On learning specifics (Re: [prog] On Perl)

[Jenn Vesperman]

On Sat, 2002-10-12 at 10:20, Mary wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 12, 2002, Jenn Vesperman wrote:
> > On Sat, 2002-10-12 at 13:44, kansas_kennedy at phreaker.net wrote:
> > 
> > Having been programming for many years, I don't memorise the specifics
> > of any language. I know how to -program-, I don't necessarily know how
> > to program in Foo.
> > 
> > Knowing how to program in Foo is what books are for. :)
> 
> I wanted to be one of the people who jumps the other way a bit, because
> people who memorise syntax specifics end up being portrayed as rank
> newbies on a high horse in these kind of discussions.

> It seems that many people, like me, use the technique of looking it up,
> until one day or one hour or something, you find that it's already in
> your memory and you don't look it up. If you don't like to use the text
> constantly, your mind will give a higher priority to getting it into
> memory. Your mind's priorities will take care of it - rote memorising
> isn't nearly as effective as memorising by using anyway.

Good points, Mary. I'll rephrase:

Knowing how to program in Foo is what I use books for. :)

Frankly, what I personally care about professionally is whether the
person knows how to program, whether they know how to learn, and whether
they care about professionalism.

If they only have the second two, I'd gladly take them in as a
paratechnical person and teach them programming. (Paratech == tester,
gofer, 'we need someone to edit this file precisely this way,
punctuation is critical').

Knowing how to learn includes knowing how -your specific- brain works.
So no, I don't care what your indentation style is so long as everyone
on the team can read it. I don't care if you know every variation of
strcmp() or if you need to look it up. Code professionally, code
reliably, and learn quickly. And I'm happy. :)

But those are -MY- quirks as a programmer. Other people will have
different quirks, priorities, and definitions of 'professional'. :)


Jenn V.
-- 
    "Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture 
        	you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.

jenn at anthill.echidna.id.au     http://anthill.echidna.id.au/~jenn/