The iNexus

There’s a quick followup I’d like to make that better elucidates what I was vainly saying in my Interviewing for Programming Jobs post.

If you haven’t, you should really read Wolf’s great followup on programmers and coding.

Jerry W. Walker really says it all when he states, “… would suggest that the most successful programmers of that age were those who were good at algorithmic reasoning. The languages (any number of assembler languages, Fortran, COBOL, PL/I, C and such) were generally easy enough to learn within a few days and you could get good with them within a month or two. I believe that the most successful of our programmers today, on the other hand, are those who are good at learning natural languages. I would suggest that the ability to learn, not only the Java language, but the Java packages and method calls therein, is a great deal more like learning French than it is like learning algebra or calculus. The active vocabulary has become huge.”

I too think that modern programmers are better measured for their language breadth and skill, not necessarily the need for logarithmic analysis. A well-balanced programmer hangs many tools from his proverbial belt, but in the end I think it’s how you use the tools and what you can do, not arbitrary challenges, that should be the standard.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 12:49 am and is filed under Musings, Programming.

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