Re:Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
by gruseom on Friday March 14, 2014 @01:05PM
(#7400201)
Programming is writing.
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I have a BA in CS from a liberal arts school and I completely agree. Nothing in math or computer science is "discovered," but we're just learning and then writing a long narrative documenting the beauty and truth of the Universe. (Some people just have a stick up their a$$ because they happen to have done time to please someone else in either ivory tower or other powers, to think that what they do is better than shoveling snow).
Despite the flurry of Stunk&White analogies, I actually found the two activities to be quite distinct. I think in part because language is much more general (you could say "lose") and because programming exhibit concepts that are nowhere to be found in language (even at the "language" level, programming idioms have little to do with actual idioms).
Re:Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
by nimblegorilla on Friday March 14, 2014 @01:47PM
(#7400520)
Good developers also tend to have good communication skills (such as writing). There isn't a 1-to-1 mapping, but things like Strunk&White can give a lot of insight applicable to developers. One example is Strunk&White's idea of a style guide, a concept that all multi-developer software projects should implement to some degree.