Continuous Learning

There are some interesting posts lately about what programmers like and don’t like to do, and what programmers can’t do. If the below are all true, just what the heck do programmers really do?

I will let you be the judge

Scott Rosenberg says programmers like to code:

And programmers, as I quote Larry Constantine in my book, programmers are programmers because they like to code — given a choice between learning someone else’s code and just sitting down and writing their own, they will always do the latter.

John Rentzsch responds saying programmers don’t like to code:

… they like problem solving.

If programmers liked to code, we’d all be writing in machine language to this day. You can write that stuff all day and get precious little of the real problem solved.

Rafe Colburn says even good programmers can’t avoid coding more than necessary:

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I have worked with programmers who, asked to write a feature, never even look at a language’s class library before hacking something out themselves. They like to code for the sake of coding. There are are also programmers who would rather code than learn. They rarely adopt new tools and they don’t pick up new libraries when they’re released.

Furthermore, programmers don’t appear to read or write code either…

Imran says many programmers can’t write code:

Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes.

Want to know something scary ? - the majority of comp sci graduates can’t. I’ve also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

Lastly - Siddhi says many programmers can’t read either:

Given that everyone learns about binary trees, and especially inorder traversal, you would have expected many to get it right. Surprise! Only a few have ever got it correct.

One conclusion is that many programmers don’t spend enough time reading code. It also explains why in many teams, most code becomes spaghetti — programmers can’t read the original code, so they hack their fixes.

Of course we should take each posts within its own contexts for merits, but it’s interesting to look at them collectively… perhaps one day we can talk about exactly what programmers can do and will do, rather than what they can’t do