Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)
Leam Hall
leamhall at gmail.com
Thu Sep 28 15:03:44 EDT 2017
On 09/28/2017 07:35 AM, Stefan Ram wrote:
> But remember that paid programmers usually do not "code",
> in the sense of "write a program from scratch". Most of the
> work is maintenance programming, where an important part of
> the job is to read and understand a piece of code.
> Coding from scratch also happens, it just less common.
>
> (So that would be a reasonable interview test: Being able
> to understand a piece of given code and do some requested
> modification to it.)
Another Perl story. I used to love Perl and then got to the point where
trying to code in it made me physically nauseous. Not sure why.
Guy had written a perl based time tracker for our contractor team. We'd
enter tasks done and it would give a text based output to send to mgmt.
Of course the guy hadn't planned on leaving after a few months and his
program stored data by date but didn't separate by year. So I had to go
figure out what it was doing since he was using a perl specific data
archiver. Eventually just wound up blowing away the data store so each
year was new. Told others how to handle it as I didn't want to do more
perl and wasn't good enough at anything to replicate it all myself.
Leam
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