Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[Leam Hall]

On 09/28/2017 07:35 AM, Stefan Ram wrote:

>    But remember that paid programmers usually do not "code",
>    in the sense of "write a program from scratch". Most of the
>    work is maintenance programming, where an important part of
>    the job is to read and understand a piece of code.
>    Coding from scratch also happens, it just less common.
> 
>    (So that would be a reasonable interview test: Being able
>    to understand a piece of given code and do some requested
>    modification to it.)

Another Perl story. I used to love Perl and then got to the point where 
trying to code in it made me physically nauseous. Not sure why.

Guy had written a perl based time tracker for our contractor team. We'd 
enter tasks done and it would give a text based output to send to mgmt. 
Of course the guy hadn't planned on leaving after a few months and his 
program stored data by date but didn't separate by year. So I had to go 
figure out what it was doing since he was using a perl specific data 
archiver. Eventually just wound up blowing away the data store so each 
year was new. Told others how to handle it as I didn't want to do more 
perl and wasn't good enough at anything to replicate it all myself.

Leam