Three Tribes of Programming (2017)

I like this taxonomy, though it is reductive to try to cram programmers into disjoint "tribes". Individual approaches to programming generally combine from all three, though in different proportion to different individuals.

Personally, I am driven most strongly by the "maker" approach, in that I write programs to be used. I also care deeply about correctness, simplicity, and performance in that order. I hate buggy, unmaintainable programs and the best way I know to make useful programs is to build them out of small, simple, correct components.

Performance is generally a more distant concern, but it really depends where you are in the stack. As you go down, performance becomes essential to usefulness, but the need for correctness doesn't disappear.

Popular in 2019 (270 points, 119 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20882783

> Well, then you're not a very good programmer. Sorry but that's how it is.

> I don’t know very much about Unity. However, it’s clear that one could not build The Witness in Unity

~ Johnathan Blow

As someone in the third tribe, I am amused that the Witness was later parodied by The Looker, a game written in Unity.

Im definitely in the first camp which explains why im going the phd route and why I am poor :)