I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by swartkrans on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @01:29PM (#8488490)

Actually I think graph theory is pretty important. For example many programming contexts have to deal with dependencies, and often dependencies form a directed acyclic graph. Understanding that will aid in writing better, more reliable code. Path finding is also pretty important, especially if you want to make a game.

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Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by phazmatis on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @02:13PM (#8488821)

That's great if you're a game AI programmer (an incredibly small group) or you're creating Yet Another Dependency Loader (hey, I guess <language that becomes super popular next year> will only have 100 frameworks to manage modules, you'd better create your own as well).

You know what I really wish? Programmers would spend 1/100th of that algorithm studying on learning to write readable, maintainable code.

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Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by dragonwriter on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @05:26PM (#8490142)

> You know what I really wish? Programmers would spend 1/100th of that algorithm studying on learning to write readable, maintainable code.

IME, programmers that write readable, maintanable code and those that have a solid grasp of algorithms and theory as it applicable to the problem domain tend to overlap considerably. Having a clear analytical mental model of the approach to the solution leads to clearer and cleaner code -- and, where necessary, clearer and more useful comments -- than hacking your way to something that works. (And I'd say thats as true of my own code -- where I've done work on both extremes of the clear model to hacking-my-way-through axis -- as of others' code I've seen.)

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Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by computerjunkie on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @02:27PM (#8488899)

>>>learning to write readable, maintainable code.

Which is why I love python. Have you seen some poorly written JavaScript that's poorly indented and has no comments? Until there is a universal guideline for JavaScript and that developers follow, I won't have a go at it again.

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Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by colanderman on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @03:26PM (#8489281)

Indentation is pretty low on the list of things that make code maintainable or not. (If it bothers you, just pass the code through a pretty-printer.)

Much more important is to pay attention to system-level measures such as modularity, abstraction, (de)coupling, and documentation. 99% of maintenance nightmares are due to code that is not modular (and thus not easily replaced), is abstracted too much or too little (leading respectively to obtuse or repetitive code), highly coupled (causing brittleness when assumptions are broken), or poorly documented.

(There are probably others, but these are the first to come to my head. These measures are also not necessarily orthogonal.)

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Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by swartkrans on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @02:40PM (#8488987)

Your comment comes across as bitter and sarcastic. It doesn't sound like you like being a programmer.

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Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by cesarbs on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @02:26PM (#8488894)

Agreed. Some people say you'll only use it in games or AI or something fancier, but that's not entirely true. I work with what would be considered pretty boring enterprise software, and yet I once solved a pretty big problem using graph algorithms. That actually earned me a good reputation among my coworkers.

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Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by csallen on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @02:48PM (#8489038)

I don't think the primary complaint about these types of skills is that they are never useful. It's just that they are treated as disproportionately important, i.e. interviews consist of 80% CS knowledge but the real job only requires it 1% of the time on average.

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Re:I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) by jestar_jokin on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @10:46PM (#8491294)

I used some super simple graph theory recently to write a Java tool that spit out data from multiple tables on a database into SQL files, with statements in the right order so that foreign key relationships were preserved. And this was for a CRUD-ish web app.

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