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@deprecated_ii@poa.st
2026-10-15 21:06 UTC
I find comments like this revealing
at a certain point you should no longer be struggling with syntax, nor should you have trouble picking out syntax errors. that point is pretty early on in your career. if you've been programming for 5 years and you still spend a half hour on a semicolon or equals sign, you should give it up and go be a games journalist
but this is how it is for a large fraction of professional programmers. they go their whole careers struggling with syntax, because they never achieved basic competence with their tools. programming is so miserable for them because they never stopped fighting the language. everything about it is high friction
also related to why people obsess over programming languages and tooling and why programming discourse is all about junior-level stuff. they blame their tools for their incompetence instead of working on themselves. surely switching to [trendy language/IDE] will let them display their full skills! it's [old tool]'s fault their code sucks
how many professional programmers -- who now proudly reduce their life's work to mere typing -- have ever played a game of typer shark to improve their typing speed and accuracy?
Replies (1)
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The current interview question we've been using at work is basic word wrapping. Here's a long input string. Write a function wrap40(string input) -> string that word wraps to 40 characters without breaking apart words or hyphenating. Super simple, "every line is 40 characters or less."
You can usually follow up with "how would you do 80 characters?" (trivial if they do it right, just add an int length to the function and you should only have to change one thing). It's absolutely amazing how many people cannot do this fucking simple thing. With the last girl, we watch her struggle, not even hit the "run" button in the REPL once just to test out what she had so far .. and the other two people on the panel finished the thing in like 5 minutes for fun while she struggled.
Compiler issues should be fucking trivial unless you're writing in Scala and using something with nested generic types.
Open ##5058964