This could be a sensitive topic for a lot of people. Pardon my arrogance, and be advised before you read any further. What is written below is my opinion, and in a few matters, I never deviate from them. You might try to prove me wrong, you might produce great examples to contradict me, while I do not even try to defend myself, but nothing can make me change these opinions of mine.
So here I am. A fresh graduate student out of the hyped IIT’s starting a career at FICO. I look around myself, I look at the people I’ll be working with and I am disturbed. The realization of truth that I am surrounded by non-CS people, people who probably started coding only after graduating out of their universities, makes me miss my alma mater. But why ?
Well, IIT’s are definitely over hyped when it comes to imparting knowledge to students. However, the aspect of my campus life that I relished the most was the belonging to a geeky society of skilled coders. These are the people who wouldn’t care for the so called good programming practises, but none the less, would implement almost all of them, knowingly or un-knowingly. They would do so because of logical reasons, and not because someone instructed them to. They would hunt the internet to find interesting informations regarding the scripting languages. And these are the kind of things I do not expect from people not of coding background.
Coming back to the disturbing world of reality, I was shocked to know that people don’t even understand the significance of 80 characters per line thingy. They just do not understand the difference between tabs and spaces. Give them an Eclipse pre-configured and they’ll be happy coding their entire life using it, without ever caring how the code would look like if a guy on a linux machine using vi and having 800×600 resolution chanced to look at the code.
My friend Naresh told me about the Shebang notation and the story thrilled me. It was an awesome idea not to add extension suffix when using scripting languages. The Shebang line contained the information for any coder interested in reading the code. And now, when I tell my friends, the ones not involved in coding before getting into a job which requires coding, and all I get back is a bored stare suggesting dude-which-part-of-it-was-interesting !
I do not expect these people to feel the same excitement as I. For them, coding shall always be a way to earn money. For me, it is the satisfaction of producing a beautifully written code which gets me up every morning. For these people, writing a code is merely following fixed guidelines and structuring the code around them. I hate it if someone comes to me and says use addall() function instead of the add() because addall() is faster. No ! I do not want statistics. Come to me and tell me why addall() should be quicker. Lets discuss the internal implementation of addall() which causes it to become faster than the other. And by internal implementation, I mean I am prepared to get as deep as compiler or OS level implementations.
In IIT Kharagpur, the place I come from, we have this competition called the Bitwise. It amazed me to learn in my third year that if you use a general purpose function like strcmp() your code will almost certainly fail the time test. Upon discussions, I found out why. And now I do advise people to make custom pointer based copy and compare functions instead of using the all purpose ones. But will these people understand it ? Will they appreciate the complexity at such a simple level.
I never expect them to. To me, they shall always remain aliens in the wonderful world of coding. I shall try my best to make them interested in the non-programming aspects of coding, but will I succeed ? I doubt that.
I conclude with another example of a friend who was using Eclipse for the first time. She copied a piece of code from some site. Then she found out the refactoring bliss of eclipse and got her code reformatted. But instead of being happy, she was disappointed at the result. What was bothering her was that a function had been broken into 3 lines, that the complete for() statement was written across 2 lines and that the comments were also put in multiple lines, despite the fact that 1/4th of her screen on the extreme right was empty. She sat down and brought everything to single lines. The ugly code spanning screens pleased her. She was happy in scrolling righ to left and then back again, but would not consent to the 80 characters guideline.
These people will never understand why the confirmation to programming practises is required. They will never appreciate the simplicity of the logic behind each of the rules that they are told to follow when writing a program.
My friends refuse to use putty or an equivalent ssh shell. They would rather go through the pains of installing cygwin and some IDE within it. vi disgusts them !
My friends, if you are one of the others, you can never be one of us. You can never become a coder. The love for code comes from within a person. It cannot be produced, not at all by making someone code for 10 hours a day.
So tomorrow if you walk upto me and insist that everyone involved in software product development is a coder, then please, you could not be more wrong. The distinguishing quality is that a coder cares not for how a particular thing is done, but why is it done the way it is.
I miss IIT Kharagpur.
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