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It can be quite humbling to realise how large a particular field is, but it in no way makes one an 'imposter'. Pro tip: Those 'Real Programmers' who's JS exper
by chriswarbo 13y ago
It can be quite humbling to realise how large a particular field is, but it in no way makes one an 'imposter'.
Pro tip: Those 'Real Programmers' who's JS experiments make your CSS look quaint aren't the world's best programmers. They're 'yet another frontend guy' to, for example, those who write Java servers. Guess what, those writing the Java servers are 'just end-users' as far as the JVM hackers are concerned. Likewise, the JVM hackers are 'just end-users' for the OS developers. The OS developers are 'just end-users' for the hardware guys. The hardware guys are 'just making an interchangable commodity' as far as the sysadmins are concerned, as they virtualise everything away. And, of course, the frontend devs laugh at the sysadmins for not being programmers.
You might think of some Node.js guy as a demi-god, but I've never heard of him since I don't particularly care about Node.js. Likewise there were a lot of tributes being paid recently to a Ruby developer who passed away. It's touching to see how many people he'd positively impacted, but again, I've never heard of him because I don't particularly care about Ruby.
Am I an 'imposter' since I don't care about these things? Not at all. I have a high-level knowledge of what they are, and I even played around with Node.js a bit (unfortunately it was just after 0.4 had broken compatibility with most libraries in NPM!), but I can't go too far down those rabbit holes because they're not the stacks I use. Likewise, I don't expect those who are deeply into Node.js and Ruby to care about, for example, the recent death of John Reynolds, or Robert Harper's kidney transplant.
Just stick with the rabbit hole you've chosen, as long as you're enjoying it; let the work of others guide you down, and if you reach the bottom you'll suddenly find yourself to be a 'Real Programmer' who can help with the digging. Alterntively, if you disagree with or don't understand some of the decisions/conventions on the way then you should absolutely start digging in your own direction, even if it doesn't go anywhere.
PS: Knowing APIs inside-out does not make one a 'Real Programmer'. My day job is PHP, but I still tend to Google the most basic built-in functions (which, admittedly, is an artefact of PHP's poor API). You should instead strive to understand your problem inside-out, from multiple perspectives, then you can pick and choose any API/stack you like and let the docs guide you through the tedious act of plumbing it all together. Or write your own :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- CmonDev 13y agoA sufficiently high-level static-typed language is similar to Math. Are mathematicians 'just end-users' to someone? In your world of abstractions you are the god.
- chriswarbo 13y agoMaths is a noble pursuit that's been around for millenia. The greatest achievement that a programmer can aspire to is writing/improving/optimising the libraries (linear algebra solvers, numerical routines, etc.) which enable Mathematical advances. On the other hand, Mathematicians are just those people who write blog posts which tell the Web designers which type of graphs to use in the analytics section of their app, once all of the real work has been done. Everything is relative.
- CmonDev 13y agoAre you aware that programming itself is a branch of mathematics? Don't put things on pedestal. "The greatest achievement that a mathematician can aspire to is helping to improve software, for even our minds are software."
- chriswarbo 13y agoErm, yes? That was exactly my point, hence my contrast of two completely opposite viewpoints and the claim that it's relative.
- pdubs 13y agoNever more relevant... http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/435/
- atmosx 13y agoThat's genius, I have a huge respect for 'xkcd' really. Some presentations are beyond amazing. That said I think it's spot on, Mathematics is the language of the Universe.
- 13y ago
- k__ 13y agolol, I know this problem. I wrote frameworks in PHP. But if someone on an interview would ask me to _code_ a solution to a simple problem in PHP on paper, I would probably fail.
- unoti 13y agoLike everything else, that is a matter of practice. Coding on paper or whiteboards is a skill you can become proficient with. Get a whiteboard, get something like skienna's algorithm book, and start practicing coding problems there while talking through what you are doing. Start simple then go more complex. After enough hours, this will become second nature. I realize this is a silly exercise, but if want to work in the circus, sometimes you have to jump through hoops.
- jimmaswell 13y agoI don't get the big deal about whiteboard coding and such. I have to write code on paper for my CompSci class exams and it's never been really difficult. If it were PHP it would be though because it's hard to predict the argument lists and function names.
- AznHisoka 13y agoSame here. Ask me to build a distributed web crawler with a Lucene-based search engine in Rails or whatever, I can code it in a month. Ask me to write a function that does something stupidly simple like converting a character to its ASCII equivalent, and I'll fail.