I haven’t manually managed memory in a very long time. I did some ObjectiveC, so I had to manage retain/release calls, which isn’t exactly managing memory. Not exactly, but it’s pretty close- a half step between manual and garbage collected memory.

I’m sadly stuck in the .NET world, and I’m trying desperately to get my employer to see the benefit of declarative persistence through something like NHibernate. The reply is, “The next version of .NET has LINQ. That’s the same thing.”

It isn’t, but at least it’s better than what we’ve got now. *sigh*

There are intricacies and weird syntax that you might not understand but it doesn’t matter – this is just the way it is done (so many programmers I’ve met just don’t understand that.) There are multiple ways to do the same thing, but as a skilled programmer [or foreign language speaker] you need to find the most concise and easiest to understand path.

Apparently, the researchers have discovered that there actually 11 kinds of people, and not 10, as previously believed.

nice :)

“I really hate this damn machine,
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does what I want,
but only what I tell it.”

Getting “meaningless” means getting that what you want and what you say can be two different things. And the computer will do exactly what you say, which isn’t always what you want.

But if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

This is meaningless, because you are defining the program compilation using your known language – math.

The programming language could just as easily compile that a = b as both being 10. Or both returning 0 because it’s an invalid line (constants can’t be assigned to each other. You don’t even know they are CONSTANTS). Or maybe they’re 10 and 20 still respectively. You don’t know the rules of the language, and they aren’t given, so you ASSUME and fall back upon, the previous world of mathematics.

As poster #8 clearly stated, it’s about order of operations.

Since this has no frame of reference (ie, language, rules, ect), this test is MEANINGLESS, hence the title. So there is no “better” answer, only an answer you can justify. And you can justify many answers many different ways. Applying that justification across multiple answers is what the test was searching for (thus the categories).

Probably because when you’re learning french, people who speak french can figure out what you meant, regardless of what you actually said.

If Alice only speaks English and Bob only speaks Incan, and then Alice and Bob both study Japanese for a day, when they try to talk to each other, the experience might not be unlike programming.

Neither one will know Japanese well enough to extract meaning from what the other says. Unless the other person says something exactly right, the intended meaning may be lost.

My first thought on reading the three groups was, “ah, the consistent group will make good programmers, because they have the tenacity and determination to try and apply a consistent ordering to the system.”

That to me is the key to what makes a good programmer… tenacity. The attitude of “well I don’t understand this yet, but screw it, I have the confidence in myself to push forward anyway”.

The people who didn’t answer at all are afraid of making mistakes, and will be the type who will always be asking for help from senior devs, instead of forging ahead on their own.

The inconsistent group just simply don’t have the right mindset for programming… or they will become spaghetti programmers. ;)

(For the record, I’m a senior developer, who taught myself to code at about 7.)

For those of you who have taken a basic concepts of mathematics course, what we have done here is describe a mathematical theory where 10=20 by axiom, which means that 0=1. It can be shown from there that 30=0, 30=20, 20=0, and all the other answers.

So even though there was not supposed to be any truly correct answer, any friend of math could totally pwn the Prof.

axiom: a=10
axiom: b=20
axiom: a=b

Since a=b
Then (a-10)/10=(b-10)/10
Therefore 0=1
Let c=30
Then 0*c=1*c
Therefore 0=30 QED
Also 0*a=1*a
So 0=10
Then 0+b=10+b
Therefore 20=30 QED

ALL OF THE ABOVE

Other students, who hadn’t read the Time-Life Science Library or some similar grade school library book might have done less well. There’s got to be a strong correlation between reading library books like that in grade school and being capable of understanding computer programming.

This would also tend to be self-perpetuating: only those who didn’t need to be taught the concept succeed to become programming teachers, so they do not think of it as something that needs to be taught (nor do they have a model for how to teach it).

Semi-testable consequence: once this concept can be isolated, verbalised and taught, success in programming courses will rise.

I’m employed in a DBA role, shared with others. Consistency of input and consistency of code expression are very highly ranked skillsets for our role; Probably 90% of my time and 90% of the code I write is spent hunting down and flattening bugs caused by inconsistency of expression, from input data to query statements.

:p

c.f. A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie A. Nardi.

I’m not a programmer, so maybe this is just my naivte…but this doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would someone predict anything other than the consistent group? I can see the blank group, at least the explanation makes some sense (not much, but some).

Why is it remarkable that the consistent group would be the highest performers? Do computers not work by consistent rules?

It’s like order of operations.
2 + 7 * 9 = 81 is perfectly valid. We just defined an order of operations that says multiplication goes first. It really doesn’t matter, so long as everyone agrees to evaluate these statements the same way. Since the consensus is that multiplication should go first, we instead say that the right answer is 65.

The secret ingredient to a good programmer is someone who is aggressive about simplifying things. Consistent rules are more simple than inconsistent ones.

Here’s the thing though: it’s harder to be simple and concise than it is to be complex and verbose. It takes more time and more effort to cut things down and define consistent rules.

Try prying requirements out of a customer. I used to tell students, “They honestly don’t know what they want,” which is uncharitable. They know what they want, but they don’t know how to describe it in clear, simple terms.

I sympathize. I do DBA, sys administration and development for my company (triple threat) and I have had to redesign all their systems to as they did not have standards in place for anything.

A classic example is their CITYSTATEZIP field in their existing database which store three data types in various degrees of conforming standards. Some of the data is their, some of the data is not, some of the data is foreign and doesn’t conform to united states formats.

Consistency is VERY important but you cannot guarantee that humans will be consistent so you have to force consistency down their throats by limiting their options much like forcing a rat down a maze; he can only choose left or right when he comes to a fork and you have limited his options through his environment.

#5 Haha! That’s great, I wonder it it would be possible to find an xkcd strip that relates to each and every boing boing post as they are published…

Except this isn’t a math course, this is a programming course, and programs are executed in sequence, whereas mathematical statements are always true.

Which should point to the fundamental difference between math and programming. Math is about getting fundamental truths. Programming is about getting something that works.

The variable “a” is being defined as an integer data type and assigned the value of “10″.

The variable “b” is being defined as an integer data type and assigned the value of “20″.

Now what’s weird is that unlike in algebra, “a = b” means that the variable “a” is from that moment on assigned whatever value “b” held at that time (in this case, “20″).

There’s no way to know that “a” used to hold “10″, but “a” will retain the value of “20″ even while “b” may also be reassigned to a different value later. Having to keep track of this program state in your head is why bugs and crashes occur.

Single assignment is far more… consistent. ^_^