What Programming is Never About (Informal Lecture) by Abner Coimbre is a 43 minute video about some fundamental software principles.
Here is the gist of it.
Summary
What Is Programming
- Dan North: write software to move information around — information is the real deal
- Noel: programming is about transforming data, process input data to create some output data
What Is Programming Never About
- it’s not about the code itself, but rather what you do with the code
- educational materials put emphasis code
- focus rather on problem solving
- spending time on cleaning up “messy code” while you try to figure out the structure of your program is a waste of time
- don’t waste time thinking about the code instead of the problem: the end goal is not having clean code, it’s having good, working code
- you only have to think about clean code insofar as it has an effect on the end product (bug-free, working code)
Links
- What Programming is Never About (Informal Lecture) by Abner Coimbre