Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
(@argumate, and maybe @nuclearspaceheater and @the-grey-tribe?)
The struggle is real.
Should I read this as “I have encountered a number of programmers in the wild that are totally incompetent”, or “yeah, programming is hard”?
Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
(@argumate, and maybe @nuclearspaceheater and @the-grey-tribe?)
If you know three programming languages within a paradigm, you can pick up another in a couple of weeks. You can write something simple after a day, but learning the API takes a bit more time.
If you know programming languages within three different paradigms, you can learn a language in another paradigm as quickly.
If you only do high-level stuff, moving to a lower level closer to hardware is harder than the other way round.
Moving to another paradigm within one programming language, say from MVC to a continuation-passing web framework or from a game library like SDL to an entity-component framework or from PostgreSQL to Redis, or from gradient descent to bayesian filtering, can also take some time.
If you know a couple of concepts and paradigms, you start working on day one, but you will only be really productive after a coupe of weeks.
That said: If you have trouble understanding a concept like distributed version control or object-oriented programming or shader pipelines, it is orders of magnitude easier to ask an expert to help, tell the expert what you think you understand, and let the expert tell you where your understanding needs to be updated. Experts can tell you where you’re wrong. If you learn a new paradigm, you can get stuck on a fundamental misunderstanding for some time.
Specific instruction from experts is great for that reason, even if you can pick stuff up on your own.
While what I’ve gone through so far mostly matches up with this (it took me about 10-20 manhours to feel like I was really starting to ‘get’ javascript in terms of general program structure and thus feel less tongue-tied, for instance), the real purpose of my question was to assess employment prospects according to the distribution of competence in the field.
Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
(@argumate, and maybe @nuclearspaceheater and @the-grey-tribe?)
