Signs that you are a bad programmer

I wish articles like this would namespace their assertions by telling us what they mean by "good" or "bad", so we could avoid the perennial echo chamber debate that goes like this: A: GOOD MEANS SHIPPING AND PLEASING YOUR CUSTOMERS B: NO YOU FOOL! GOOD MEANS WRITING CLEAR CODE THAT OTHER HACKERS CAN READ C: NO YOU FOOLS! GOOD IS A HAPPY MEDIUM BETWEEN BOTH OF THOSE THINGS D: DEBATE IS HARD, LET'S GO SHOPPING! God forbid we agree on…

One of the unstated, or subliminal purposes of these kinds of ideas is to act as an emotional "vent." Its social purpose in the programmer community is to present a target for the release of "justified" emotional aggression. Other fields and other kinds of social groups have them in their own contexts. One of the things that such sets of ideas produce, in sufficiently large populations and sufficiently complicated contexts, are false positives. That is to say, you will tend…

2012. Bit snarky at the end about alternate careers. Please separate the ability to program from the jargon that has been developed over the decades re programming. Some of us predate cs courses being widespread. Some of us aren’t cs majors. Some of us even bag schooling in cs and “just do it”. Many of the concepts were obvious after one programmed at higher and higher levels - how do you think the design patterns became patterns?

This is like, the best guide to being a better programmer I've ever seen, all except for the part about pointers. High level language references are different enough that I could see someone having no trouble with them even if they didn't understand pointers. Maybe "Indirection" is a better goal, since you really will need to understand that, even though you might never do any pointer arithmetic beyond array indexing.