Linus Torvalds - The Linux kernel author

Dave Thomas - Author of the “Pragmmatic Programmer”, “Programming Ruby” and other great books about programming. One can read his mainly programming-related thoughts here.

David Heinemeier Hansson - Author of the Rails Framework - the new hot web development framework. He has a weblog here.

Steve Yegge - Probably the least known from guys here, but also made one of the most interestings answers, has a popular weblog about programming. He is also the author of a game called “Wyvern”.

Peter Norvig - Research Director at Google, a well known Lisper, author of famous (in some circles at least) books about AI. See his homepage.

Guido Van Rossum - The Python language creator

Bjarne Stroustrup - C++ creator, has a homepage here

James Gosling - The Java language creator

Tim Bray - One of the XML and Atom specifications author and a blogger too.

Şimdi de sorular ve cevapları:

- How did you learn programming? Were any schools of any use? Or maybe you didn’t even bother with ending any schools :) ?

Steve Yegge:

I taught myself to program on an HP calculator using their RPN stack language when I was 17 years old. I’d tried to learn programming a few times before that but never really “got” it. The HP 28c and 48g scientific calculators were pretty powerful and had great docs. I wrote a 3D wireframe viewer for the 48g — I got a book on 3D graphics and painstakingly translated an example program in Pascal into the RPN stack language. It was pretty sweet when I got it running. After that I bought a PC and Turbo Pascal, and started studying programming in earnest. I was a decently good programmer by the time I went into the CS program in college.

I went to the University of Washington and got an undergrad degree in CS. It was definitely worthwhile, and I recommend that all programmers should try to get a CS degree if possible.

Linus Torvalds:

I didn’t learn programming in school, but mostly on my own reading books and just doing it (initially on a Commodore VIC-20, later on a Sinclair QL).

That said, I think especially University was very useful. Rather than go to an engineering school, I went to Helsinki University, which is pretty theoretical, so there the teaching concentrated not so much on programming (which was just a small part, and which I ended up doing more of “on the side” anyway), but most of the courses tended to be on fundamental concepts and things like complexity analysis.

Which can seem boring and even a waste of effort at times, but I think it was useful, and I mostly enjoyed it. And I think I’m probably a better programmer for it.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

I learned programming by starting to put together my first web page in HTML. Then I wanted to make some dynamic pieces and picked up first ASP then PHP. After I already knew how to program, I then started on a joint computer science and business administration degree.

Peter Norvig:

I took courses in high school and college, but always felt I learned more on my own.

Dave Thomas:

During my secondary schooling I took a class in a local technical college on computers. It got me totally hooked: I fell in love with programming, and looked around for colleges offering courses in software. Eventually I went to Imperial College, part of London University. It was only the second year they’d offered a course in software, and it was absolutely marvelous: the staff and students worked together to make the materials better, and everyone learned a lot. The undergraduate course there gave me an incredibly strong background in software development. I stayed on to start a PhD, but got lured away by a startup.

But the overall question is “how did you learn programming?” The real answer to that is “I’m still learning programming.” I think any good developer continues to learn throughout their careers. It isn’t just a question of picking up new languages and libraries: good developers also refine their techniques and practices over the years.

Guido Van Rossum:

I went to university where they had a big mainframe and there were various computer courses. This was very important for me.

James Gosling:

Initially, I was self-taught. I got my first programming job before I went to college. But I’m glad I did. I had a lot of fun. I kept going until I had a PhD.

Bjarne Stroustrup:

In university (Aarhus and later Cambridge). The universities taught me much that was useful, incl. most of the bases for my future work. In addition, I learned a fair bit from programming for money - where understanding of real-world problems, correctness, maintainability, on-time delivery, etc. were more pressing than in an educational setting.

Tim Bray:

I thought I was going to be a math teacher. The math program at University required a few computer science courses.

- What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?

Steve Yegge:

Written and verbal communication skills. You’ll never make it very far as a programmer in any field unless you can get your ideas across to people effectively. Programmers should read voraciously, practice writing, take writing courses, and even practice at public speaking.

Linus Torvalds:

It’s a thing I call “taste”.

I tend to judge the people I work with not by how proficient they are: some people can churn out a _lot_ of code, but more by how they react to other peoples code, and then obviously by what their own code _looks_ like, and what approaches they chose. That tells me whether they have “good taste” or not, and the thing is, a person without “good taste” often is not very good at judging other peoples code, but his own code often ends up not being wonderfully good.

But hey, it’s not the only thing. One thing that is very useful, especially in an open source project, is simply the ability to communicate well what you want to do, and how you are going to do it. The ability to explain to others _why_ you do something a certain way is very important, and not everybody has that ability.

That said, in the end there are also the people who just churn out good code. They may not be good at explaining it, and they may not even have great taste, but the code works well. Sometimes you need another person (one that _does_ have that hard-to-define “taste”) to maybe massage the code into a form where it’s useful in the bigger picture, but just the ability to write clear code for difficult problems is obviously a fairly fundamnetal part of any programmer.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

A strong sense of value. The ability to ask yourself the question: Is it worth doing what I’m doing right now? So many programmers seem to waste oceans of time on stuff that just doesn’t matter. And not enough on the stuff that does.

Peter Norvig:

I don’t think there’s one, but let’s say concentration.

Dave Thomas:

Passion.

Guido Van Rossum:

Your questions are rather general and hard to answer. :-) I guess being able to cook an egg for breakfast is invaluable.

James Gosling:

To be self motivated. To be really good, you have to be in love with what you do.

Bjarne Stroustrup:

The ability to think clearly: A programmer has to understand problems and express solutions.

Tim Bray:

Ability to prefer evidence to intuition.

Şimdi tamamını kopyalayıp yapıştırmanın doğru olmayacağını bildiğim için lütfen devamını okumak için yazının orjinal  sitesinii ziyaret ediniz.

İngilizcem bu yazıyı okuyacak kadar yeterli değil diyorsanızda çok güzel bir şekilde Türkçe'ye çevrilmiş halini buradan okuyabilirsiniz.

Linus Torvalds - The Linux kernel author

Dave Thomas - Author of the “Pragmmatic Programmer”, “Programming Ruby” and other great books about programming. One can read his mainly programming-related thoughts here.

David Heinemeier Hansson - Author of the Rails Framework - the new hot web development framework. He has a weblog here.

Steve Yegge - Probably the least known from guys here, but also made one of the most interestings answers, has a popular weblog about programming. He is also the author of a game called “Wyvern”.

Peter Norvig - Research Director at Google, a well known Lisper, author of famous (in some circles at least) books about AI. See his homepage.

Guido Van Rossum - The Python language creator

Bjarne Stroustrup - C++ creator, has a homepage here

James Gosling - The Java language creator

Tim Bray - One of the XML and Atom specifications author and a blogger too.

Şimdi de sorular ve cevapları:

- How did you learn programming? Were any schools of any use? Or maybe you didn’t even bother with ending any schools :) ?

Steve Yegge:

I taught myself to program on an HP calculator using their RPN stack language when I was 17 years old. I’d tried to learn programming a few times before that but never really “got” it. The HP 28c and 48g scientific calculators were pretty powerful and had great docs. I wrote a 3D wireframe viewer for the 48g — I got a book on 3D graphics and painstakingly translated an example program in Pascal into the RPN stack language. It was pretty sweet when I got it running. After that I bought a PC and Turbo Pascal, and started studying programming in earnest. I was a decently good programmer by the time I went into the CS program in college.

I went to the University of Washington and got an undergrad degree in CS. It was definitely worthwhile, and I recommend that all programmers should try to get a CS degree if possible.

Linus Torvalds:

I didn’t learn programming in school, but mostly on my own reading books and just doing it (initially on a Commodore VIC-20, later on a Sinclair QL).

That said, I think especially University was very useful. Rather than go to an engineering school, I went to Helsinki University, which is pretty theoretical, so there the teaching concentrated not so much on programming (which was just a small part, and which I ended up doing more of “on the side” anyway), but most of the courses tended to be on fundamental concepts and things like complexity analysis.

Which can seem boring and even a waste of effort at times, but I think it was useful, and I mostly enjoyed it. And I think I’m probably a better programmer for it.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

I learned programming by starting to put together my first web page in HTML. Then I wanted to make some dynamic pieces and picked up first ASP then PHP. After I already knew how to program, I then started on a joint computer science and business administration degree.

Peter Norvig:

I took courses in high school and college, but always felt I learned more on my own.

Dave Thomas:

During my secondary schooling I took a class in a local technical college on computers. It got me totally hooked: I fell in love with programming, and looked around for colleges offering courses in software. Eventually I went to Imperial College, part of London University. It was only the second year they’d offered a course in software, and it was absolutely marvelous: the staff and students worked together to make the materials better, and everyone learned a lot. The undergraduate course there gave me an incredibly strong background in software development. I stayed on to start a PhD, but got lured away by a startup.

But the overall question is “how did you learn programming?” The real answer to that is “I’m still learning programming.” I think any good developer continues to learn throughout their careers. It isn’t just a question of picking up new languages and libraries: good developers also refine their techniques and practices over the years.

Guido Van Rossum:

I went to university where they had a big mainframe and there were various computer courses. This was very important for me.

James Gosling:

Initially, I was self-taught. I got my first programming job before I went to college. But I’m glad I did. I had a lot of fun. I kept going until I had a PhD.

Bjarne Stroustrup:

In university (Aarhus and later Cambridge). The universities taught me much that was useful, incl. most of the bases for my future work. In addition, I learned a fair bit from programming for money - where understanding of real-world problems, correctness, maintainability, on-time delivery, etc. were more pressing than in an educational setting.

Tim Bray:

I thought I was going to be a math teacher. The math program at University required a few computer science courses.

- What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?

Steve Yegge:

Written and verbal communication skills. You’ll never make it very far as a programmer in any field unless you can get your ideas across to people effectively. Programmers should read voraciously, practice writing, take writing courses, and even practice at public speaking.

Linus Torvalds:

It’s a thing I call “taste”.

I tend to judge the people I work with not by how proficient they are: some people can churn out a _lot_ of code, but more by how they react to other peoples code, and then obviously by what their own code _looks_ like, and what approaches they chose. That tells me whether they have “good taste” or not, and the thing is, a person without “good taste” often is not very good at judging other peoples code, but his own code often ends up not being wonderfully good.

But hey, it’s not the only thing. One thing that is very useful, especially in an open source project, is simply the ability to communicate well what you want to do, and how you are going to do it. The ability to explain to others _why_ you do something a certain way is very important, and not everybody has that ability.

That said, in the end there are also the people who just churn out good code. They may not be good at explaining it, and they may not even have great taste, but the code works well. Sometimes you need another person (one that _does_ have that hard-to-define “taste”) to maybe massage the code into a form where it’s useful in the bigger picture, but just the ability to write clear code for difficult problems is obviously a fairly fundamnetal part of any programmer.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

A strong sense of value. The ability to ask yourself the question: Is it worth doing what I’m doing right now? So many programmers seem to waste oceans of time on stuff that just doesn’t matter. And not enough on the stuff that does.

Peter Norvig:

I don’t think there’s one, but let’s say concentration.

Dave Thomas:

Passion.

Guido Van Rossum:

Your questions are rather general and hard to answer. :-) I guess being able to cook an egg for breakfast is invaluable.

James Gosling:

To be self motivated. To be really good, you have to be in love with what you do.

Bjarne Stroustrup:

The ability to think clearly: A programmer has to understand problems and express solutions.

Tim Bray:

Ability to prefer evidence to intuition.

Şimdi tamamını kopyalayıp yapıştırmanın doğru olmayacağını bildiğim için lütfen devamını okumak için yazının orjinal  sitesinii ziyaret ediniz.

İngilizcem bu yazıyı okuyacak kadar yeterli değil diyorsanızda çok güzel bir şekilde Türkçe'ye çevrilmiş halini buradan okuyabilirsiniz.