Raj MadhuramDuh! In other news, Astronauts on ISS don’t like outer space!. But this link was forwarded to me by my collegue Santosh. Here’s my take on that:
Rosenberg is wrong. Programmers don’t like coding, they like problem solving.
Mathematicians like problem solving! Farmers like problem solving! Accountants like problem solving! At least most of the people in their profession like to solve problems in their field of choosing. What is the difference with programmers? They can and should like to code.
If programmers liked to code, we’d all be writing in machine language to this day. You can write that stuff all day and get precious little of the real problem solved.
That’s nonsense. I would love to write in machine language for quantum computers, when they are available, if indeed we need to build technology from scratch. Also I’m amused by his belittlement of writing in machine language. I have seen amazing games and apps written with machine language on my Z-80 based home computer in late 80’s.
If programmers liked to code, they wouldn’t value a language by its libraries. If programmers liked to code, every last one of us would be overjoyed to write our own HTTP client.
This is obnoxious – makes me wonder if he is a programmer. A programmer does not value a language by its libraries. He values it based on a) its ability to translate his thoughts into machine understandable form and b) elegance of expression, and one programmer’s valuation doesn’t necessarily mean anything to another.
I reject the explanation that programmers capriciously want to rewrite code for the fun of it
Go tell it to the thousands of college kids who take the ACM programming contest each year (http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/)! Coding, by its nature has an inseparable fun element to it for real programmers.
I can go on and on! but I have better things to do, such as coding :)