This is a topic I have been thinking about a lot lately, so this article is quite timely.
I was a bad programmer for a long time. For a few years, I was an engineer and basically wrote quick and dirty matlab or python scripts to do physics based modeling and simulations. But, it was never elegant or efficient or anything that I guess you learn about in upper level CS courses.
It didn't have to be. A customer would never see the code, it would never have to perform under critical conditions, it could almost never be reused because each project data set was completely different. The code was just supposed to crunch input and produce meaningful output that could be analyzed.
I got to thinking that I was a pretty good programmer because I could write those scripts.
Then I quit that job and moved to a different country. The only job here that I managed to get was as a software engineer. Here, I learned how very wrong I was. Writing quick and dirty scripts that crunch data is easy. Programming is hard. Really really hard.
I was a bad programmer for a long time. For a few years, I was an engineer and basically wrote quick and dirty matlab or python scripts to do physics based modeling and simulations. But, it was never elegant or efficient or anything that I guess you learn about in upper level CS courses.
It didn't have to be. A customer would never see the code, it would never have to perform under critical conditions, it could almost never be reused because each project data set was completely different. The code was just supposed to crunch input and produce meaningful output that could be analyzed.
I got to thinking that I was a pretty good programmer because I could write those scripts.
Then I quit that job and moved to a different country. The only job here that I managed to get was as a software engineer. Here, I learned how very wrong I was. Writing quick and dirty scripts that crunch data is easy. Programming is hard. Really really hard.