Hacker News Reader

Comment by whacked_new | Hacker News Reader

How much experience goes into these ideas? They are quite astounding. I have the bias that physicists would make the best programmers. Anyone else?

View on HN

Of course there's always going to be confirmation bias, but I look at people who work on CS related stuff like Graham and Powers as proof. Also, I find that great programmers often develop an interest in photography, music, or writing later in their career. Is it then that hard to believe that they could have studied these topics originally and still developed into great, even excellent, programmers? The fact that English and Philosophy are concerned with representing ideas (i.e. the act of programming) is undeniable. The fact that people are not naturally good at representing ideas is also undeniable. I personally would go with the fields that have a better track record at producing people that think well in this way. Honestly CS has a pretty poor educational record when it comes down it it.

Actually I think what you are saying is simply that smart people who enter CS from tangential fields will still do well. Their competence will probably manifest itself regardless of what field they came from. The striking thing is when you say "English and Philosophy are far older disciplines than Computer Science; consequently their methods of teaching students how to represent ideas are far more developed."

This seems to make sense. But these disciplines, although old and established, have spread across (diffused, if you will) a larger area, such that they become umbrella terms for many other studies which may not be specifically concerned with the formulation of ideas, and even less so in a quantitative and procedural manner.

Thus it is still not entirely clear whether these older disciplines deserve credit for providing better training in representing ideas than straight-up CS.

I originally had this view of English too, until I took a formal course on criticism in college. Some of the methods are surprisingly quantitative and all of them are procedural. Indeed, many techniques of criticism grew of the the fact that English Professors at universities in the 20th century had no formal method of research, while the counterparts in fields like Chemistry had no problem justifying their existence. I might be more precise in my words above by saying Literary Criticism instead of English.

I agree with you that the direct benefit of these disciplines is not entirely clear; must research needs to be done in this area. One thing that is clear, however, is that the undergraduate CS curriculum is not particularly good at teaching this way of thinking. The closest you can come to achieving the effect of English and Philosophy on your thinking is a well designed CS curriculum focused on theory. I've found that the students here who find theory interesting also tend to be good programmers. Again, all of these thoughts are based simply on unscientific observation, but I believe there is a provable, related truth that might come out of them.

The second best hacker I've worked with has a PhD in Physics. (The best has a PhD in Math.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com