I don’t think so, I have seen him ditch 15000 lines of code because “they didn’t feel right”, rewrite all from scratch and have the stuff up and running in a week, ever tried that?

Though, I will agree that productivity varies by an order of magnitude.

Already in the 70s, according to a US army survey, they found a factor 26 between the best and the worse DOD developers (who were nevertheless qualified professionals).

Tsk! tsk! tsk!
Don’t tell that to Daniel (he doesn’t believe in “heroes”, in programming either I guess)

P.S. Speaking of programming skills, I have personally known the author of the 4D Database and had made an estimate of his productivity: he were singlehandedly doing the same amount of work than about 40 good developers, sheeesh… nothing to see here, move on!

Quote 2: “If you dig into the average source code, it is undistinguishable from ramblings, even if you are an expert developer.”

Although the difference is here, it is hard to tell. I am a mathematician, and a hobbyist programmer (I’m no programmer, but I can write code, and read code without any problems, but don’t work directly in software engineering). And have to disagree. I know a lot of people working on real programming, and I can tell (and they can too!) that what they do *are* mad ramblings. Yes, the average mathematician’s paper is also, but it solves something and usually is well-written and documented. But most of the software I’m referring to (mostly bank systems, ATM control centers and such) is… well, not that good. Is just a mix of code, without any real intention to be pretty.

Programming is an art *sometimes*. There are wall-painter programmers (also mathematicians, mind you), and the art in this is zero. Why programming is viewed as flawed (by some, I don’t think it is as widespread as you say) is because the sheer amount of programmers falling into this category.

As a little proof of concept, this Coding Horror “Horror” history about interviewing: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html

A CS bachelor’s degree, or really, much less than that, makes you a decent programmer.

We are squarely in the domain of perceptions and values. Many Computer Science students at the graduate level cannot program at an expert level, by industry standards.

I majored in Physics in school. Rather a lot of math in Physics. Was told by a friend that he thought my workload was a lot higher than his (as a Mathematics major) – and I seem to recall general agreement from the others present in his major. (We tended to study together a lot, due to shared math classes.)”

If you are in college, then you choose your own workload (unless you are a slacker, but then why go to college?).

A math bachelor’s degree does not make you a mathematician at all, much less an average one. A CS bachelor’s degree, or really, much less than that, makes you a decent programmer.

The number of programmers is so much smaller than the number of mathematicians that this comparison isn’t at all fair. I don’t think that Daniel’s list of distinguished programmers (Knuth et al.) is very impressive, though.

I majored in Physics in school. Rather a lot of math in Physics. Was told by a friend that he thought my workload was a lot higher than his (as a Mathematics major) – and I seem to recall general agreement from the others present in his major. (We tended to study together a lot, due to shared math classes.)

Seems I might have some relevant notion about workload.

I think you have this backwards. The level of effort is a product of your interest and ability. The result comes from the effort of which you are capable.

You can apply a high level of effort to many different areas, if you are capable.

As to the “hit iPhone app” and the creativity and understanding needed, you are undoubtedly right – some of the time. (Though I could be over-rating the average for Mathematicians.) On the other hand, there are problems in designing software that stretch the mind, and can require all your ability to overcome.

I would guess that you are far more familiar with what is hard in math, and not so familiar with what is hard in software.

And nothing like “elegance” according to Joel.

On the other hand, programming doesn’t require anywhere near a comparable level of effort.

You comparison falls apart in lots of places. Inventing new theorems requires much more creativity and understanding than coming up with a hit iPhone app. Mathematics has also changed the world much more than Google has. (And open source, seriously?)

In C++ you can use operator overloading, overloaded methods, implicit conversions, and templates to write code that looks short and simple – but is entirely lacking in clarity. (Been there, done that – in the early 1990′s when first starting to use C++.)

No matter how short the code, if you cannot readily understand what the code does, the result is not “usually simple and effective”.