Believe it or not (well, I can’t believe it too before), there are traits and personality that are common on most programmers.
Just a reminder, these are just based on my own observation on programmers I met. I don’t generalized, but I believe in it. The purpose of this post is to help the newbies know if they have same characteristics most programmers have. If none of these is applicable for you, don’t lose hope. It’s always your will and guts to decide.
1. Programmers are into a music genre. As what I’ve observed, most of them listen’s only to one genre. Most programmers are easy to distract on external noise, so they tend to listen loud on a music genre they love. For me, I only have four playlists – Goth, Punk, Classic and Alternative.
2. Programmers are lawyers. They are always ready to debate on issues they think they have a point. They are ready to debate for their beliefs and philosophies in life.
3. Programmers are artists. As programming is an art too, they have an eye to appreciate work of arts.
4. Programmers are writers. I already said it to a friend before. Programmers are natural writers, we just use a different language.
5. Programmers are futurists. We develop programs for future and not for past. Though, every detail in the past is a lesson learned. We do debug-and-test for future scenarios.
6. Programmers love signatures. They love putting their names on their codes. Just like an artist embedding their name on their works. Of course, we don’t want our work to be a victim of copy-and-paste without any tribute.
7. Programmers are clever. Clever in a way that once they learn new thing, they will create at least a simple program for it. Most of the learning came from this trait.
8. Programmers don’t memorize codes. Just like what others are thinking, memorizing codes is difficult. But put it your mind that we never memorize codes. We just understand the process.
9. That’s all for my observation. I hope you learned something.
10. Class dismiss.
I agree with #8. I was once got a written job examination on programming where the examiner had a list of problems and a list of programming languages to choose from.
The problem items were not that difficult, the only problem was that I don’t memorize program codes. I still can remember my reaction telling them,”don’t you have computers that we should program in a sheet of paper?”
Yeah! Non-programmers always think that a programmer’s good in memorizing code. But the fact is they can only code in front of computer. Not in a paper, not in their mind at all.
I have to agree with Kira 100%. Doing programs on test papers is one of the most absurd thing on this planet. How do we able to debug our code on paper? I also don’t memorize everything. Though we can already remember the syntax if we always use them, how about those we don’t always use — but needed to be included on a program?
High five on that, Kira. I thought it was just me who find this so absurd.
Test papers doesn’t have compiler. How could we know if we did it right? When I was still a student, I hate those teachers! LOL!
Test papers doesn’t have compiler. How could we know if we did it right? When I was still a student, I hate those teachers! LOL!
Nice one! Doing programming ns a sheet of paper is really a shit! This is always happened especially in College. There are test that you need to debug the program. WTF! How do we know if there is an error. I remember what my professor said “Don’t memorize it! Instead, Put in in your heart”. I mean isapuso daw an code.
hahah.. I too don’t memorize my codes.. best programmer doesn’t do that too.. they just know the answers once they see the problem.
also, though i really hate programming on paper (based on experience), I find programmers who can debug without the computer the best, imagine seeing an error without compiling! that’s awesome! 😀
yeah! they’re awesome and don’t need to code using an IDE. 🙂
I have to agree to all esp on #6 and #8. 🙂 I always included my name on every web page I’ve created (by comments) and on the programs I coded as well.
Regarding #8, to be honest I really dislike memorizations. I like to analyze things than memorize them. Computers do the memorizing. Humans do analysis.
“Computers do the memorizing. Humans do analysis. ”
Computer would be non-sense if humans can do everything. 🙂
We can actually do almost anything, but might use some help from the machines to save our time and effort and use it on much productive things and not just populating our minds with things we could actually store elsewhere like books, or on our computers.