Programming

17492 readers

45 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

183

What are the craziest misconceptions you’ve heard about programming from people not familiar with it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

215 comments fedilink hide all child comments

As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren't as familiar with it. It doesn't happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.

I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I think Dijkstra's point was specifically about uni programs. A CS curriculum is supposed to make you train your mind for the theory of computation not for using specific computers (or specific programming languages).

Later during your career you will of course inevitably get bogged down into specific platforms, as you've rightly noted. And that's normal because CS needs practical applications, we can't all do research and "pure" science.

But I think it's still important to keep it in mind even when you're 10 or 20 or 30 years into your career and deeply entrenched into this and that technology. You have to always think "what am I doing this for" and "where is this piece of tech going", because IT keeps changing and entire sections of it get discarded periodically and if you don't ask those questions you risk getting caught in a dead-end.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

He has a rant where he's calling software engineers basically idiots who don't know what they're doing, saying the need for unit tests is a proof of failure. The rest of the rant is just as nonsensical, basically waving away all problems as trivial exercises left to the mentally challenged practitioner.

I have not read anything from/about him besides this piece, but he reeks of that all too common, insufferable, academic condescendance.

He does have a point about the theoretical aspect being often overlooked, but I generally don't think his opinion on education is worth more than anyone else's.

Article in question: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Sounds about right for an academic computer scientist, they are usually terrible software engineers.

At least that’s what I saw from the terrible coding practices my brother learned during his CS degree (and what I’ve seen from basically every other recent CS grad entering the workforce that didn’t do extensive side projects and self teaching) that I had to spend years unlearning him afterwards when we worked together on a startup idea writing lots of code.