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Comment by sayemm | Hacker News Reader

In "Programmers at Work", Bill Gates makes a few interesting comments on programming speed and innate ability (pages 82-83):

"I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it... A lot of people would say, "I want days and days to read this." A really good programmer would say, "Let me take that home with me. I'll just spend an hour tonight and go through the whole thing". The difference of ability there is vast."

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Interesting. I have heard many good programmers say that to them reading code has become more important than writing code.

Sure, but reading code is quite different from writing code. Not necessarily easier, but different enough that I think it invalidates the comparison.

I can see what he's getting at - programming involves building up a mental picture of everything that's going on in your program. Of course most professional programmers probably don't work on a single project for months that's all theirs, they have to work with modules/interfaces developed by other people - when you don't have the luxury of writing all the code yourself (even terrible programmers know what's going on in their own spaghetti), being able to comprehend complex systems in a few hours is a huge advantage. They might still write terrible code if they were never taught good practices, but at least it does show ability/potential.

I'm assuming Gates is talking about a reading comprehension test. Like the ones grade school where you needed to read a paragraph and then determine the age of Mount Rushmore. How someone did as part of the follow up (What did you think of the architecture? How would you implement feature X?) would be a pretty good gauge of their skill. Since they're discussing a real code base, it's harder to fake it for the guy who knows all the buzzwords and all that but can't deliver.

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