Types Of Programmers

Techie Type Programmers
The truth is that there are big differences in techie types. The hardware people are radically different from the software people, and on the software side alone, there are at least three subspecies of programmers.

Forget about the first subspecies, the lumpenprogrammers, who typically spend their careers maintaining mainframe computer code at insurance companies. Lumpenprogrammers don't even like to program but have discovered that by the simple technique of leaving out the comments--clues, labels, and directions written in English--they are supposed to sprinkle in among their lines of computer code, their programs are rendered undecipherable by others, guaranteeing them a lifetime of dull employment.

The two programmer subspecies that are worthy of note are the hippies and the nerds. Nearly all great programmers are one type or the other. Hippie programmers have long hair and deliberately, even pridefully, ignore the seasons in their choice of clothing. They wear shorts and sandals in the winter and t-shirts all the time. Nerds are neat little anal-retentive men with penchants for short-sleeved shirts and pocket protectors. Nerds carry calculators; hippies borrow calculators. Nerds use decongestant nasal sprays; hippies snort cocaine. Nerds typically know forty-six different ways to make love but don't know any women. Hippies know women.

In the actual doing of that voodoo that they do so well, there's a major difference, too, in the way that hippies and nerds write computer programs. Hippies tend to do the right things poorly; nerds tend to do the wrong things well. Hippie programmers are very good at getting a sense of the correct shape of problem and how to solve it, but when it comes to the actual code writing, they can get sloppy and make major errors through pure boredom. For hippie programmers, the problem is solved when they've figured out how to solve it rather than later, when the work is finished and the problem no longer exists. Hippies live in the world of ideas. In contrast, nerds are so tightly focused on the niggly details of making a program feature work efficiently that they can completely fail to notice major flaws in the overall concept of the project.


Truly, i am a hippie :)

Hey you forgot us drunken,backwoods,gun nut,coon dog havin',nothing better to do programmers.We're the best of them all.

lol@hornet

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...601285-0140863
thats a quote from this book :)

rioter

Damn, I wonder where I fit in :confused: I drink rarely, dont smoke, dont do coke, am not a nerd, know women and love women. Where do I fit in, in this world of pure anarchy..NOT. Actually I have no clue what I am saying. Nevertheless, there are also info hungry people like myself, our big drawback hard to concentrate on one thing. have to try everything, programmin, web design etc etc....I know there are more people like me out there...cheers to all my proggrammers, whether u like 40's or hard liquor u'll fit rite in. *mumbles* gotta stop drinking .......... :D

<< hippie programmer right here , lol - cool post :-)

I'd be the hippie's younger friend. Im the type of programer that wears a walkman as if it were a body part then puts bumper stickers on my PC & when asked to program for someone I do it at a unusual rate of speed so I'll have more time to program something I'd enjoy rather than for someone else.

lol specialist, i guess there's a real need of adding more to this, huh
well RiOtEr, thanks but eh, this article might be at 100's of places on the net, daz for sure :)

iz really too bad , people who give out antipoints done have a valid reason and balls enough to write their name after the assign.

Surely we must have "types", too! :-)

iz really too bad here man, now can somebody explain this ?
somebody ****in negged me sayin' that i copied the post from here -

http://www.oyvind.dk/texts/nerds.htm

i guess that makes it very much a statement that we cant judge anybody with their antipoints.
sorry if i'm being a rebel.

dont complain about antipoints, suck it up and get on with life.

as for what 'type' i am, i think im in the 'young'n thinkin we can be like the guys in <hackers> and end up programming obsessively' category. when i was like 9(not that long ago) i thought i wanted to be like 'crashoverride' and 'acidburn' in Hackers: the movie, how wrong i was :) now i probably have read more pages in combined programming manuals than most scholars read in all their years of college, and im only 15.... :P

thank you much, the_jinx, good i got one true friend, huh

What you wrote:

Quote:

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Hippie programmers have long hair and deliberately, even pridefully, ignore the seasons in their choice of clothing. They wear shorts and sandals in the winter and t-shirts all the time. Nerds are neat little anal-retentive men with penchants for short-sleeved shirts and pocket protectors. Nerds carry calculators; hippies borrow calculators. Nerds use decongestant nasal sprays; hippies snort cocaine. Nerds typically know forty-six different ways to make love but don't know any women. Hippies know women.

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What I read on www.oyvind.dk:

Quote:

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The hippies have long hair. They deliberately, almost proudly, ignore the seasons in their choice of clothes. They wear shorts and sandals in winter and T-shirt all the year round. The nerds are tightassed perfectionists who prefer short-sleeved shirts and trouser pockets with zippers. The nerds carry calculators. The hippies borrow calculators. The nerds sniffle and uses nasal sprays when they have caught a cold. The hippies sniff cocaine. The nerds typically know 117 ways of making love, but don't know any girls. The hippies know the girls."

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I have directly cut-and-pasted.these passages from thier respective sources.

This is plagarism. Sorry if you're too thick-headed to realize this, but the alteration of five words does not constitute an original article. Try this is University and you'll be expelled. Try it in the corporate world and you'll be sued. Try it here and you'll be negged. Looks like you're getting of easy here, kid. Time to buy a fire extinguisher, I think.

striek boy, you think you are an oldie ? lol
this is not the first place ive written this article at
ive written it at security-forums, cheetachat forums, my own website, this is the fourth.
There is full evidence that this maybe the source code, and that, that .dk website be the copier, so you dont really have to advocate. And also, if you think, by matching one paragraph, one can say that the whole work is copied, it's really great , imaginative thinking .. :)
If you like the post, say it, if you dont like it, shut up. In short, mind your own business

In other words, you think that so long as my opinion doesn't agree with yours, I have no right to post it?

Okay. maybe you DID write that article. Then you's got some 'splainin' to do...

The author of that book, Acciddental Empires, is Robert X. Cringley, a television personality on PBS. You are the CEO of Zero-in technologies, a company based in Nashua, New Hampshire, yet you live in New Delhi. Robert X. Cringley was studying at Stanford when you were born. But then again, maybe a former Stanford student stole the article from you... If he did, then why would HarperBusiness allow it to be published?

Maybe you could point me to your website and tell me where the article is.

And why didn't you provide actual proof instead of simply insulting me?

Please, prove me wrong. I would admit defeat gracefully. Besides, I enjoy a good battle of wits...

:D sorry, but i think striek's evidence is alittle more convincing.... ;)

Quote:

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Originally posted here by mathgirl32
Surely we must have "types", too! :-)

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Yeah, there are the "little old schoolteacher" programmers who
know COBOL and FORTRAN, and used to work for NASA
in the 1960s. They look over at you and give you the "evil eye"
if you look like you're having too much fun.

And then there are the anarchist/goth/wicca girls who specialize
in creating incomprehensible websites.

And of course, don't forget the "soccer mom programmers", who,
on top of raising 4 kids and working full time as IT admins at the bank,
are running their own small business, active in local politics
and maintaining their "relationship" with their significant other.
:cool:

Quote:

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And also, if you think, by matching one paragraph, one can say that the whole work is copied, it's really great , imaginative thinking

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How about matching up more than one paragraph? Sitll imgainative thinking? Interesting that the person that stole your "work" and posted it here gave the credit to Robert X. Cringley.

http://www.unix-girl.com/blog/archives/000364.html

I'm going to make this as plain and simple as possible, so there is NO CONFUSION.

On THIS group of forums, the ACCEPTED practice is to credit your sources, no exceptions. It doesn't matter how you give credit...it can be a link, a short description of the book or magazine (author and title) where you got the material, even the occasional "author unknown" is OK. When you fail to do this, you are viewed as taking credit for someone elses work or in a word, a thief.

A simple edit on your part would have easily cleared all of this up, but instead you whine and rail against those attempting to assist you by showing you what is acceptable here. No one cares about how many other forums you've posted this on...we only care about this one, and we care to the point of demanding integrity from each other...that includes you. If you don't like the way it's done here (and I'm not trying to be rude) then the simple solution would be to not post.

<EDIT> You (or that is, the REAL author) left out a catagory....the "Gates" programmers....the ones who see someone elses work and egomaniacally take possession of it to call it their own and get sooooo very defensive when someone attempts to expose their misdeeds. Hmmmmm....sound familier?

i still dont understand how my company is based in new hampshire lol

Quote:

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Originally posted here by Striek
And why didn't you provide actual proof instead of simply insulting me?

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Im sorry about the insulting factor, if i really did what you think i did.
But in utter honestly, let me again tell you that it was me wrote the thing, i read a similiar article in a computer mag, which gave me some deifinitions, i added a lot more to it. I guess it was the dumb mag which copies stuff, cuz i wasnt aware this was all over da net. By the way, my company is based in India itself, it's a web solution company.
Also, Striek, it is really hard to give evidence, aint it?

Im not interested in posting articles here and getting antipoints if you think that's what im here to do. I plainly thought that i'd rather make people laugh over the article.
Im amazed at the amount of debate it has created.

iz me

Seeing as my website was used as part of argument.. I thought I'd register and post my two cents.

What's here: http://www.unix-girl.com/blog/archives/000364.html is typed directly from Robert Cringley's book (I know, because I typed it in). What you posted in this thread is exactly that, word for word..

If you wrote this, then either your name is Robert Cringley, or you wrote this before 1994 (date of first publication of the book) and Robert stole from you. Considering you sound like you are rather young you probably were not old enough to write this back then (I apologize if I'm wrong on your age, it's just a guess).

At this point, utilizing occum's razor, you are indeed not the author. Have the guts to admit to copying and taking credit, you'll be a better person for it.

Another point, considering that I actually cut out a sentence out of the first paragraph (it had to do with previous content in the book and was irrelevant to what I was posting) and what you posted is missing the same information, you probably copied this straight from my website..

lol , obviously ive lied about my age on website, i cant be a CEO at 18, in any case, i dont wish to engage to take part in the discussion anyway

So, long story short... you admit to being a liar. Looks like we have our true answer everyone. Time to wrap us this thread!

"Copy from one person, it's plagerism. Copy from many people, it's research!"

And no, I didn't come up with that... not sure who did. See... it feels so much better if you just admit it :-)

only if , in the first place i did it, cuz you all cant just mount on me to agree on it.
I havent, i havent, so damn i havent