> From personal experience, speed has very little to do with productivity. Productivity is a function of knowledge and experience.
As I wrote elsewhere, it's not just speed. The more talented programmers I referred to write better, cleaner, more performant and more elegant code -- and they do it faster.
> Productive programmers don't really type faster or think faster. They just make far less mistakes to begin with and such mistakes always inflate the development time exponentially.
We can postulate all sorts of different explanations. I wasn't attempting to do that in my previous post. I was just relaying my own repeated observations that some programmers don't just write better code -- they manage to do it much faster too.
Do they think faster? I don't know. They just have a knack for programming. It's obvious to them which data structure to use, so they just use it.
Maybe it just comes down to this. If it's not obvious to someone which data structure to use and they have to spend a significant amount of time being confused about it, not only are they more likely to make the wrong choice, but they're likely to take longer too. Someone who, for whatever reason, has better intuition about how to structure a piece of code is going to be able to write it faster, not because they think or type faster, but because they just didn't even have to think as much in the first place. Consequently, I suppose that frees up mental space for thinking about the cleanliness of the code and other such factors.
I suspect those that learn to program before they're expected to have more undirected time to consider alternative formulations of their programs. People who learn later aren't performing the playful exploration that's necessary for independent mastery. They're just treating it like any other subject and completing tasks for the approval of an authority figure. I watched plenty of students learn bad habits from arrogant teachers like it was just "the way" you program. We don't have some master method of programming that can be taught that way. It's not like we're building bridges and already know pretty much exactly what we're doing. The craft is evolving before our eyes. They have to understand the incomplete state of our knowledge to know that they should seek superiority amongst potential selves and not merely acceptance from some external deity.
As I wrote elsewhere, it's not just speed. The more talented programmers I referred to write better, cleaner, more performant and more elegant code -- and they do it faster.
> Productive programmers don't really type faster or think faster. They just make far less mistakes to begin with and such mistakes always inflate the development time exponentially.
We can postulate all sorts of different explanations. I wasn't attempting to do that in my previous post. I was just relaying my own repeated observations that some programmers don't just write better code -- they manage to do it much faster too.
Do they think faster? I don't know. They just have a knack for programming. It's obvious to them which data structure to use, so they just use it.
Maybe it just comes down to this. If it's not obvious to someone which data structure to use and they have to spend a significant amount of time being confused about it, not only are they more likely to make the wrong choice, but they're likely to take longer too. Someone who, for whatever reason, has better intuition about how to structure a piece of code is going to be able to write it faster, not because they think or type faster, but because they just didn't even have to think as much in the first place. Consequently, I suppose that frees up mental space for thinking about the cleanliness of the code and other such factors.