All the reasons I dislike programming boil down to "acquiring and importing data into a form where I can do something fun with it"
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Every programming idea I want to try that stalls tends to stall on the data acquisition step. It's pure schlep I'm only willing to do for $
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I suspect it would be more valuable to interview programmers on variety of data sources/formats they can wrangle rather than langs/algos
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Nah, it's just easiest and most fun as a closed system. All solid pro-programmers I know are data-interface ninjas
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I would distinguish between structural messiness ("crap I have to find a json parser for matlab to deal with this") vs. semantic messiness
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I don't mind semantic messiness. Free from string parsing for sentiment for eg. It's structural messiness that derails my motivation.
And being 6 years ahead of the likes of me is the reason you make the big bucks while I complain on twitter :D
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Yeah, but there are other programming paradigms... functional tends to attract the purist lisp crowd to begin with
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I think you're using "real world" in a way that obscures the actual phenomenon. What you're getting at is actually mental model divergence.
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Cf, Brooks, "show me code and hide your tables, I'll understand nothing; show me your tables and hide your code, I'll understand everything"
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