Lonely programming

When a carpenter masters his craft, he learns by observing the work of others — how they cut wood and hammer nails. The same applies to surgeons, teachers and many other professions - but not to programmers. We are taught programming in universities or we learn ourselves, but at the same time we rarely observe how other programmers work. If we continue the analogy with carpenters, we are taught theories of wood processing and nailing algorithms, and then left alone with the material for our entire professional life, while all other carpenters work in separate, closed rooms.

Thanks to high-quality open source software, we can familiarize ourselves with the results of the work of the first league programmers - just download the source code and get a good look. What about the ingredients? You do not see things that seem insignificant, but repeated thousands of times for the code to work. Setting up the development environment, keyboard shortcuts, building the program, running tests, sketching pseudo-code, code pages that are later thrown out and rewritten from scratch ...

After each masterpiece, great artists and writers leave behind a pile of side effects of creativity — letters, sketches, drafts, and workbooks. These materials do not represent a separate artistic value, but are important for understanding the author’s thoughts and the course of his creative process. In programming, all this is discarded - only the complete code matters, whereas often from its first version - dirty and speckled up with commented pieces of code - one can learn much more.
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Apparently, this is why people are so eagerly reading the stories of other programmers about their tools and tricks - as if they are spying on their work. In addition, this is why (now I know) it annoys me so much when other people use their tools inefficiently - for example, for 30 seconds they scroll through the menus and submenus in search of what can be done with a shortcut for a second, or again same commands instead of writing a script for this.

After all, we all program alone, each in his cell.

Translator comment

People also love screencasts (for me it was news that people were interested in watching screencasts of participants in programming competitions) and stories about how games and start-ups were made. Some, the most open, even love pair programming! Itself recently learned from an employee to automatically format the code with a key combination, rather than manually, like all my life before :-)

On the other hand, many, if not all, are annoyed when they look at the monitor - either they are embarrassed that they do not immediately turn out beautifully, or they hide ICQ and games, or they are just used to the fact that coding is a personal process, you can even say intimate. Personally, I can show and comment on my ready-made code or make some changes to it under the supervision of an adviser, but write code from scratch under the employee's skeptical look? Dismiss!