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Sam Barnett-Cormack
The simple truth is that most people who are making their living programming have very very sketchy understanding of theory. Nowadays it’s common to understand OO on a practical level, but even those who have studied computer science at an undergraduate level and had to study, say, design patterns have mostly forgotten most of it within a few years of graduating, if that. If I say to a professional programmer “why not use the observer pattern” or “what about using a generator”, people are baffled.
People can be regularly programming using relational databases and not know what ACID is about, and I doubt most of them have heard of relational algebra/calculus. An alarming number aren’t aware of what normalisation is.
Programmers are not, by and large, immensely knowledgeable about programming as a whole. They know how to do the stuff they work with regularly, and they learn new stuff as they need to. If they’re good, they keep up with new developments so they find out about new and better ways to do things.
The ones who know about umpteen paradigms, formal definitions, etc etc, are nerds among programmers. I don’t mean that pejoratively, just saying that’s what we are.
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The simple truth is that most people who are making their living programming have very very sketchy understanding of theory. Nowadays it’s common to understand OO on a practical level, but even those who have studied computer science at an undergraduate level and had to study, say, design patterns have mostly forgotten most of it within a few years of graduating, if that. If I say to a professional programmer “why not use the observer pattern” or “what about using a generator”, people are baffled.
People can be regularly programming using relational databases and not know what ACID is about, and I doubt most of them have heard of relational algebra/calculus. An alarming number aren’t aware of what normalisation is.
Programmers are not, by and large, immensely knowledgeable about programming as a whole. They know how to do the stuff they work with regularly, and they learn new stuff as they need to. If they’re good, they keep up with new developments so they find out about new and better ways to do things.
The ones who know about umpteen paradigms, formal definitions, etc etc, are nerds among programmers. I don’t mean that pejoratively, just saying that’s what we are.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
