Wednesday 14 March 2018

What are some great truths of computer programming?

truths about programming languages


So here are some of the facts about programming languages.

  1. Programming is 99% self-taught. See all that stuff you learnt in that Python class? Yeah, you're going to relearn it all when working on a real project.
  2. There's no such thing as a simple bug. A stupid mistake like leaving out a semi-colon or misspelling a variable name can easily take a week to find and fix and can cause significant loss of sleep.
  3. The more code you write the more you shut up about what's possible and what's next to impossible. And the more you pity those newbies with that “Of course it's possible!” mentality.
  4. The language you use doesn't matter. There's so much fuss about which language is better for x or y. At the end of the day what matters is can you solve the problem? As a company manager, I'll want to see a running system. Not a running (insert language name here) system.
  5. Six months later, you wouldn't recognise your own code. Documentation and commenting are more of a survival tactic than niceness to whoever encounters it next.
  6. Programming isn't sexy at all. Try taking that girl home by telling her your heroic tale of saving an entire department by rewriting a recursive function to take advantage of a feature in the new server Intel chips to scale up their online orders. Then tell me how it goes.
  7. Programming can be addictive. I can't go through an app or a game or a site without mentally visualising what that code must look like. I don't know if I'm alone on this one.
  8. Programming is tons of fun. But the fun only begins once you “get it”.

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