- They love to tinker with academic languages, such as Haskell, and have an unusually high preference for talking and discussing apparently superior paradigms without ever demonstrating their successful deployment.
- Quick to criticize existing popular languages for a myriad of shortcomings. For instance C++ is bad because it: Lets you make mistakes, is too complicated, is a terrible replacement for C and got it all wrong, too big/too many features etc.
- They admire low-level programming, such as assembly, operating systems, and system libraries, but never apply themselves to it. One would have thought such practical, competitive fields would be an ideal outlet for the academically minded, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
- Inability to reuse existing solutions. This extends into a fear of calling "raw" interfaces, such as directly into libc or making system calls. Preferred frameworks are selected, and then adhered to religiously for fear of "breaking the mold", and suffering the consequences of an inflexible mindset. When the chosen framework fails to provide needed constructs, a new framework is selected, and code is rewritten and migrated to the new framework.
- Fear of Microsoft. While in my opinion, a healthy disdain for Microsoft is a good thing, this commonly devolves into a phobia for non-productive programmers. The inability for the non-productive programmer to demonstrate efficiency even when developmentally enhanced by Microsoft's spoon-feeding solution suites becomes plainly obvious. In Microsoft land, there are no paradigm shifts available to cover their tracks.
Monday 30 November 2009
Non-productive programmers
I've made an observation in some colleagues and friends, who seem to have difficulty in being productive programmers. They seem to have the following traits in common:
Tuesday 3 November 2009
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