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What are the craziest misconceptions you’ve heard about programming from people not familiar with it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren't as familiar with it. It doesn't happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.

I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

He has a rant where he's calling software engineers basically idiots who don't know what they're doing, saying the need for unit tests is a proof of failure. The rest of the rant is just as nonsensical, basically waving away all problems as trivial exercises left to the mentally challenged practitioner.

I have not read anything from/about him besides this piece, but he reeks of that all too common, insufferable, academic condescendance.

He does have a point about the theoretical aspect being often overlooked, but I generally don't think his opinion on education is worth more than anyone else's.

Article in question: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Sounds about right for an academic computer scientist, they are usually terrible software engineers.

At least that’s what I saw from the terrible coding practices my brother learned during his CS degree (and what I’ve seen from basically every other recent CS grad entering the workforce that didn’t do extensive side projects and self teaching) that I had to spend years unlearning him afterwards when we worked together on a startup idea writing lots of code.