * being mentored by a great programmer who can teach. And, not surprisingly, these are all things that nearly anybody you consider a "great programmer" would have done to get to that point. Very few people who are not already inclined towards programming are going to be willing to put that kind of effort in. As a result, while I firmly believe great programmers can be trained, I think there are very few who actually are. In the end, I'm not even sure that "trained" can even be used as a classifier. I think a better classifier would be "self-selection". So, can a person who has not self-selected to be a programmer become a great programmer? Can a person who has not self-selected to become a basketball player become a Michael Jordan? Genetics may say yes one in a billion times, but most likely not. It may be easier for programming, thou, because you can spread those 10000 hours out over 15 years while still making a reasonable salary utilizing the mediocre skills you have today. Salary is a strong motivator, but I would be most people are willing to stay at the mediocre level.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mcartyem 14y ago
Two things people who put 10,000 hours have in common are: - They are naive and believe they can conquer the world - or are discouraged about their original inability and hide it. - They share a sense of destiny in what they do. They can't imagine a world where they wouldn't be working any more in their medium. So if you wanted to predict who will become a great programmer you could look for naivety and commitment. You could look for people who can't tell what they've accomplished. And which continue to obliviously work on (naively ambitious) things only because noone was around to stop them.

jt2190 14y ago

Note that Hemming is using the word "training" precisely, to contrast with "education": > * Education is what, when, and why to do things > * Training is how to do it > Either one without the other is not much use.

lambda 14y ago
Ah. That, then, changes the meaning of this quote entirely. If he's merely saying that training alone, as opposed to a combination of training and education, is insufficient, then that is much more plausible. I was reading the original post as including what he defines here as "education" in "training".

stiff 14y ago

Those lectures from Hamming are available online on video: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30&feature=plcp http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30&...

aristus 14y ago

Short term, he is right. Long term he's like that patent officer claiming that everything had already been invented. http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/08/pascals-apology.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/08/pascals-apology.html

jt2190 14y ago

Hemming's point can be summed up with this pithy question: Do you have n years of experience, or n * 1 year of experience? Spending years on the job learning nothing or barely learning lots of programming languages does not make one into a great programmer. My mother taught creative writing, and it's exactly the same. Writers got good ultimately by writing, not by reading books about writing or taking classes on writing. (edit: Let me add that this is a central problem faced by educators: The good ones know that they can't teach/train success directly, rather that the students must take that training and educate themselves about how to use it to achieve their own success.)

summerdown2 14y ago
> Writers got good ultimately by writing, not by reading books about writing or taking classes on writing. I'm not sure this is true. I've had a little success in short story writing, and have been pushing myself to get better over quite a few years now. At least for me, writing seems necessary but not sufficient. I have to: * Write * Think hard about what I write * Critique other writers * Read books by people who know the subject * Write some more The key seems to be reflecting as well as writing. It's essentially a constant struggle to improve rather than just cranking the handle. I think that's why the answer to: > Do bureaucrats after years of writing reports and instructions get better? is no. They're not striving to be better.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

akg 14y ago

I think what makes one great in craft is deeply caring about the craft. It's not just a means to an end, it is something one truly feels passionate about. When one has that visceral calling for something, I think they find ways to get better at what they do. The greatest attribute of humans is that they adapt and learn. I know several people who could be great programmers, in terms of the ability to solve complex problems, but they do not care enough about their code to do so; which is fine, they find passion elsewhere. Programming is not for everyone, but I do think that it can be learned over time with patience, passion, and practice.

edwinnathaniel 14y ago

HackerNews has always been enamored with the perception of the so called Great Programmer that seemed to attract the next logical discussions: productivity and compensation. In a big scale software product, great programmer is only marginally important. In a startup, great programmer is definitely useful provided they do not come with "baggages" and asking for top notch compensation (how would you maintain your company's financial health if you are paying him tons of money and giving him stocks while it is your dream, passions, goals, and livelihood that is on the line). Programmers love to talk about great programmer because that is their dream: fame, money, and freedom. The real great programmers keep writing good code and act normally like any other workers...and I do not think that the bar is that high...most of us painted it otherwise.

greenyoda 14y ago
I don't think you should underestimate the essential contributions that great programmers make to large-scale software products. They can: - Keep the entire system in their heads, which is of great help to other programmers who have questions about how the code works. - See several steps ahead and thus avoid pitfalls that may not be obvious to others. - Design stable and maintainable architectures. - Debug nasty bugs that others on the team may never be able to solve. - Mentor less-advanced programmers. Without at least a handful of really good programmers to lead the way, a large development project probably has a very small probability of success.
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago
  I've yet to meet someone who can keep the entire complex, humongous system in their head (we're talking about a system that have been developed for 5-7 years with at least 20 smart developers where things keep changing/updated/fixed, etc). I think you're stretching that point too far. Point #2 is more in the experience, a good developer (not necessarily great) can do this in any given day provided that he/she has the right experience. You don't know what you don't know => all others would either be 50-50 or intuition (a.k.a luck). Point #3 can be done by "good enough" developer as well. The fact that we have plenty "good enough" software systems that requires little to less maintenance running today is a proof of my statement. Point #4 debugging is about focus and patience. Give it to a decent programmer without time-limit and he'll figure it out, eventually. Point #5 any decent developer who have good communication skill can do this. I think we are guilty of underestimating "good" developer and overestimating (or plain worshipping) great developer.

Confusion 14y ago

When asked, greater writers and programmers will both emphasize study and practice. They recognize they were once bad writers and programmers and got better via study and practice. I see no reason to doubt these self-reports. I think Richard Hamming is out of his depth here, as evidenced by his use of naive anecdotes and analogies. If programming is like writing, it is like a severely restricted writing exercise, where you can only use certain grammatical structures, where you have to define a lot of words explicitly and where your stories have to explain to a machine how to achieve a slew of mundane goals.

pyalot2 14y ago
It's a fact that you cannot become better at something without doing it. But it is not guaranteed that you become better at something because you're doing it. The personality traits that let you become a great writer or programmer are not innate in everybody. And for the most part you can't reshape a personality to have the right traits. It's not talent, but the right precondition to make use of the practice.
- Confusion 14y ago
  It is practically guaranteed that you will become better if you 'study and practice', which implies the explicit goal of becoming better. It's almost impossible to become worse by practicing with the explicit goal of becoming better. I don't have any reason to believe there exists such a thing as an identifiable "personality trait that let's you become a great writer or programmer". Perhaps a predisposition towards "being good at what you do" and "practicing and studying to become better" is such a thing, but when I speak for myself I know such tendencies can thoroughly change over time. I believe it's easy to engage in armchair psychology, while simultaneously thinking ourselves members of a special breed.
  - pyalot2 14y ago
    Becoming better isn't the same as becoming great. I don't think there is such a thing as an identifiable personality trait, not in the way you mean it. Yet I'll propose to you a simple proof of two points. The first point is that there is more going on than simply applying yourself. And the second point is that whatever that is, it has to do with your personality. To the first point: If there was a recipe to greatness (the Amadeus, Shakespeare, Einstein, Goedel, Knuth kind) then everybody would simply do it and we'd be a race of supermen. So obviously any argument for the existence of such a recipe has to be fundamentally flawed. This presents us with a paradox, as we do know that great people did apply themselves to become what they are, and we know that within bounds everybody is equipped with the same mental facilities. How do we reconcile this? To the second point: Great people applied themselves over decades and tens of thousands of hours. This level of commitment can neither be forced upon you, nor can you make yourself do it with discipline. You will have to find a drive inside yourself to do it. All things being equal and your personality being fully formed as you enter your teens, the answer obviously is that how that happens is your personality. You cannot predict how the personality of a person will interact with that persons life and goals, so there is no "identifyable". But with hindsight you can analyze a person and see what made somebody apply himself consistently for decades. And every person is different, so you cannot predict if a person will become great or not.

pyalot2 14y ago

Let's clear some facts first: - You're not born a programmer, there's no such thing as "talented" - Different people have wildly different levels of skill/proficiency in programming. - Skill in programming invariably takes time to acquire, nobody has become a great programmer after programming for a week. With that being said, what the author aims for is to predict who will become a great programmer, not just an average one, he's looking for the 99.9th percentile of programmers, for the 0.1%, the ones which outrank 1000 of their peers. For most of the profession/craft of programming that doesn't matter. You're certainly looking for people to hire in the 80th percentile and above but between 1:1000 and 1:5 there's a huge difference. We know that you can train people to become proficient enough in programming to be useful in it. As to the difficulty of "training" great programmers, it takes a long time and a lot of hours, persistence and passion to become one. Probably in the order of 10 years, 10'000 hours. Not everybody can do that. The simple fact that different people have different preferences, priorities, etc. ensures that most people on the path from beginner to great programmer fall somewhere along the wayside. But those few with the stamina to persist, who push themselves, for a decade or more, those people have a shot. So can you train personality traits that will allow you to pull trough? I think it's unlikely. You can show so-inclined persons the way, and if they have the right personality they can walk it, and you can train them on walking the path well. But you can't reshape their psychology to fit the path.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

bjoe_lewis 14y ago

I would like him speak to Peter Norvig.

sonabinu 14y ago
yep, 10000 hours of programming

kenko 14y ago

"I made the comparison of writing software with the act of literary writing; both seem to depend fundamentally on clear thinking. Can good programming be taught? If we look at the corresponding teaching of "creative writing" courses we find that most students of such courses do not become great writers, and most great writers in the past did not take creative writing courses! Hence it is dubious that great programmers can be trained easily." That's just a staggering misuse of "hence".

michaelochurch 14y ago

The proverbial "10,000 hours" is not enough. Here are some problems with that. * You get 5 focused, highly effective hours in an average day, possibly 6 days per week. You can work productively for 10-12 hours in a single day, but it's not effective in the long run. As an absolute maximum, your harvest for something as difficult as programming is going to be about 1500 hours per year. So if you really max it out, you're going to need 7 years to become a great programmer. That's if you're maximally efficient and control your own schedule. * What you mentioned about bureaucrats becoming worse writers is probably true. It takes deliberate practice. It takes feedback and interaction and exposure. It may require a mentor. In fact, one of the most important "meta" skills is knowing when to recognize people are better than you, and to learn from them. Otherwise, you might be practicing doing things wrong. Most people at their paid jobs are doing just that, because the corporate world is one of oppressive mediocrity. * The software industry sucks. Most of the work is busywork and most of the shit being done is being done wrong. Few people get any deliberate practice at their paid jobs. In fact, I would say that most paid software work is negative toward long-term greatness, because it forces you to do things wrong. Programming is an especially hard thing to become really good at, because (a) to become a great software engineer, you must interact with the real world, but (b) the vast majority of the real world is dismally broken, and 99% of the real shot-callers are idiots who've never even seen a line of code except in the movies.

jrvarela56 14y ago

Two important issues to take into account: 1) The use of "worse" or "better" keeps the conversation very subjective. Better in what sense? What metrics are you using to measure the skill? 2) Deliberate Practice: same as with physical training if you practice in ways that strain your capacity, it will grow as long as the necessary amount of time is put into the activity. Highly recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performers-EverybodyElse/dp/1591842948 http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performer...

lambda 14y ago

Hmm. I'm not so sure about his analogy with writing. Of course, most people who take creative writing don't go on to become great writers; that pretty much goes without saying, most people in any field don't go on to become "great" (the very definition of "great" is that it's exceptional). So that part is a tautology. Now, I wonder about how many people who go on to be "great writers" received training in writing? Of course, "creative writing" as an academic discipline is rather new, but English has been around as a discipline for years. From a quick poll of the authors mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century_in_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century_in_literature and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century_in_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century_in_literature, almost every one had at least a college education, mostly in the humanities (which generally require a lot of writing, and train you in writing). And most of them have worked at lower-level writing jobs before becoming great writers; copy editors, journalists, corporate writers, and the like. Several of the more recent "great writers" of the late 20th and 21st centuries have indeed gone through creative writing programs. So his analogy, at least, seems to be false. How about in writing software? Well, as I mentioned, it's pretty much tautological that no training program can produce entirely great programmers. The purpose of training is to turn lousy programmers into mediocre. Mediocre into passable. Passable into good. Good into very good. And very good into great. You are not likely to train all of your lousy programmers into great; so claiming that training does not produce great programmers is attacking a strawman. I have seen plenty of people who have gotten a degree in computer science who are lousy programmers. And I have seen great programmers with no formal education. But on the whole, when I've looked at programmers with equivalent amounts of experience, but where one had formal training and the other did not, I would prefer the one who had some formal training. People who have not had formal training tend to not have much experience with reasoning about algorithms, or invariants, that can make their code a lot better. While its true that nowadays we have many libraries and tools that mean that the average programmer can just use built-in data structures and do a pretty good job, I've seen enough code that was so horribly inefficient that even a little bit of algorithmic analysis upfront would have been helpful. Or a lot of code where someone just hacked away at a problem until they had something that worked, rather than trying to formulate a model that would underly it and keep the code well-organized and understandable. And among those programmers who are self-taught but great, they have put in deliberate practice, and deliberate study, even if its on their own. So sure, there are some people who are just untrainable; I've worked with some of them. And there are some people who are naturally brilliant and able to study independently. But all else being equal, I think that deliberate training definitely has value in improving the quality of programmers as a whole; and so yes, training will lead to more great programmers.

mikevm 14y ago

What's the definition of a good programmer anyway? It seems rather vague to me. Someone who writes clean, readable code? Someone who writes efficient and elegant algorithms? Which is it?

mcartyem 14y ago

When you look back at when you started programming and where you are now, what surprises you the most? What turned out to be the opposite of what you originally thought it would be?

thirdtruck 14y ago

Based on years of research by folks like Cal Newport and Scott H. Young, the bureaucratic world epitomizes the antithesis of an efficient learning environment. To learn, one needs: * A constant influx of new and increasingly difficult challenges. * Opportunities to step back and review prior learning, in order to develop a more holistic understanding. * As rapid and accurate feedback as possible. As learning animals, we love video games because they hit all of those buttons of ours in rapid succession. The start-up world hosts a disproportionate amount of innovation and technical proficiency for the same reason.