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Culture of Computer Programmers

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Codebyte:
First off, WOW...

These are amazingly powerful thoughts that you guys have put into words... I read those and was happy to be who I am; proud of what i've done and proud of the way I look at life.

@all of you - may I quote you in my speech for my college course?

Thank you for spending the time to have expressed your views of life and opinions... It really helps to see what kind of mindset I need to have so that I can become what is commonly known as an "expert programmer" in my later days... Alot of the times, when I think of some of the people at DC.com, I can only hope to be as organized, as devoted, and as productive as you guys are... I mean I love seeing what you guys do: what websites you use, what things you do to stay organized, what sorts of programming you consider and many other things... These things do NOT shape me, but rather point me in the right direction of where I need to be to truly excel at what I love doing: creating software. I can honestly say that because of DonationCoder, I've become a better programmer...

I have just recently read a quote that caught my attention and really made me think about things...

Here is the quote: "If I had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter." - T.S. Elliot

Anyways, thanks for the thoughts!!

CWuestefeld:
Some folks have observed that tests of software people show that many of us have tendencies toward autism. Over-generalizing significantly, such people are characterized by difficulty in understanding the reactions of other people, and how to interact with them.

I think this makes a lot of sense. I think that we software developers find our interactions with the computer rewarding because the computer behaves very deterministically. Given a particular input, the computer will always react the same way; and if you want a certain output from the computer, it's possible to methodically calculate the right algorithm to get it. We're not burdened by the subtle, hard-to-comprehend, and sometimes random, reactions that we get when interacting with humans.

Paul Keith:
Sorry if this is too late but on my part, sure quote away. You'll notice that the bulk of my posts are based elsewhere also.

]The result is using a computer not to accomplish anything, but simply for the sake of using a computer, and accomplishing stuff is a side effect that kind of happens when you put everything everyone does everywhere together.-Gothi[c
--- End quote ---

I'd just like to start by saying I agree with the core of your statement Gothi[c]. I just feel like I have to comment on these two parts I'm quoting. The above because I think you're selling your realization short by limiting the effect to just computers and not life in general and the below because I disagree on the little bit about a very very tiny percentage of what we do matter in the grand scheme of things.

My case against that would be to point out that most well developed theories of progress and innovation all require very very tiny percentage of changes and they in fact point more towards the insignificance of a major event.

Two particular theories that jump at me are:

In Chaos Theory, it is the biggest event that has least significance and the culmination of all tiny events that innovate the world. In fact, the bigger the event the more it gets dispersed into tiny events and the more it is useless beyond being a bookmark for history books to refer to.

In a paradigm shift, the biggest event is pre-cluded by the combination of small events that the big event is the most detrimental to progress because it revisionizes a society's perception that it is in fact one major character or event that mattered and thus influencing a culture of over-simplistic people prone to throwing away their progress rather than understanding it.

In programming this would be akin to saying Google was a major event when in fact, little bits of coding was what got a certain character to influence another character to influence another character which resulted in Google. By saying Google is the major influencer and the programmers at home didn't do anything, one is likened to saying the popularity of a movie is credited to the actor and not the culmination of people watching it, the actor, the director, the set designer...

As you can see, it, alone isn't harmful but what if a society is in need of relevation and specifics? They are then deprived of progress. Why? Because it was due to one person not questioning a priest or one priest not questioning a Church or one Church not questioning the teachings of God. In programming, if one man didn't program a script by which a programming language would be born, would the next major programmer have created a program based on that programming language? or would the next major programmer have to create that programming language first?

If there was no Unix, would there have been a Linux?

If there was no complicated Yahoo search page, would there have been a niche for Google to create a simple search page?

If there was no mouser, would we have tech forum on the level of a DonationCoder despite the fact that it is very basic for a programmer to set up a forum?

The very very tiny things are all that matters. I know this could be just a difference of value and perception between us but I just couldn't live with not pointing out that we are still molecules and atoms and no amount of work we do changes our composition to the point that our little insignificants matter less than our big significants. The small bug always sour the big feature to a person affected by that small bug.

Perhaps the real core of the matter is that, like he says, software development is hard and takes so much effort (the number of 100 million lines of code was dropped, somewhere in that talk), that, when you're actually writing software, only a very very tiny percentage of that will ultimately only matter in the grand total.
--- End quote ---

Gothi[c]:
All valid points Paul :)
(ps, yes quote away!)

The famous actors example is a very nice comparison, I think. In the past actors never got that famous. It was usually the writer of a play that got all the credit, and the actors were but mere pawns.

Perhaps perception in general, is almost always incorrect/inaccurate/broken/wrong. :)

Paul Keith:
Glad we agree Gothi[c].  ;D (I was worried I might have come off as antagonistic!)

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