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It's quite strange to me that people would identify as or look for a "[language] programmer". Sure, I happen to write more C++, Python, and C than anything else

• shurcooL 14y ago
  I completely agree. I think to completely explain this phenomena, one would have to make references to people's skill levels, and it's hard to explain it in a few words. So I'll just not say anything at all on this subject beyond that.
• memset 14y ago
  I agree with the premise that, as a professional software engineer, it is my responsibility to be a polyglot. As for myself, when I started writing Python, I mainly wrote C or Java code in Python - in a similar way, perhaps, how early C programs were littered with __asm__() constructs. It took a long time to learn how to write things in (though I hate the term) a "pythonic" way. That is, to learn the common language idioms that are not taught in any tutorial, or are part of pep8, which illustrate common patterns in Python code, the ins-and-outs of PYTHONPATH, etc etc. So while I agree that, in a weekend, a reasonably proficient programmer can pick up reasonable proficiency in a given language, being a "Python Programmer" to me means that one has developed an intuition for the common patterns, libraries, pitfalls, platforms, and clever specific features of a given language and its ecosystem.
  • cpprototypes 14y ago
    I agree, but I think the age of the language and community is another factor. Java, Python, C++, these are all old languages with decades of history and habits. Newer things like Node.js and Go have no history, no baggage to learn or avoid. I think starting in something with such a clean slate is somewhat easier because there is less ecosystem to learn.
    • laumars 14y ago
      This has been my experience learning Go as well.
    • qznc 14y ago
      I once heard a quote like this "programming languages are frozen knowledge about software engineering". (Anybody got a clue who said something like this?) New languages usually improve upon older languages by making certain errors impossible by design. For example, Go allows pointers, but not pointer arithmetic. With C we learned pointer arithmetic is often harmful (though sometimes necessary), so Java removed pointers from the language (not completely, though). Go takes a sensible middle way, because no pointers sometimes is ugly. Such a clean slate is good, because with older languages programmers fight their language deficiencies with habits (e.g. if (5 == x) instead of if (x == 5) to prevent if (x = 5)). On the other hand, we will find the pitfalls and dark corners of Go over time, but currently we do not know them enough. Go will acquire its own conventions, but we do not know all of them yet. This is the risk of a clean slate.
      • mercurial 14y ago
        Funny you should take Go as an example, since it's often bashed for not having taken the last decade of language design into account.
        • qznc 14y ago
          Go does take the last decade of language design by Pike, Thompson, and Griesemer into account. Mostly Pike as I am not sure if the other two guys even did design some language in this time. Personally, I consider gofmt the biggest achievement of Go, if it manages to make that mainstream. While there are equivalent tools for C they are not widely used.
          • masklinn 14y ago
            > Go does take the last decade of language design by Pike, Thompson, and Griesemer into account. Decade which ended 20-odd years ago relative to the rest of the world, kind-of the point.
• georgeorwell 14y ago
  What, you don't know about The Programmer Hierarchy? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1622553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1622553 http://lukewelling.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/programmer%20hierarchy.pdf http://lukewelling.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/programmer... I find a lot of people who use high-level languages are terrified of tediously direct contact with the machine, and a lot of people who use low-level languages are terrified of the performance costs of abstraction. I'm terrified of both. I think that in general, C++ is a lot harder to get your head around than C, being for all intents and purposes a superset, and an easily five times bigger one at that.
  • kenfromm 14y ago
    Love this comment, "I'm terrified of both."
    • stcredzero 14y ago
      That's how you gauge the experience of a programmer: how much of the field she/he's terrified by. EDIT: I originally meant this as a joke, but seriously, if someone accurately knows where the gotchas are, that's valuable. Also note if they're biased to false positives and/or false negatives, and by how much. Are their heuristics for dealing with unknown territory efficient and likely to converge on good approximate results?
      • georgeorwell 14y ago
        Thanks guys, I guess I really have had some rough times. I like how Lisp and Assembler at the top of the hierarchy capture the two extremes. Some hypothetical language in the middle would be great, but maybe the best we can do is to straddle that point, e.g. with C++ and Python.
        • willismichael 14y ago
          Rather than straddle the middle, I think I'd go with as high-level a language as I could get, coupled with a simple low-enough-level language to get whatever performance benefits I needed. Some combo like Python/C, Clojure/Java, or maybe some other lisp dialect and C.
• kyllo 14y ago
  This is why Joel Spolsky correctly observed that the replacement of C/C++ and functional languages with Java in university CS curricula is a tragedy. If you don't understand pointers or recursion, you are not a polyglot and you cannot pick up just any language in a matter of weeks. The "[language] programmer" (where [language] usually = Java or .NET) trend is a misguided attempt by industry to commoditize programmer talent.
  • edwinnathaniel 14y ago
    I've seen C/C++ programmers failed in writing good readable code. C/C++ programmers tend to do premature optimization (habit) due to the culture and the problem domain (past experience): device driver, kernel code, game development. How important Pointer is for say learning any high-level programming language that don't have pointers (pretty much everything outside C/C++/Objective-C)? Sometimes I felt that knowing Pointer arithmetic and tricks are some sort of chess-thumping that old programmers tend to do. (My background is system programming so I know how pointer works). It doesn't matter what you know or learn during the university. What matters is whether you continue to hone your skill or not and have a high bar of quality.
    • raphaelj 14y ago
      I think he was talking about pointer from the "idea" point of view, not the language feature. References in high level languages are mostly hidden pointers. A good knowledge of how pointers work is really important to get a good understanding of how high level languages work (a lot of Java programmers don't well understand the distinction between value and reference types, for instance). Likely, be at ease with recursion is also very important as many complex problems are recursive by nature, and so way easier to solve using functional techniques.
      • kyllo 14y ago
        Yes. Pointers are always there in programming and you need to understand how they work, even if you are using a language where you don't have to declare them as such explicitly.
• MBCook 14y ago
  > It's quite strange to me that people would identify as or look for a "[language] programmer". I understand people doing this. First you can be more sure of what you're getting. It's sad that tests like FizzBuzz are so useful, but it's a fact. If I hire a Java developer for a Java position, I can figure out there Java skills. If I look at a PHP developer, it's more of a crapshoot. They may have a lot of PHP experience, but can they convert that to Java or have they just been doing cargo-cult stuff? This would be a smaller issue with something like C# that's closer to Java. Second, and I suspect more common, is time investment. It might take someone quite a bit of time to switch languages. If they haven't done it before, you might find out it's a weakness for them. In my experience, at least in smaller companies, the fact that you're hiring means you need someone now. That extra time could be killer, because you waited to long to start hiring. I would at least expect candidates to look into what we're using. When I changed jobs 2 years ago, one place I applied was a Python shop. I've never used Python professionally, but I've tinkered with it. If you're applying for a Java position, I expect you to have at least looked at Java before the interview. Sadly, I bet that would happen a non-trivial number of times.
  • cpprototypes 14y ago
    How did you convince them to hire you when you had no professional experience? Did you have to take a pay cut to do it?
    • MBCook 14y ago
      I didn't get hired for the job, after the first interview I bowed out. I ended up in another mostly Java position (although we've also started doing some Obj-C). I had 4+ years of working on a reasonably sized and complicated Java application. In addition, a few years before I used Python for personal projects so I could show some experience. But it turned out the position was largely for front end development, and not some of the more back-end stuff I'm interested in. I think they liked me (don't know how I compared to other candidates) but I thanked them for their time and told them the position wouldn't be a fit for me.
    • codygman 14y ago
• anthonyb 14y ago
  If you're looking for a good programmer, it often pays to be looking for one in a niche language. Paul Graham referred to this as the Python paradox: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html (The inverse of this is if you're looking for a PHP programmer, and posting ads on monster.com ;) )
• beatgammit 14y ago
  I agree that any serious programmer should be able to be productive in any language, but mastery of a style of programming takes time. It's easy to move about in the same style of programming, but trying to move someone from enterprise-y OO (Java, C#) to functional (Haskell, Lisp) or even Go is a bit of a leap. Concepts often just don't cross over. A Go channel, for example, makes sense to an Erlang developer, but not a Java developer. Goroutines don't make sense to someone familiar with traditional threads. There's a certain amount of rewiring that needs to be done. Looking for a "[language] programmer" is strange, but looking for someone proficient in the style of programming used makes sense to me.
  • seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Even within languages, styles are not set in stone; e.g. are you the OO-style Scala programmer, or are you the FP-style Scala programmer? Java has had channels for a while now at the library level, they just lack pretty syntax. But this just reinforces my point.
• ralph 14y ago
  I doubt that. Learn a language's syntax and semantics, perhaps, if it's not C++. Learn its standard library so one uses it aptly rather than re-inventing, less likely, depending on the size of that library. Become proficient in the language's idioms, know its gotchas and what are the more efficient of the choices it presents, less likely still. Code in it, yes. And I agree with the polyglot.
• gilgoomesh 14y ago
  > Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. It depends if you're going to spend years training someone or if you need an expert right now. My experience is that it is impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments. You can remain familiar with other environments but you don't have the time to be an expert. While I sometimes switch between C-family languages for different projects, it can take months to get up-to-speed with the changes in a language and its environment since you last programmed in it. I'm talking about situations where I know the language well but the environment has changed. Languages change a little but the libraries they use can change dramatically. And along with the change comes a whole body of implied knowledge about how to safely and effectively use it all and this impacts on how you use the language itself. If you've literally never programmed in a language before, it can be a few years before you know about all the eccentricities, before you understand why the language follows certain patterns, before you understand the risks with certain behaviors. If you need an expert now, not in 12 months time, then they need to know both the language and the environment. If you can wait a couple months, then they still need to know the language.
  • bingobangobongo 14y ago
    > impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments And the crappier your language and libraries, the more time it takes to be an "expert."
    • rgbrgb 14y ago
      By this definition, Ruby/Rails are pretty crappy (I kind of disagree). As a newcomer, the amount of stuff going on in a Rails app and the stack trace when there's an error are pretty overwhelming. Meanwhile, people expound on how simple and elegant Rails is. Lately I've been thinking that this is because those people started using it 5 years ago when it was small and their knowledge has built incrementally with the environment. My other theory is that it's a lot harder to track down bugs for a newcomer because like C (and unlike Python in most cases), importing functionality from another file is implicit. That is, when you 'require' a bunch of files, there's no indication which functions are coming from where. For me, this is one of the things Python solves marvelously (it's generally considered bad form to 'import *').
• alok-g 14y ago
  >> Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. I can pick up a new language very fast but won't consider myself a polyglot (know a handful of languages). I do still consider myself a serious programmer.
• jack9 14y ago
  > Most of programming and all of computer science is universal. Performance is not universal. Stacking generic algorithms and patterns on top of each other leads to language specific bottlenecks, tweaks and practices. Practical concerns are not universal. i.e. Lispers know the value of everything, but the cost of nothing. - Alan Perlis
• SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
  >Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. My own experience is that there are PLENTY of programmers who have used, say, PHP and Python, but who you wouldn't want to touch your C codebase in a pair-programming session. If you've used C++ and C, then sure, you can probably jump to just about any language. Someone who's only used Python (or worse, Java or PHP) will likely be a danger to themselves and others for the first year or three using C.
  • kamaal 14y ago
    Starting out with Python as a newbie is disastrous. I started out with assembly, then went to C and then all the C-family based languages. Non C-family languages are actually rare enough to neglect for 99% of all programming tasks today. Always remember going from something difficult to simple is easy, but going from something simple to difficult is not easy.
    • gems 14y ago
      >Always remember going from something difficult to simple is easy, but going from something simple to difficult is not easy. Great. There are plenty of hard working people to make this "piece of wisdom" completely worthless. >Starting out with Python as a newbie is disastrous. ... why?
    • codygman 14y ago
      I disagree. My path went like this: HTML->CSS->php->javascript->C#->Visual Basic->Java->Ruby->Python->C->Go->Scheme->Lisp->Haskell I believe the "python way" and "pythonic" code that the community pushes is great for newbies, since it gets them thinking about not just writing code, but writing it idiomatically. This, in turn, makes most think about why doing it the "pythonic" way works better.
  • gems 14y ago
    >My own experience is that there are PLENTY of programmers who have used, say, PHP and Python, but who you wouldn't want to touch your C codebase in a pair-programming session. There are plenty of programmers that wouldn't want to touch C to begin with, regardless of past experience. Anyway, why would you ask somebody with no experience in C to develop your C codebase? >If you've used C++ and C, then sure, you can probably jump to just about any language. Nope.
• kamaal 14y ago
  >>Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. The quality of a serious programmer is to get things done. Not tool tricks. When I go out to hire a carpenter, I just ask him to show me some of his work. If I like it I buy from him or hire his services. I don't go around and ask him to demonstrate how he uses a hammer.
  • pifflesnort 14y ago
    Getting things done means using the best tool for the job. Sometimes that's a language outside of your immediate preference, because that's what the best tool/library/platform is written in. Today I wrote Java (LDAP server plugin), and ssembly (for unit testing some code that has to minimally interpret x86 assembly). I'll also occasionally need to write some JS/HTML/CSS for the web, work on systems programming for other architectures (ARM, AVR), write kernel code and drivers (C/C++), write/extend a Python script (HTTP test client), write Tcl (to drive simulavr), ObjC (iOS apps), and occasionally write some functional code for fun (I have no business case for it, sometimes it's just nice to work on something clean). I've done and do all those things (and more) not because I have 'tool tricks', but because in nearly every case, I needed to use the tool most suited to getting things done in that problem domain. Programmers that refuse to adapt to the given problem domain do their users a disservice. It's like the old joke about which nationalities run heaven and hell -- the worst possible people set to tasks for which they're innately ill-suited. However, programmers can learn more -- if they're willing -- and adapt to better suit themselves to the problem at hand.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  • codygman 14y ago
    He doesn't use a hammer though, he prefers to use his screwdriver for everything. What you didn't see from the pictures of his work is that they have now burnt to the ground. Burnt to the ground on purpose because there were too many bugs or it became an impossible to maintain tangled mess of meaningless symbols. By the way, since he only uses his screwdriver and you project requires nails, he'll take 5 times longer than your deadline. Your end product will work for about 2 months, then you'll pour the gasoline on it and burn it down yourself.
• Skywing 14y ago
  Try a Lisp. You'll be humbled. In my opinion, anything resembling C is easy stuff. Pointers, threads ... it's all pretty easy, really. Truly breaking out of that C mold is the differentiator though, in my opinion. Anybody can learn C, Python or Javascript.
  • kyllo 14y ago
    Lisp is a huge paradigm shift, but once you get that writing code in Lisp is basically just writing parse trees directly, it's not so scary. If you don't already get recursion, though, you will struggle. Everyone struggles with recursion at first.
• ramchip 14y ago
  Generally I don't understand "C++ programmer" to mean a programmer who is an expert in C++, and C++ only, but rather a programmer who may be comfortable in many languages but has a special expertise in C++. All my team identifies as C++ programmers, but we all speak Python and Java, and some can do Haskell, etc. It takes a long time to become really good at C++.
• pjmlp 14y ago
  > Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. Fully agree. At the end of my CS degree, I was able to code in: - Pascal - C - C++ - Prolog - Smalltalk - Camllight - Java - Assembly (x86 and MIPS) - PL/SQL
• smosher 14y ago
  Absolutely. Even if you're a blub grandmaster, you really ought to know a dozen other things fairly well.
• JPKab 14y ago
  If only the morons that hire could figure this out. I almost NEVER use Java, but obviously I have and CAN use Java. Yet interview after interview demands that I use Java day to day in my current job to be considered. And this is for data transformation/analysis jobs, in which my use of Python makes me dramatically faster and more productive than my Java using colleagues.
  • rossjudson 14y ago
    Of course use of the word "moron" might be poisoning the well a bit. "Possessing incomplete information" might be a better way to put it.
• crag 14y ago
  "Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default." The language itself is not usually a problem for me. I mean an array is an array in any language. It's environment. Example: c# (which I think in MS's best work, by the way); c# was easy to pick up. The .Net framework was another matter. That took time. Knowing where the resources are and hell - even getting comfortable with the documentation and the IDE took time. So now, when I hire a programer, I'm not too interested in his language skills. I'm assume he can code well enough not to embarrass himself. It's his knowledge of the environment that we run. That's what I look for.
• smrtinsert 14y ago
  Many programmers are religious about their languages.