[Sussex] How to tell if someone a really good programmer?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Geoffrey Teale wrote:
>
>
> On 08/02/2008, *Andrew Guard* <andrew08 at andrewguard.com 
> <mailto:andrew08 at andrewguard.com>> wrote:
>
>     So is really possible to tell who is a really good programmer. If so
>     what is the tell, tell sings to look for?
>
>
>
> Well, that depends a lot on th situation you're assessing them under.  
> Interview conditions are stressful and therefore a persons shyness can 
> skew the results, however I'd say broadly it;s very much something 
> that can be assessed.  What;s much harder is to say "will this person 
> work hard and will they fit into the team".
>
> Generally the golden rules for me are:
>
>    - They program outside of work and have been doing so since before 
> they went to Uni (or perhaps they didn't even go to University)
>   - They have a non-trivial understanding of computer science (that is 
> they could discuss implementations of say hash tables, B-trees, and 
> Tries without straining too much).
>   - They are aware of new developments and play with new technology as 
> a rule
>   - They may not have commercial experience in more than one language, 
> but they will have programmed in 7 or 8 languages at least during 
> their life.
>   - If they think Scheme rocks and they can explain to you succinctly 
> why hygenic macros make it the best language in existance then you're 
> probably onto a winner :-)
I was with you right up to there. I took MIT's introduction to computing 
course with Gerry Sussman, which was a seious course on Scheme designed 
to force out people not serious about computer science While Jerry is an 
excellent instructor, and had a great deal of insight to impart, I 
thought he was hampered by the absolute "let's make everything 
recursive" and "there's a layer of abstraction, we don't actually care 
what actually happens as long as we can write our part in one less line 
of code" that was the *mandated* approach for the course. Scheme has 
generated a large number of navel-gazing programmers who couldn't 
garbage collect their way out of a dustpan, and couldn't find the I/O 
skills to write "Hello, World.".

*SHUDDER*.
>  - If they don't think they're leat just because they use vi (we have 
> already established that wannabe's use vi and real programmers use 
> emacs :-))
>
> .. the last ones a joke, BTW, but the wannabe point is based on some 
> experience of reality.
I would if I could: I'm dealing with SCO OpenServer right now, and even 
getting vim on it was an adventure. *Shudder*.