Three Tribes of Programming (2017)

This is fantastic and surprisingly close to how I tended to explain computer science to students and graduates: In Computer Science, there are 3 kinds of problems: 1. The problems that Math gives you: algorithms, data structures. These are the problems you think you're going to solve and sometimes you do, but often we just need a few really smart programmers to solve this and the rest of us can just use those solutions. 2. The problems that Physics gives…

I'm just skilled labor. I'm a milling machine operator, except instead of a CNC machine making, idk, table legs, I'm writing a thing to filter some database result based on some user input from a web page. I am not doing poetry or making hardware dance, I am not doing mathematics (directly anyway). This is a trade. I'm building the small pieces of the bigger things our culture either needs, or sometimes just wants. It's my job and I'm good…

I like this taxonomy, though it is reductive to try to cram programmers into disjoint "tribes". Individual approaches to programming generally combine from all three, though in different proportion to different individuals. Personally, I am driven most strongly by the "maker" approach, in that I write programs to be used. I also care deeply about correctness, simplicity, and performance in that order. I hate buggy, unmaintainable programs and the best way I know to make useful programs is to build…