

3 Types of Programmers: Zerg, Terran, Protoss - mathgladiator
http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/12/3-types-of-programmers-zerg-terran.html

======
StrawberryFrog
A facile and shallow analogy. Not very illuminating.

~~~
mapleoin
I think it's purpose was entertainment rather than illumination.

~~~
StrawberryFrog
It's probably harmful to pigeon-hole people like that, It would be better
(though probably just as predictable) to discuss how people fall into those
categories, what these people have to teach each other, and what their next
steps are to break out of their respective ruts.

------
iwwr
If Google is a company run and maintained by the Protoss, their servers are
Zerg technology: weak individually (hardly able to serve one youtube video
slice), short-lived (due to overheating) and controlled by a hive mind.

Microsoft is a company lead by Terrans, running on state-of-the-art Protoss
servers, selling Terran technology to Zerg corporate drones from other
companies.

Oracle are a bunch of Protoss mercenaries, selling Terran, Protoss, Zerg,
Xel'Naga and Hybrid creatures to anyone else. IBM are like that, only they
sell custom-made spaceships.

------
jarin
Then you've got the Xel'naga programmers (e.g. Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson,
Dave Winer, etc).

Richard Stallman is probably the Dark Voice.

Edit: "The Dark Voice (also known as the Fallen One) is a Void entity. It is
the leader of the hybrids and seeks to remake all life in its image."

~~~
argvzero
Wait, Dave Winer in the same class as Ritchie and Thompson? Really?

~~~
jarin
Haha I knew someone was gonna say something about that. How about we replace
him with... Grace Hopper?

------
koichi
Well butter my biscuit

~~~
artmageddon
You want a piece of me, boy?

------
dshankar
What happens when you infect a terran programmer?

~~~
yrral
Infected terran programmer: While they can still write code that works, the
tools/processes required by the company slow them down. (someone higher up has
to bless the project with creep before it can be started)

Before being infected, they completed many projects one after another without
being exhausted. However, after being infected, the programmers mysteriously
disappear after completing a project for the first time...

------
madhouse
I do wonder where Linus Torvalds would fit.

Terran? While getting shit done is usually fine with him, he also has a good
sense of elegance and has been seen being vocal about code that looked bad.

Zerg? Yeah, no.

Protoss? While Linus' skills are high, I just can't imagine him being the
rigid protoss, as he has his fair share of quick and dirty hacks aswell.

Also... what about the linux kernel developers as a whole? Are they like an
infested terran-protoss hybrid, with Linus being the Overmind, and his
leutenants the Cerebrates?

------
jmtame
so google is auir, bill gates is (was?) sarah kerrigan, and zuckerberg is jim
raynor?

~~~
loup-vaillant
Knowing the story, I'd say Arcturus Mensk fits Zuckerberg better. Jim Raynor
probably maintains Debian.

Oh and don't forget Miguel de Icaza as Samir Duran (may not fit the person,
but definitely fits the reputation).

------
snippyhollow
I play random and very much enjoy it, use C, Python, C++, (and now) Lisp for
depending on the job, sometimes write the maths and/or algorithm(s) down
beforehand, sometimes write test, sometimes unit tests, and achieve what's
interesting. I would've stopped playing SC2 if it wasnt' for random. ;-)

------
julius_geezer
I had to Google for the terms, making me, I suppose a Trogdolyte
programmmer....

------
nestlequ1k
Pretty apt analogy. Nice one!

~~~
ecuzzillo
I liked the idea of categorizing things using Starcraft, but this didn't
particularly resonate for me. In particular:

a) Shiny math and shiny languages are negatively correlated; the mathier a
grad student is, the more likely he is to use Matlab and the less likely he is
to actually know how to program. When mathier people write non-Matlab code, it
is often (but obviously not always) very shitty. Now, there are ML people, but
they're a small subset of mathy programmers.

b) The "Terran" description is closest to what you would think of as a normal
hacker, but hackers generally care that what they make is good, and people who
care about code being good are not usually characterized as "just getting shit
done," since for example they rewrite code that works just because it's ugly.

c) Terrans, by which I mean hackers, can and do learn math and then become
unstoppable. I imagine there's some Starcraft parallel here, but I haven't
played it recently enough.

~~~
RBerenguel
The math-Matlab correlation may not be as big as you think. In my university,
we use Matlab for almost nothing in the degree (I used it in Signal
Processing), and write all our math code in C (Newton's methods, ODE
integrators, linear system solvers). Of course this does not mean "knowing how
to program" (unless you learn all the missing stuff along the way), or doing
non-shitty code, but this is unrelated to Matlab being present

~~~
ecuzzillo
I meant mainly grad students and the like on their projects, not languages for
classes. Languages used for classes are mostly the professor either picking
his favorite language for the course (very random) or letting his TAs pick the
language (very random if the TAs are not his grad students, mildly correlated
with the field if the TAs are his grad students).

Edit: Initially I was talking about undergrad classes, but then realized you
might have meant grad classes, so I changed it to say classes in general,
which I believe is still true.

Edit 2: I set the delay so I can edit my post a bunch of times after I post it
and not provide a moving target.

Edit 3: Clearly you are an exception, but then again you're reading Hacker
News.

Edit 4: Where are you going to grad school that doesn't let you pick your own
language?

~~~
RBerenguel
I'm doing my PhD and do almost everything in C (I don't need to code a lot for
my thesis, but for a paper I got in complex dynamics I did a few fractal
renderers that needed to be fast, or at least as fast as I could get them to
be). Sadly we can't choose the language as we have 3 courses on programming
which are supposed to be C based. If I was to choose, I would pick Lisp... but
this is only a dream ;)

------
raz0r
Yeah, this is stupid.

