Comment by sqrt17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sqrt17 | Hacker News Reader

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There is a major difference between sports and programming: In sports, everyone is a critic, and it is really obvious if people cannot skateboard, or cannot throw a basketball.

Compare with programming, where overt effect and actual competence are not always related. Criticizing programming and programmers is nontrivial, and hence people have to do it all the time to build up a shared understanding of good and bad practices.

Looking at visual arts, you'll probably find a similar asymmetry between drawing (where it's difficult to get to even a barely mediocre level) and layout/typography (where it's easy to do something that looks "good" to the layman yet is totally horrible). Needless to say, there are more pages bashing bad layout and bad typography than there are sites dedicated to bashing bad drawings.

Except there is much more to a sport than, for example, shooting a basketball. There's offense, there's defense. There's fundamental skills, there's game strategy, there's different sorts of matchups. It goes on and on to subtler and more intricate detail. It's not simply whether one can skateboard or not, program or not, and it would seem that is what the author of the article was getting at.

In your visual arts examples, there is a much simpler explanation. The reason there are more pages devoted toward layout principles is because the medium of expression (i.e. the web) fundamentally uses layout principles. Drawing doesn't express using the web. It's a selection effect, just as it's more likely that you will find soccer players in Brazil, and hockey players in Canada, rather than the other way around.

OK, but there are degrees of subtlety though. A casual fan might see someone score 40 points in a basketball game and say "wow, he must be a great player" while a hardcore fan might chime in and say "actually he's way overrated. He's a poor defender, way too selfish and lazy in rebounding." but the fact remains, if you score 40 points a game in basketball, you are at least a 'good' player at your level. I can say that categorically. Can we say "If you X, you must be a good programmer."?

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