Introduction:
Programming languages all have their own distinctive style and odd character. Not surprisingly these unique set of traits tend to attract deviants that sometimes form a community who then hold conferences to talk about their deviant ways :)
It was a Friday afternoon and I started wondering if programming languages were superheroes who would they be?
Assembly (Hulk)
Assembly fights “close to the metal”, moving and shifting data around like no ones business.
After reading Willard Foxton’s Blog piece entitled “The Government wants to teach all children how to code. Here’s why it’s a stupid idea” I had to stop myself and think rationally; naturally the post was full of factual inaccuracies and a negative portrait (conjured up entirely in the imaginations of Willard’s mind) of a large section of the developer community.
Ironically I agree with the title. This is not a new debate and it’s one that I have posted about before as a response to Jeff Attwood “Please Don’t Learn To Code But Give it a Try”.
Your cursor is still flashing at the same point and you have been staring at your screen blankly for over ten minutes. You make any excuse to get away from programming, “I’ll go make one more coffee” you tell yourself. When you start writing code you only delete it to start over again. If you are experiencing this level of procrastination then you may have programmers block.
Writer’s block or mental block is widely accepted in most creative fields.
You may have come across this form of questioning most likely in an interview. Its a classic question but usually asked in terms of 5 year projection, however the concept are the same. The problem with well worn questions are that the answers mostly follow in a predictable manner. If you have never given this question any serious thought, then I suspect you would be in the majority.
So why is this question so popular among interviews anyway?
That dreaded email the one you was hoping would never turn up in your inbox has now suddenly popped up. You re-read the communication just to be sure of the exact details. Although you would love to just ignore it, this is one you can not. You have written your reply for the last time, but you hesitate to hit the send button. “Let me reword that again” you think to yourself, the dilemma is do you tell the truth?
