Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2

Alicorn

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

July Part 1

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

July Part 1

Do you consider fizzbuzz trivial? Could you write an interpreter for a simple Forth-like language, if you wanted to? If the answers to these questions are "yes", then that's strong evidence that you're not a horribly incompetent programmer.

Is this reassuring?

Do you consider fizzbuzz trivial?

Yes

Could you write an interpreter for a simple Forth-like language, if you wanted to?

Probably; I made a simple lambda-calculus interpret once and started working on a Lisp parser (I don't think I got much further than the 'parsing' bit). Forth looks relatively simple, though correctly parsing quotes and comments is always a bit tricky.

Of course, I don't think I'm a horribly incompetent programmer -- like most humans, I have a high opinion of myself :D

0[anonymous]16y

I'm probably not horribly incompetent (evidence: this and this), but there exist people who are miles above me, e.g. John Carmack (read his .plan files for a quick fix of inferiority) or Inigo Quilez who wrote the 4kb Elevated demo. Thinking you're "good enough" is dangerous.

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Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2

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Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2

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