The 5 Stages of Programmer Incompetence | Hacker News Reader

The 5 Stages of Programmer Incompetence

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63 pointsskorks32 comments

Here is a writing tip: if you talk about a hypothetical person of undefined sex, choose "he" or "she" and stick with it. Some writing teachers say one should always use "she" to avoid sexism, but that is obviously not followed. As long as you do not actively reinforce stereotypes (i.e., you call all hypothetical flight attendants "she" and all hypothetical lawyers "he"), I think using "he" is fine.

But if you mix "he" or "she" up then you just raise questions in the reader's mind. Here the author has half "he's" and half "she's" which opens him (or her!) to bunch of accusations of sexism. Why was the newbie a "she"?

"The Guru" is also a "she"

True, but the guru is just depicted as an advanced newbie.

It is not what you do, it is how you do it.

They are all newbie's.

"They."

They is plural.

They has been used as a neutral generic singular in English for a very long time. I believe there are extant examples in Shakespeare, for example.

..but colloquially "they" has been used as the 3rd person unisex singular for a long time. Still don't understand how "she" avoids sexism.

The article is missing the stage where you get into management, fall hopelessly behind on current technologies, and forget how to code.

In this article it would have been fine to use singular ‘they’ especially since each fictive person is really a group of people, so even read as plural ‘they’ works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

This is more of a curiosity than anything, but one can always use Michael Spivak's gender-neutral pronouns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun

Oh man I wish these were in widespread use. It would simplify things greatly for everyone. I kinda wish HN just started using them and it spread out from here.

Wikipedia has a nice chart of gender neutral pronouns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Summary

There are a bunch of different proposed gender neutral pronouns... which is part of why no one particular set has caught on yet.

I use 'singular they' because at some point 'one' started to connote pretentiousness. I don't see how Spivak pronouns solve that problem, but this off-topic sub-discussion has convinced me to go back to using 'one' (for disambiguation's sake).

I have a lot of empathy with those levels, but I'd sum up my own programming career to date in just three:

1. Under-engineers everything.

2. Over-engineers everything.

3. Tries to find a balance (with maybe a 75% success rate today).

Or, to put it another way:

1. Writes simple but over-specific things.

2. Writes general but over-complicated things.

3. Aims for simplicity and generality.

ha that is so me: Distinguishing code features: Only writes in dynamically-typed languages with a strong functional component. At first glance her code looks remarkably similar to the newbie’s, except there’s less of it and the variable names make sense.

You could try strong typing--in the sense of ML and Haskell--for a while.

Strong typing and dynamic typing aren't mutually exclusive. Most dynamically typed languages are strongly typed, and C, a statically typed language, is weakly typed.

But good suggestion. :)

Indeed. I meant to say (sane) static typing.

> Only writes in dynamically-typed languages with a strong functional component

aka, javascript.

Pretty accurate except for the pronoun "she" (unfortunately).

I'm all for adopting 'they' as the genderless pronoun of choice.

In the poll at the end, there are plenty of people who have been through the early stages, but significantly fewer who claim to have been through the guru/veteren stage. I presume that means they are still in the guru/veteren stage? :D

Either that or there are more young programmers than there are older programmers.

And then... A moment of Zen.. He/she realizes - the real programming is lack of it... And buys FPGA board.

Then sees the horrible mess that the FPGA dev tools are, and quits programming forever :)

Sorry, I've just been in a small personal version of hell for the last few weeks courtesy of Altera.

Do you have any recommendations for an FPGA newbie? I've been looking around at boards, but I'm not sure which ones are the good ones.

I'm finishing up my final project for university (which is FPGA based), and I'm stuck with the supplied tools, so I can't really compare different vendors.

All the FPGA tools are closed-source though, and the free versions treat you as a criminal. I'm using Quartus II Web Edition. Altera finally came out with a Linux version, which is nice of them, but the list of annoyances is long:

1. Incremental compilation is disabled. You'll wait at least 5 minutes to try each change.

2. The signal analyzer is disabled. Debugging is a pain.

3. The source code for the supplied Altera components is encrypted.

4. Your design is on a timer, and stops working 1 hour after being programmed into the board. There goes that hobby project.

This is for the trial version, which I supposedly would use to learn. Yet they make learning about as painful as possible. I simply don't have 3 grand for the full version of Quartus.

I can't comment on Xilinx or Lattice, but I suspect the story is similar. FPGAs are hostile to hobbyists.

Oh yeah, boards :) Get a full-featured dev board. Sparkfun has simple breakout boards, but you have to add your own power, clock source and flash for storing the FPGA config, at least, before you can do any work.

Thanks for the recommendations. I love Sparkfun.

Oops, I didn't mean to recommend their boards :) I meant they are not the best choice for starting with.

You'll want something that works out of the box, so that you know the bugs are in your code, not your soldering.

Ahh. Gotcha. Thanks again.

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