The Eight Levels of Programmers | Hacker News Reader

The Eight Levels of Programmers

codinghorror.com

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CodingHorror strikes again.

Knuth is apparently dead. And it sounds like he didn't go down quietly, he took Alan Kay with him.

The text immediately above Kay and Knuth is "Very few programmers ever achieve this level in their own lifetimes."

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001250.html (since the article link is now dead).

he took Alan Kay with him.

Sarcasm strikes again! Kay is a living legend, since he's still alive. He's working at his own institute: http://www.vpri.org/html/people/founders.htm

[EDIT: Grammar]

I'm inspired by several things Alan Kay has said about commercializing technology, but it struck me: has he been involved in anything that has been commercially successful for him?

The Xerox/PARC stuff famously didn't make money for Xerox; Smalltalk was not commercially successful; Squeak is not commercially successful.

It seems he's great at inventing stuff, and his opinions on that are worth listening to. But he doesn't seem so great at commercializing stuff, and so perhaps I shouldn't listen to those so much (even though I find them inspiring). Has he successfully commercialized something?

Maybe Alan feels comfortable with his position as an innovator-sans-entrepreneur, and is contributing greatly to the world at hand?

Don't get so stuck on evaluating ideas by their brand name (in this case, Smalltalk). Alan's ideas have influenced Java, Ruby, etc. considerably...

As I said, Kay has invented a lot.

My comment was based on his general writings, not Smalltalk.

However, I agree that it's possible to have an insightful understanding of the commercialization of ideas, and to have contributed greatly to one stage, without having done all stages oneself. In a way, Alan Kay + Steve Jobs complement one another.

As an example, one might see the stages of commercialization of the desktop metaphor as: PARC-->Apple-->Microsoft. Note that here commercialization means making money by getting something into the hands of more people.

Add objective-c to the list, of course.

Summary: there are good and bad programmers. Some are just OK.

Yeah, I don't know how this story got votes. It provides no insight and is not interesting.

The domain name ensures both upvotes and low quality.

Yeah, I hate codinghorror stories. How may karma points do you need to down-vote now, 100? I'm at 86 and once I get there, I plan on voting down most CH stories.

There is no method of voting down stories. You can flag spam to get the article killed but that is it.

1000? i have 825 and can't downvote.

A yes, yet another broken way to partition the full richness and complexity of life neatly into made-up pigeonholes.

Yep. I'm wondering where most people who read this article place themselves. I would say I'm probably a mix between the Working Programmer, the Average Programmer, and the Amateur Programmer. Working because I would say I have a successful career so far; Average because I wouldn't say I'm a naturally talented programmer (although I question whether they exist at all); and Amateur because I love programming and messing around with new technologies.

Why wasn't Linus Torvalds added to his Successful Programmers list considering the first line of that category is - Programmers who are both well known and have created entire businesses -- perhaps even whole industries -- around their code.

Maybe he will get added once he dies, considering Linux will surely outlive him.

Another thing .. can Knuth and Dijkstra be said to be programmers ?! Just an open question for discussion !

Didn't Knuth implement TeX in order to typeset his papers to his satisfaction? If so, I think the coder level fits...

Knuth is an expert compiler-writer. This alone would qualify him solidly as a programmer.

Only one of his examples of dead programmers is actually dead.

He explains in the comments that he meant it predictively, in that their work would survive long beyond them. I don't think programming has been around on a large scale long enough for dead masters who've actually died, unless you'd consider Turing, Church, and Shannon to be programmers. Hell, even the inventor/discoverer of Lisp is still around.

edit: I added "Discovered" because that's the way many Lisp fans, including pg, refer to it.

Discoverer? I mean, I think Lisp is great, but I wouldn't call it a fundamental part of the universe.

You obviously haven't read about apply/eval. SICP is a great book. It's even available online! There's also the lectures.

SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ The part about apply/eval: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-26.html...

The lectures: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma... (apply/eval is discussed in Lecture 7, the meta-circular evaluator. I'm not sure if you could understand it without watching the previous lectures, however they're all wonderful)

He should probably have called that section "Immortal programmers".

I want to be a dead programmer.

No, that doesn't sound as cool as I expected.

It seems to totally overlook the successful open-source programming 'gods' so to speak, only mentioning open source in relation to amateur programmers. Where's Linus?

Where's Linus, RMS, K&R and Guido? They're not only successful, they're also "dead" (which is a stupid label to use). I'm sure people will be studying the Linux kernel and using GNU/Linux (or derivatives thereof) and hacking in Python and C long after those people are dead. Why does Gates get to be on that list and not the Woz?

I wonder where Jeff Atwood places himself on that list.

> Why does Gates get to be on that list and not the Woz?

surely he meant them as examples and not a comprehensive list.

Seems the distinction between Average and Bad programmers is that, while both lack talent, the Average programmer understands that he lacks talent and the Bad programmer does not.

1. Two of his "dead" programmers are still alive!

Alan Kay is not dead. (Maybe he's one of the "[v]ery few programmers ever [to] achieve this level in their own lifetimes".)

Neither, for that matter, is Knuth. I'm sure there are, however, piles of dead COBOL programmers whose code is still in active use. Perhaps Jeff should rethink the category names.

Oh crap, I knew that!

Deepest apologies to Don Knuth, long may he live.

Maybe next he will grace us with the '7 Levels of Programming Hell'...

I've heard of that. Apparently, on level 7, you're forced to re-read all of the blog posts on codinghorror every day, without cease.

heh...reminds me of the punishment in Neal Stephenson's 'Anathem', where they have to memorize nonsense from a big book for weeks on end!

Where does Journalist Programmer fit in that list?

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