Cargo Cultists, Part Three: Is Mort A Cargo Cultist?

re: Cargo Cultists, Part Three: Is Mort A Cargo Cultist?

Michael Giagnocavo — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 22:06:00 GMT

I jsut thought I'd add that I see LOTS of "Evlis" cargo cultists. People who have gone through a CS course and are actually making real-world programs, but are just getting by on pure luck or divine intervention. I saw someone who had written perhaps, 20 apps that were in production, and he had a while(true) loop with no exit, *for no reason*! And then I got the case to figure out why the program was hanging. Turns out he wanted an if instead of a while(true).

I'm constantly surprised at the number of people like this. My friend ran into someone at a very large, global IT company who was writing a printer driver. They were stumped on what a "thread" was.

re: Cargo Cultists, Part Three: Is Mort A Cargo Cultist?

Mort — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 03:30:00 GMT

I like intellisense because I don't get to do programming every day. Sometimes I don't get a chance to do any for a couple of weeks or more. So, having intellisense helps remind me what the options are.

I'm glad that you guys are finally starting to pay attention to my needs. VB.Net is way harder to use than VB6 for building simple apps. My buddy Elvis finds it way more powerful, but for me it's too complex.

(not really Mort, but close enough)

We are all Cargo Cultists

Tarjei T. Jensen — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 10:27:00 GMT

There is a lot of smart people out there. The problem is most of us are only smart within narrow boundaries. Once outside those boundaries we are as stupid as the rest of them.

There is a lot of misdirected smartness out there. Developers have spent the last 20 years preventing errors in C programs which every two bit Ada/Modula-2/Pascal compiler finds in no time. The problem is solved, but since we don't like the solution, we keep messing up. Is that smart?

We are not talking about shaving a few percent of the project completion time. We are talking about cutting developement time in half.

We want to learn C/C++/Java, because that is where the money is. Thse are cool languages with direct connection to the tinkerer center in our brain. But we would learn faster, be better programmers and understand more if we first learnt Ada/Delphi/Eiffel.

If you start looking we will find more and more bad choices. Not smart choices. A lot of smarts is used to make bad choices workable.

A good way of messing up a good programmer (at least in Norway) is to ask him to make a program from the tax return form. They almost invariably screw up. Not because it is difficult, but because they are trying to do too much at a time. They are being too smart.

Worst of all: they don't understand that the tax return form is a step by step description of how to do it. All they have to do is to transcribe it to a programming language. It is not hard, just a lot of boring work.

greetings,

re: Cargo Cultists, Part Three: Is Mort A Cargo Cultist?

Michael Gardner — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:19:00 GMT

A good book written years ago on much of all this was Gerald Weinberg's "Psychology of Computer Programming", still very relevant to much of this discussion.

But even beyond the Novice, Mort, Elvis, Einstein model, there is a programmer that has the best of Mort & Einstein...who can see the business side or economics, the sociology of the app, the "linguistics" i.e. HOW the app is going to have to "fit" into the organization as it were as well as the code...the code becomes almost a superfluous, trivial issue and this person works intellectually at a meta-level. I've only met only one in my whole career. Many Elvis', some Einsteins (whose egos are larger than their knowledge...see Psychology of C. Programming), but only one of these...this guy had an MBA from Wharton's, a CS degree from Carnegie Mellon, and routinely "enhanced" the assembler on our project, while teaching the rest of us how to code assembler. He's still my idol 25 years later...no one's ever come close. He's the guy who taught me how to get past my own cargo-culting.

re: Cargo Cultists, Part Three: Is Mort A Cargo Cultist?

Peter Torr — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 06:14:00 GMT

Actually, Mort doesn't typically have Widgets to Frobnicate; that's Matt's job. Mort is a full-time programmer, but he comes in at 9 and leaves at 5 and it's "just a job" rather than a passion. He takes pride in his job and wants to do good work / get a promotion / etc.

Matt is the one busy frobnocating one day when he realises he can increase the productivity of his team 20% by recording some macros.

re: Cargo Cultists, Part Three: Is Mort A Cargo Cultist?

Eric Lippert — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 18:05:00 GMT

Yeah, I deliberately conflated Matt and Mort for rhetorical purposes. In thinking about this afterwards I realized that for the rhetorical purposes of this blog, these personas don't need whimsical names; in fact, they might cause more confusion than clarity.

In my more recent blog entries I've started naming the personas after their job function, which I hope has less potential for confusion.

Mort, Elvis, Einstein and now Zombies

DonXML Demsak's All Things Techie — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 21:55:00 GMT

re: Cargo Cultists, Part Three: Is Mort A Cargo Cultist?

Simon Cooke [exMSFT] — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 01:30:00 GMT

Just out of interest... how come there are so many Morts at Microsoft who use Visual SlickEdit et al?

Intellisense isn't useless if you know what you're doing. It avoids having to remember the exact syntax of commands or function calls - you can still learn what they do and what they're for, but it's much easier to learn new APIs if all you have to remember is what you're looking for - not the absolute nitty gritty of its function signature. And it's nearly essential if you have polymorphism in the mix.

I defy any programmer - Elvis, Einstein or Mort - to use Visual Assist (www.wholetomato.com) for two weeks and at the end of that two weeks, not tear the head off anyone who tries to pry it out of their hands.

re: Why doesn't C# have

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re: Cargo Cultists, Part Three: Is Mort A Cargo Cultist?

jp — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:00:38 GMT

I'm an Elvis. Graduated with a CS degree. Right now I'm working with some Morts who don't even want to write requirements for a large project we are working on. Yeah these guys can hack some fixes together but to engineer an entire application, forget it.