What is Digg?35 Comments
- Clearz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25Good questions and great answers. Enjoyable read for the most part. I thought Peter Norvig diddn't make much of an effort though. I would have liked to have seen more of his views.
- eplawless, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Oh Linus Torvalds. You so crazy with your classic rock and your "C".
- cdlavalle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Great stuff! This is what I like to think Digg was built for!
- beforeIforget, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10"What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?"
"Dave Thomas: Passion"
... and there you go. - lilme, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8It's nice to see an actual blog post once in a while instead of rehashed traffic-attracting trash. Go stiff!
- keitaro85, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I think steve yegge is awesome. I just actually found his blog a few months ago and consider a gold mine of information:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
Hes a guy who worked at amazon before, and seems to have covered a lot of ground in CS. His drunken blog rants are especially good:
Drunken Blog: http://opal.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/ - Eeqmcsq, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I really enjoyed the answers they provided. My favorite answers:
- What do you think makes some programmers 10 or 100 times more productive than others?
"The ability to restate hard problems as easy ones."
"The ability to fit the whole problem into their heads at one time."
The better a person is at these two areas, the more I trust his/her insights at problems, and the more I'm willing to ask him/her for help with my problems, because I have more confidence that he/she won't get me confused, lost, and frustrated. - zeldafan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Very Cool, I'm also glad to see that the majority of them self taught themselves for the most part, I live in the middle of nowhere and the most they teach at my school is javascript (shudder).
- theone3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Don't be so quick to shudder at JS
http://www.digg.com/tech_news/The_World_s_Most_Misunderstood_Programming_Language - error401, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Interesting answers. Makes them really seem like normal people, too.
I just can't believe that so many - presumably educated and experienced - programmers actually enjoy MySQL after trying something else... - jdubdub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Great questions and great answers. Awesome to hear from some of the most well-known programmers on the Internet!
I found it funny how the Ruby creator calls HTML programming... it really makes sense! All of them do, when you consider their backgrounds... - billyfoxtrot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Great read for aspiring programmers. It's a little disappointing though that Guido Van Rossum is somewhat of a jerk.
- skywake, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5i spent half my time reading this just nodding...
it just rings sooo true!! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2good read, although Norvig and Guido seemed a bit annoyed (in a way) with their responses
either that or they couldnt be bothered enough to even try being sociable... - Kenshi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3This was a good read. Informative and interesting. Thank you. :o)
- mcherm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2... but nice to see that he had the courtesy to respond, which I doubt was the case for everyone the poster originally emailed.
- HidingInABunker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It's always inspiring to hear great programmers talking about their craft, now I want to learn every tool in /bin and /usr/bin since Steve Yegge suggested it.
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4(sorry guys but I have to point this out...)
People who want to get work done prefer unix. Programmers prefer unix. So when you see so many things on Digg about the Mac (unix!) and Linux (unix!) don't bitch about how it's too hard and you can't configure xorg or it can't run your games and you'll never switch. Digg is for geeks, and geeks like to program. Hence so many of us being crazy about everything unix. - nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'd say the fact he chose Ruby puts him above the LCD, who would choose VB, PHP, etc.
- Snakedal337, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Good read!
- knutert, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I was great to learn that all of them seemed to use Emacs as their IDE.
- cdlavalle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good point, Linux especially, though has matured to a point to be useful for those who don't want to spend a whole lot of time on system maintenance/admin etc. while still giving power users the flexibility they demand. Still it's greatest weakness, from a mass consumer standpoint, its it's lack of support for robust and easy game programming ala DirectX. Don't get me wrong, I love OpenGL but it is clunky. The community really needs to get on the problem and start writing things like standard libraries for gaming input devices and generally polish up the libraries and interface and push for Linux consoles. Once that happens and games can be transparently and seamlessly written for Linux desktops and consoles (as DirectX allows now) there will be no stopping it. Porting programs are a decent stopgap but by no means ideal. If there are good projects in this direction that I am unaware of, please let me know. (prepare for avalanche in 3...2...1)
- NekroByte, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good improvement for a buried afternoon ;-)
I almost use math knowledge at programming apps, only with mental schemes I can do the majority codes. Since my view point, importantest thing is the algorithm.
Hilsen. - Metasquares, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The thing that makes me, as a developer, like Unix is the amount of control that it gives you. Windows *can* do (about) all of the things that Unix can, but it won't *let you* because it insists on hiding everything behind a restrictive but easy-to-use UI.
Many examples of this trend can be seen in the new Vista beta. The most obvious ones are tools such as the defragmenter. All of the low level details are hidden from you; all you get is a progress bar. This may be good for average users, but not for developers. The more a developer understands about a system, the easier he will find it to develop for. - CaughtThinking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1He's not even close to an engineer. How can a "programmer" say math isn't needed?
- zeldafan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oh no, I know javascript is great, but it still can't beat Python or a non-online scripting language.
- Pictographer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
- CircleFusion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't think he was saying that HTML is programming. I think he was explaining his progression from HTML to ASP and then PHP. He started learning programming through the desire to do dynamic things with his webpages.
"I learned programming by starting to put together my first web page in HTML. Then I wanted to make some dynamic pieces and picked up first ASP then PHP."
(hmm, I swear I hit reply to jdubdub...oh well) - cdlavalle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What?
- rubygreenblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Great article! Very interesting and insightful.
I did think someone might have mentioned The Mythical Man Month as a computer related book though. - splaf, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2The comments from David HH made me understand some what where Rails comes from. David is clearly not an engineer, but seem to come more from the archetypal VB / Dot-com web development background. This is not bad itself, since rails clearly seems to fill the void for some people, but it is helpful in explaining why rails is as it is (unintuitive to some, apparently not to others).
- lfestv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well I'm just curious but what's so special about Emacs?
- Metasquares, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I also noticed the correlation between musical ability and programming ability. It also seems to correlate, though to a lesser degree, with mathematical ability.
I would argue that one of the characteristics that makes a good programmer is the ability to write code that will work with few, if any, changes on any platform. It is important to make as few assumptions about the surrounding environment as possible when programming, because that environment may one day change.
Writing code that other people find easy to integrate with (Linus Torvalds' answer) is important as well, but I doubt that this factor is due to any innate programming ability. It seems to be more a factor determined by how much one works and what roles one is given in a team environment.
Ultimately, however, I agree with the view that a holistic view of the problem and how it may be broken up are the most important components of programming. It doesn't matter whether you start top-down or bottom-up, so long as you understand how one piece fits in with the rest. - shailendrapawar, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0hi shailendra
please check ur comment description, what do you want to say in comment - shailendra, on 10/12/2007, -8/+0Great Question and answers also,thanksdfghd ghd fdfgh dgfhd fhgdf dfgh
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