99% Idiot, 1% Savant
I’d love to get my hands on the stupid asshole who scheduled me for a programming class at the end of a 12-hour school day. Oh wait, I’m that stupid asshole. I really need to plan these things a little better.
I’m truly impressed, though, with my ability to actually do the work correctly while nodding like a junkie and experiencing wild hypnagogic hallucinations. Tonight in class I managed to throw together a perfectly functional implementation of the greedy algorithm, except that it didn’t actually make any sense to me. I wrote the damn thing in about 30 seconds and then sat there staring at it for a good 5 minutes, trying to figure out how it works.
I’m either a natural-born programmer of I’ve finally gone ’round the bend.
Stores with tip jars are the truly greedy ones. All change is expected to end up in that jar, so it doesn’t matter what they give you.
Was it recursive?
Comment by Alcibiades — September 6, 2007 @ 12:49 am
A sign of a good programmer is the ability to code something awesome, and to forget entirely how you did it the moment you complete it.
At the end of a particularly long coding session I returned the next day and found my code didn’t work. It took me two hours to understand what I did, and why I did it. Once I understood the code I wrote, it took me all of 10 seconds to realize I needed to swap two lines.
I’ve always thought that writing code at some levels required a mild form of autism. Of course I always have trouble tying my shoes which only reinforces my theory.
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely Wapner. I’m an excellent driver.
Comment by existingthing — September 6, 2007 @ 5:04 pm
Was it recursive?
No, it was just an unholy mess of spaghetti code that somehow ended up using about 15 more variables than the problem required. I was really, REALLY tired.
Comment by TD — September 7, 2007 @ 4:42 pm