Six Things I Learned About Programming

This [1] is an interesting meme: Three Things I Learned About Software While Not In College (via reddit [2]). And a lot of the comments are centering on three things learned in college and out of college.

So I'll play along here.

Three things I learned while at college (Florida Atlantic University) [3]:

• 1. Not many students “got” programming, and far too many were there for the money (ha ha, the joke was on them come the Tech Stock Crash of 2001 [4]).
• 2. It is possible to get into an upper level class and still have no clue how compilers work (“Where do the comments go?” indeed … ).
• 3. Make friends with the system adminstrators—that way, you'll stand a better chance of avoiding … um … “complications” for
• 3. [DELETED-pranks* 3. -DELETED]
• 3. misunderstandings gone awry.

And the three things I've learned since:

• 1. Clear code is better than clever hacks. Especially if you end up maintaining the codebase.
• 2. You Aren't Gonna Need It [5].
• 3. Not many people “get” programming, and far too many are proving this in Perl and PHP.

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThreeThingsILearnedAboutSoftwareWHILENOTInCollege.aspx

[2] http://programming.reddit.com/info/225ds/comments

[3] http://www.fau.edu/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

[5] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?YouArentGonnaNeedIt

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