Good programmers

I'm a good programmer, because I don't make things any more complicated than they need to be out of necessity. A lot of newfags mistake good programming for amassing a repertoire of clever tricks and shoehorning as many as possible into every program, whether the problem calls for it or not. That isn't good programming. Anyone can make a complicated mess, but not everyone can solve a complicated problem in a simple and elegant way. A good programmer always strives for the latter; even if he can't always achieve it, it should always be his goal.

I'm widely regarded as one of the greatest programmers of our time, so I suppose that makes me uniquely qualified to say; yes I am good.

Yes or I at the least prefer to think of myself as good. I'm a hacker.
I'm going to recycle something I wrote quickly for this same general topic; I'm considering writing an article for this topic, but this is the best I'm going to invest in this post on an imageboard I don't post on much:

A good programmer is likely going to be a hacker (not a cracker). A hacker is someone with a nice sense of aesthetics and creativity, as two qualities. A hacker is going to implement software he designed himself, likely for his own use. You can be a good programmer, just writing the same things others do, with libraries others wrote, and other such things, but I’d be inclined to classify that as average, rather than good, which I’m considering above average.

A hacker is probably going to design and implement libraries for his own purposes, rather than reuse something someone else wrote, but this is debatable. A hacker should have a genuine interest in the topic, so a hacker is likely going to know a wide variety of languages, learning more as mastery of one is achieved. I’d be inclined to argue a hacker will work with languages such as Lisp, APL, and machine codes more than Go, C++, and Java; note that the former group is filled with variety, whereas the latter group is roughly the same language.

You can be a hacker in isolation, but a hacker is likely going to have some manner of home group of sorts. A hacker probably spends all or most errant thought mulling over the topics of interest. If you’re a programmer just for your job and you don’t think of it much or at all outside, then you can be an average programmer, but not a hacker.

Tying in with the creativity and whatnot mentioned earlier, a hacker is going to create novel things and be interested with potentially obscure things. I’m a hacker and I have a tiny little esoteric language and work with CHIP-8 a good amount; I work on a novel machine code development tool I’ve designed. This isn’t boasting, but merely some examples.

As you can guess, I’ve described a good bit of myself in this message. I won’t claim to have distilled the essence of being a hacker in this message and probably not in any articles I write about it, either, but I do believe this is at least a good general idea. If you’ve not done so, you could bother RMS with this question. That’s all.
I once sat down somewhere for several hours to have a computer club spontaneously coalesce around me, so I stayed to observe it. Not a single person there was aware of what Lisp was. It was mostly your Indian Java programmers and the fat, white fellow who knew Python was probably one of the more competent people there. I was probably the only person there with a Thinkpad or who didn't want an Apple product.

In brief and off the cuff, I'd judge a programmer like I'd judge a writer: Is there a real interest in the topic; what variety is there in what is known; is this person only in it for the money; is there anything they know that I don't, that I'd consider useful; these are the manner of questions I'd consider in judging a programmer.

So you can judge my opinions attached to my work, here's my website; I also run a Gopher hole under this domain:
verisimilitudes.net

If you're interested in discussing programming topics further, you can find my email and contact me; it's not easy to find on the website, but it's explicitly available from the Gopher hole. Automatic computing is the topic I decided I would dedicate my life to years back and so almost all of my errant thought is used to mull over various such topics; I'll be doing this long after the next dot-com bubble pops. I try to be what I think a good hacker is, and that's being genuinely interested, creative, and constantly learning, to list only three things.

Pick one.

woah there, Socrates
slow it down for the rest of us
A day has 24 hours. You spend 8 of it asleep. You spend 8 of it at work. You spend 8 of it away from work. There are also such things as 'weekends', but do you think thoughts spent out of work go farther than thoughts spent during work? Bearing in mind that the 8 'free' hours, devoted to neither sleep nor work, are going to be full of interruptions even before you succumb to distractions like talking about hacking on 8ch.
fair point. completely true.
undeniable truth. Too much fat and languages less shitty than Python are hard to use, much like normal-sized chairs.
I guess you are Socrates himself. That would explain why you haven't read any fucking Hayek, you savage. You naked Greek moron. Programmers probably can't tell you anything? When they work for a living? Have you heard of domain knowledge?
Actually, have you worked even once for a real job at any point in your life? Have you worked at fucking McDonalds, making fries?
you don't sound that interesting, sorry.

A hacker uses the right tool for the job, period.

You constructed those groups.

Untrue. To make it true, a hacker can use systems other than Apple, but may use Apple because it suits him. Conversely, merely using *nix doesn't make a person a hacker.

Wrong. That's what a good programmer would do. A hacker uses whatever language he feels like at the moment, in spite of its unsuitability. It might be a perfect fit, but it could also be using machine code to parse a JSON file just because the hacker could, and he thought it would be fun.

Why is it all the shit threads that turn out to be fun get anchored, and the ones that go to shit (having long run their course) are still floating around? Mod, do you read the board or just wake up, anchor a random subset of the newest 10 and then call it a day?

I'm not checking the board 24/7, so it happens that I might miss something.
If you want to complain, feel free to do it in >>>/metatech/

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