Curt Hibbs points to some interesting questions asked by Stiff and answered by who’s who in the programming domain.
Not golden rules or the word of God, but they definitely can serve as guidelines to some of us and definitely is fun to see what the great guys think. The most interesting for me was the question:
What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?
As a fresher, the answers would have surprised me. The answers talk about communication, sense of value, taste, passion, concentration, but none of them mention about knowing the syntax. What we learn from this is that programming is much beyond code and syntax, it is about understanding concepts and their application. Not that they are not important, but they are not the key to become a good developer. Another good thing that comes out is that most of them suggest some mathematical background from computing, after all somewhere the fundamentals have to be learned. However, not all subscribe to it. In my opinion, it is more related to the field one is working with. Programming pure business applications using highly abstracted programming languages or Domain Specific Languages (DSL) might not require math. However, the base of analysis, optimization or algorithms is in the math.
Good questions and good answers, some of which are useful if you have any doubts about programming.
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Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.
