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Comment by jwingy | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these make sense, but I would caution against being discouraged if you show any of these symptoms. Like another front page article that says IQ is not static, I think this also definitely applies to programming ability.

I hope this isn't used by some to push the mantra that 'not everybody can code'.

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Yeah, I think the title should have been "Signs that you are a mediocre programmer", which would have been less discouraging. I'm sure most good programmers have started out making many of these mistakes. At least it has a "Remedies" section, so it's not a total downer.

I completely agree. Several of the mistakes listed, particularly thinking in sets, were things I had issues with until that "aha" moment when the paradigm shift in my thinking about the problem occurred.

On the other hand, I doubt the author was trying to discourage bad programmers, but rather bring common deficiencies or mistakes up to help programmers avoid them. To me, many of these are signs that you are a new or inexperienced programmer, not a bad one (although if you've been a programmer for a decade and are still making them, you may have something to worry about).

Especially symptom #2 - "Executing idempotent functions multiple times (eg: calling the save() function multiple times "just to be sure")"

That could just be OCD rather than bad programming.

I would say that's OCD causing them to program badly. That there's some underlying condition behind the erroneous pattern does not excuse it's presence in the code base.

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