
How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary - ColinWright
http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html#src=hn
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benhoyt
Cheeky side note: it'd be nice if the author could _program_ their web server
to send the correct character set so that the © symbol doesn't show up as �.
It's being served with:

    
    
        Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8
    

whereas the charset is actually in ISO-8859-1.

~~~
sparknlaunch12
Unsure of the charset standards history, but article is from 2003 and hosted
on an edu domain. So possibility since then site has been moved around?

~~~
benhoyt
Good call. I sent an email with a UTF-8 version of his article attached to the
address listed at <http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/>, but it bounced. Any
ideas for how to contact him?

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tumes
As a Mines alum I can say I damn good first step to becoming a programmer is
surviving a school as tough as Mines (if you're academically minded). I
graduated with a chem degree but decided to switch to web development about a
year and a half ago, and if there's one thing that school really taught me how
to do was be a good learner which ended up being an awesome asset in trying to
get hired.

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Kilimanjaro
Shorter: learn, think, code, debug, solve, share, enjoy.

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_feda_
I presume the author is female, according to her use of the feminine pronoun
in referring to programmers generally. Nice to get a female perspective. I
appreciate her emphasis on all the qualities beyond coding itself that
contribute to a good programmer.

~~~
scarmig
I've actually noticed only a weak correlation at best between gender of the
writer/speaker and the generic pronoun e uses. It's pretty common for people
of the progressive set to use the feminine personal pronoun for programmers
generically, which is a Good Thing (tm).

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
As opposed to the gender-neutral 'they', which is the Best Thing (that few
people seem to realise).

~~~
joshAg
Many people still like to claim that 'they' can only be used as a plural.

~~~
masterzora
I personally think it just sounds awkward. Spivak pronouns can pick up all of
the benefits of a singular "they" without the drawbacks, though.

~~~
akavi
I would say the opposite, actually.

"They" as a gender neutral singular pronoun is, to me, perfectly natural. I
use it dozens of times a day as such without noticing.

Spivak pronouns, on the other hand, are blatantly marked, and were I to come
across them in writing or speech, I'd find them very distracting.

~~~
Tloewald
Thanks for alerting me, indirectly, to the Spival pronouns. I think they're a
good, minimalist approach to a fix, but agree they will look distracting until
or unless they become commonplace.

I guessed - correctly - it would be the same Spivak who wrote the excellent
Calculus textbook.

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jcfrei
a short summary?! i could learn python in the time it takes to read this.

~~~
janardanyri
This is short by the standard of well-considered material of durable merit
warranting serious reflection.

It's not short by the standard of contemporary consumable Internet content,
which is to be expected, as most of that content is not designed to enlighten.
It's designed to catch your attention long enough to tell you about a brand,
whether corporate (advertising) or personal (blogging).

And at any rate, serious writing implicitly asks for an investment of time in
contemplation above and beyond line scan time, so its 'reading time' is only
loosely coupled to the apparent length of the material. Making that investment
increases the payoff, it doesn't dilute it. "You get out of it what you put
into it."

If content consumption time is directly linearly related to content length,
that's a pretty good flag that you're probably not getting much real value out
of it. I've found low value content to be a difficult honeypot to resist even
on HN, which is comparatively a pretty high-quality aggregator.

This is one of the best HN submissions I've ever seen. Given its due respect,
it could change lives.

