Q&A With Nine Great Programmers | Hacker News Reader

Q&A With Nine Great Programmers

dodgycoder.net

81 pointsdamian200021 comments

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I'm not sure why Guido Van Rossum bothered to answer at all.

I really liked his answers.

Considering the language he works on is named after Monty Python, his answers do seem rather appropriate.

His answers reflect on him a lot, he comes off as a different kind of person to the rest.

Actually, he comes off as a person not interested in taking this test.

Which is fine.

I remember when this got posted on reddit years ago, pg chimed in and said he had also probably received the interview but didn't do it (and now wishes he did so he could see how his answers compared to others).

DHH is completely out of his league, yet probably makes more money than all of them.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, DHH is an amazing businessman and a very smart guy.

Without specific reference to the income of any particular individuals, particularly individuals with HN accounts, there is an important lesson here for folks who think that being world-class in programming is the primary rewarding career path for "programmers."

I think you mean the lesson is for people who thing being a world-class programmer is the primary rewarding career path for 'making money' (or being successful where 'success' is defined as 'money').

How about freedom to pick employers and projects?

If you're already working on what you like, then why chase after money to... have the luxury of working on what you like?

Note that I'm not saying this is how everyone should be (I'm not, myself) but its a perfectly reasonable lifestyle.

I think he's entitled to be in that company. Rails was a big leap forward.

I think the original blogger showed great taste with his choice of interview subjects.

I thought his reponse for Q2 (most important skill?) was spot on and something rooted in his getting things done mentality ...

"A strong sense of value. The ability to ask yourself the question: Is it worth doing what I’m doing right now? So many programmers seem to waste oceans of time on stuff that just doesn’t matter. And not enough on the stuff that does."

Big fan of this post, for the format more than anything. I find these types of posts often hard to contextualize without solid reference points, and it helps having differing opinions side by side.

It's funny what Torvalds said about "good taste" because I have had the same sort of idea for years. But I'd never heard any programmer articulate it as such. I also call it "sensibilities". I have no clue if his idea of what is "good taste" is even remotely similar to mine, but it's interesting that he also thinks about this notion of "good taste". I can eliminate programmers and programs very quickly using this sort of qualitative assessment. It might not even be necessary to see any code. Just knowing how they would approach a problem, how they would design a solution (Rube Goldberg machine), and of course what language they would use says something about their "tastes". It's not so much a matter of what they do or don't know how to do, it's their selections from among different choices. Imagine hypothetically a programmer knows every language and can implement any design. The language he chooses and the design he chooses tells us about his "taste".

I don't believe he said he liked VB, he actually said as a language it isn't great. What he did say is that the way it simplified database access gave us something extremely powerful and influential even though it was not (and isn't) seen as particularly disruptive or new. This seems inline with other statements from Linus w.r.t. the value of C++ and OOP in general. A very pragmatic man. I believe it also aligns with many of the answers to what will be the "next big thing.".

Bjarne Stroustrup's favorite band is the Dixie Chicks. For some reason, this just makes me giggle uncontrollably.

Interesting how Mobile Computing was not in their radar in 2006. I wonder if it would be today.

On Q5 (if you had 3 months to learn a technology what would you choose) ... DHH replied "Cocoa programming on a Mac"... which in hindsight would have been great preparation for the iPhone release the following year...

Steve Yegge's statement about how programming in the "future" will shift away from desktop apps and towards web-based applications strikes me as being the most prescient.

Yeah Steve Yegge came across to me as someone who's been in the trenches in the real world of software development for a significant part of his career, while still keeping up with the latest technologies. Not to detract from any of the others' achievements, but some of them have remained primarily focused on their particular field of expertise.

The first paragraph of his wikipedia article bears this out:

"Yegge has two decades of industry experience, developing across domains including embedded operating systems, scalable e-commerce systems, applications for mobile devices, and software productivity tools. In his career he has worked for Amazon.com and Google among others."

Somehow I figured that Linus still uses Pine to read e-mail.

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