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ChristianKl comments on Cheerful one-liners and disjointed anecdotes - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Romashka 13 February 2016 07:40PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 14 February 2016 08:25:17PM 4 points [-]

One of the key skills that a good programmer needs but that isn't specifically taught in computer science is reading and understanding large code bases and API's.

Comment author: HungryHobo 16 February 2016 03:08:46PM *  1 point [-]

I found this to be very much the case. In hindsight I'm also shocked that source control systems didn't get a mention in my course.

As a professional programmer very little of your job involves actually writing code. Most of it revolves around understanding the surrounding code well enough to not fuck it up, documenting shit and quite a lot of testing.

The few times when I had a blank slate to work with felt wonderful: I could write code almost as fast as I could think rather than analysing things for an hour then writing a couple of lines to deal with a bug or to add a feature.