I asked this question during one interview (update:several, ok maybe all) from prospective bioinformatics students and to my surprise, a lot of them said they didn't have a clue what a pragma1 is ! This doesn't mean they didn't know about it but they were unaware of this technical term/jargon. Once I told them, most of them knew what I was talking about.
Let me give a little background first. I am a biologist-turned self-taught programmer who followed the book from page one to the last page (mostly because I couldn't grasp what it meant), started programming, failed and tried again, then went on to web based forums to gain some sense as I learnt to tackle problems of increasing difficulty. I had a pretty good problem (read very hard !!!) during my PhD (for which I started learning to program) which had enough complexity to make me sweat more and more and more and more...
Most students don't read the book, go off straight to the web and learn coding, not programming. Yes, there's a difference. Diffuse while it may seem, experienced programmers will immediately recognize what I am referring to. We start by coding and learn to accumulate nifty tricks on our way to becoming a programmer. We may use a less-than-efficient algorithm to manage RAM or CPU. Programmers know what works best given the resources at hand (CPU/RAM/type of OS or portability issues), maintainability (can the original developer & anyone else keep the code working and fix bugs without too much pain) and future developments (is it extensible in a way that allows new features to be added without a lot of refactoring?) to the code.
While coders are great at doing small chunks of unit problems very quickly, the programmers tend to think more about the problem, and identifying the abstract problem type and ways (or algorithms) to deal with it. Some examples are sorting (too basic and well-known), array-array comparisons etc. In my opinion, programmers, design and write code for an optimal solution while coders try to do it the one way they know or google up to do the stuff they are supposed to do. Also, programmers are great at debugging2, even though they may not be fastest in coding or the most elegant (but they do generally come up with nifty & elegant solutions). Coders may me great at execution but they may find it difficult to debug code, more so when it was written by somebody else.
With a thoughtful process behind acquiring newer sub-skills in programming, and making and effort to write and debug codes in a better and optimal way, any coder can aspire to become a programmer.
Footnotes:
1. I'll come back to pragmas in a later post. They deserve a solely dedicated post.
2. As they say - To err is human, to debug divine !
Let me give a little background first. I am a biologist-turned self-taught programmer who followed the book from page one to the last page (mostly because I couldn't grasp what it meant), started programming, failed and tried again, then went on to web based forums to gain some sense as I learnt to tackle problems of increasing difficulty. I had a pretty good problem (read very hard !!!) during my PhD (for which I started learning to program) which had enough complexity to make me sweat more and more and more and more...
Most students don't read the book, go off straight to the web and learn coding, not programming. Yes, there's a difference. Diffuse while it may seem, experienced programmers will immediately recognize what I am referring to. We start by coding and learn to accumulate nifty tricks on our way to becoming a programmer. We may use a less-than-efficient algorithm to manage RAM or CPU. Programmers know what works best given the resources at hand (CPU/RAM/type of OS or portability issues), maintainability (can the original developer & anyone else keep the code working and fix bugs without too much pain) and future developments (is it extensible in a way that allows new features to be added without a lot of refactoring?) to the code.
While coders are great at doing small chunks of unit problems very quickly, the programmers tend to think more about the problem, and identifying the abstract problem type and ways (or algorithms) to deal with it. Some examples are sorting (too basic and well-known), array-array comparisons etc. In my opinion, programmers, design and write code for an optimal solution while coders try to do it the one way they know or google up to do the stuff they are supposed to do. Also, programmers are great at debugging2, even though they may not be fastest in coding or the most elegant (but they do generally come up with nifty & elegant solutions). Coders may me great at execution but they may find it difficult to debug code, more so when it was written by somebody else.
With a thoughtful process behind acquiring newer sub-skills in programming, and making and effort to write and debug codes in a better and optimal way, any coder can aspire to become a programmer.
Footnotes:
1. I'll come back to pragmas in a later post. They deserve a solely dedicated post.
2. As they say - To err is human, to debug divine !
illiterately its not true, but understanding in other way like programmer work for single software and coder will code for many software.
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