[PLUG] Apology.

[Jonathan Sergent]

Alex Russell:
[...]
> I've seen programmers castrated by IDEs in industry, and it's not a pretty
> thing. They are generally smart people, they genuinely know how to code, but
> they have no idea what a makefile is. It's a sad thing to see a co-worker
> come over to your desk asking where "dir" is in the strange prompt he was
> given on server Y. And it just pisses you off when it's a $200/h consultant.
> Wouldn't be such a problem if everyone was just making applets, but when you
> start getting to server-side stuff, odds are you're going to be running on
> *nix in application server X (BEA, JRUN, Oracle, etc.) and pulling code out
> of a CVS source tree. Just being familiar with SSH (and to a lesser extend,
> telnet), the JDK, shell scripting, and Unix editors will set a programmer
> apart as a "serious coder" among the rest. I've seen it with my own eyes.
[...]
>             Ok, I'll shut up. Thoughts?

I think this is true, but at least partially the other way around
(someone who knows their stuff will have little difficulty learning new
tools because they will have had to do it many times before).

Everyone has preferences, but adjusting to unfamiliar environments is
definitely an learned skill.  This is true of new operating systems,
development environments, new programming languages, and definitely also
new code bases and new projects.  Figuring out how to use the text editor
and the compiler is usually pretty easy compared to comprehending the
*mumble* kLOCs that have been dropped in front of you to do something
useful with.  And I think it's a learned skill because I know I have
gotten better at it over the last few years.

I think lack of devotion to any one platform (and willingness to work
on many of them) is a good sign.  With enough experience, you begin to
realize that all platforms suck, just in different ways.


--jss.