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Re:Think in Math, Write in Code by lioeters on Thursday July 18, 2019 @08:48AM (#20469180)
Fascinating, thank you for the link to the paper.

They group these styles as: opportunistic versus systematic approach to programming. Paraphrasing below..

Opportunistic programmers develop solutions in an exploratory fashion, work in a more intuitive manner and seem to deliberately risk errors. They often try solutions without double-checking in the documentation whether the solutions were correct. They work in a highly task-driven manner; often do not take time to get a general overview of the API before starting; they start with example code from the documentation which they then modify and extend.

Systematic developers write code defensively and try to get a deeper understanding of a technology before using it. These developers took time to explore the API and to prepare the development environment before starting. Interestingly, they seemed to use a similar process to solve each task. Before starting a task, they would form hypotheses about the possible approach and (if necessary) clarify terms they did not fully understand.

Re:Think in Math, Write in Code by optimuspaul on Thursday July 18, 2019 @09:49AM (#20469721)
I've always thought of those two groups using different labels. The Code Artists and the Engineers. The Artists have a strong need to be creating to understand something, whereas the engineer has a strong need to understand before they can create. And those that believe the programming is not an art fall into the latter group.
Re:Think in Math, Write in Code by filoleg on Thursday July 18, 2019 @06:41PM (#20474660)
A pretty good essay I've recently read that explores this topic.[0]

0. http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html