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Comment by mcantor | Hacker News Reader

I wish articles like this would namespace their assertions by telling us what they mean by "good" or "bad", so we could avoid the perennial echo chamber debate that goes like this:

    A: GOOD MEANS SHIPPING AND PLEASING YOUR CUSTOMERS
    B: NO YOU FOOL! GOOD MEANS WRITING CLEAR CODE THAT OTHER HACKERS CAN READ
    C: NO YOU FOOLS! GOOD IS A HAPPY MEDIUM BETWEEN BOTH OF THOSE THINGS
    D: DEBATE IS HARD, LET'S GO SHOPPING!

God forbid we agree on what words mean before we talk about them...

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Except this is sort of a cop out isn't it? In the sense that for any type of artist there are good artists and bad artists but while the good artists may be highly differentiated bad artists share a common set of deficiencies.

The article is almost in the 'you might be a <foo> if <bar>' style (most common instantiation I am familar with is 'you might be a redneck if <insert denigrating attribute of redneck>' And in the spirit of that humor I liked it.

That being said, if you ask me as a hiring manager what I consider 'good' programming, its 'readable/understandable', it does what it is supposed to do, and it has tests.

Anna Karenina would have you believe that there are more ways to fail than to succeed, but I would argue the opposite in most cases involving creative endeavors:

Bad programmers are all alike; every good programmer is good in his or her own way.

Props just for the Anna Karenina reference :-)

"Good" already has a meaning, you can't arbitrarily redefine it. You have to actually figure out what the most "good" tradeoff is between shipping and writing maintainable code.

"Good" is also arguably subjective and relative to the subject's perceptions of "bad"(and vice-versa).

So of course that "good" tradeoff to one programmer might be a "bad" one to another.

That's a "good" point.

I laughed, you bastard.

I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way.

Good has a meaning, but it is a meaning that is highly context sensitive.

When talking about "Good cars" for instance, what makes a good car for a mother of 5 is likely different from what makes a good car for a single person who is very worried about the environment and both of those are different from a "Good car" for drag racing.

Yes, and likewise someone can be a very good web programmer while being a crappy embedded programmer. But there's common factors involved: likewise, a car that doesn't run probably isn't a good car regardless of your requirements. (OK, maybe you're a hobbyist that likes working on cars when they break down, or maybe you enjoy having broken down cars on your lawn for decoration. But by the same token, maybe you're a hobbyist who enjoys the IOCCC.)

Defining the word "good" is a philosophical rabbit hole for sure, but if someone comes out and says "a good programmer is someone who writes maintainable code", and someone else comes out and says "a good programmer is someone who writes fast code", and someone else comes along and says "a good programmer is someone who writes code that pleases the customer", you're still having a meaningful discussion about which "good" is better, so to speak.

Thanks dude... everybody has their own evaluation criteria in their mind (which is not disclosed) and people start calling things good or bad. Most of the debates end up being a very unscientific way of evaluating something!

Not sure this relates 100%, since the article is mostly talking about your understanding of concepts.

If programmer A understands recursion and programmer B does not programmer A will write better code regardless of deadlines.

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