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[nycphp-talk] Semi-OT: Is there a scale for language competency?

Traffanstead, Mike mike at thesandbenders.com
Sun Sep 1 13:45:48 EDT 2013


The problem is that very, very few people code in a vacuum anymore.  So
yes, your rockstar programmer can turn out code very quickly if they don't
have to follow any guidelines... and then it will be turned over to junior
programmers to maintain and they will have no idea WTF is going on.

At the very least it will slow them down trying to figure out what's going
on.  Probably they'll end up taking up more of the senior developers time
to get him to explain it.  At worst it will create bugs b/c they thought
they knew what was going on but didn't.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. :-)


On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 1:21 PM, Gary Mort <garyamort at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 8/20/2013 6:38 PM, Justin Dearing wrote:
>
>>
>> Can you provide a link to that study? I've never heard that, and my gut
>> says it's folk wisdom that "experts" use to justify their behaviour.
>>
>>
> Unfortunately not offhand.  I read it on the internet so it must be true?
> :-)
>
> Honestly though, I think I read about it in Pragmatic Thinking and
> Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, by Andy Hunt
> http://pragprog.com/book/**ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-**learning<http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning>
>
> It was a very interesting book with lots of little tidbits.  The most fun
> "new to me" fact was when he was....disparaging the idea of cube-farms.  He
> referenced a wide spread belief that we only have a set number of brain
> cells, they don't grow back.  I recall learning this back in school as part
> of all the anti-drinking classes[ie "alcohol kills brain cells and you
> don't grown any new ones!"]  This bit of wisdom is based on a decades old
> study of rats where it was found that they stopped growing new brain cells
> after adulthood. What had been overlooked was the environmental factors: ie
> these were rats kept in a sterile environment, no stimulation, nothing new,
> every day the same old same old[making the obvious analogy to cubicles and
> their sameness].   Take those rats and give them changing environments and
> stimulation and low and behold, they do grow new brain cells.
> http://www.livescience.com/**505-adult-brain-cells-growing.**html<http://www.livescience.com/505-adult-brain-cells-growing.html>
>
> Now, I'm not quite sure I'd buy into comparing working in a cubicle to
> being a rat in a lab, since you DO still have mental stimulation for the
> projects one works on.
>
> Unfortunately my copy is at my brothers, so I can't look it up.
>
>
>
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