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EigenCoder: Programming Stereotypes (trestletech.com)
81 points by trestletech 3751 days ago
8 comments
carsongross 3751 days ago
Hey, man, you'd be sad too if you lived to see what modern man would do to programming languages:

http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/_media/img/fello...

http://kazimirmajorinc.com/Documents/Why-Dijkstra-didnt-like...

The old guys wrote the best stuff:

https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

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twic 3751 days ago
Completing the holy trinity of bearded computer pioneers looking appalled at the modern age: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/images/dijkstra-quick-n-dirt...
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imh 3751 days ago
In addition to the caveats they list, there may be systematic biases as to who includes a profile pic and who doesn't. Even an enormous sample and perfect inferences from the face API can't surmount a bad dataset (bad depending on what you are trying to learn from it)
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antsar 3751 days ago
To be fair, they did address that:

    Lang 	FacesDetected
    ruby 	71
    r 		38
    javascript 	60
    java 	47
    html 	59
    go 		53
    cpp 	34
    c 		24
    python 	49
    php 	66
    perl 	45
    swift 	49
    csharp 	61
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imh 3751 days ago
Not quite. That relates to sample sizes and, as far as interpretation goes, it's dealt with as if the rest were missing at random. In reality, they are probably missing not at random, but in relation to other characteristics, changing the interpretation.
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greydius 3751 days ago
This site crashed my browser 3 out of 3 attempts. Firefox 44.0.2 on Android 5.1.1
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Buge 3751 days ago
Happened to me on Firefox 45.0 on Windows.

But when I restarted it gave a popup saying there was an unresponsive script and asking if I wanted to stop it.

Script: data:application/x-javascript;…B9XX0se30sWzMxMV0pKDMxMSl9KTs=:40

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trestletech 3751 days ago
Yeah there's a preposterous amount of JavaScript that gets loaded because I'm too lazy to rewrite the interactive graphics. Sorry :(
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Mikeb85 3751 days ago
R does give me a smile more often than most other languages (everything is just so easy), though I also have a big beard. Interesting article.
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imadeajoke 3751 days ago
I felt I should point out that cpp is probably on the bottom end of the facial hair graph as a result of being on top of the age graph...
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Gratsby 3751 days ago
There's only one conclusion to draw from the age data:

Somewhere between 50 and 60, software developers realize that their skill can be better put to work managing the retirement fund.

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staticautomatic 3751 days ago
I chuckled when I saw that java programmers smile the least.
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Scarbutt 3751 days ago
Do software engineers stop programming at 35?
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simmons 3751 days ago
Not at all. That's just the median age, and I think the profession tends to have a lot of young people due to the size of the field at the time people chose their careers.
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rzzzt 3751 days ago
Hopefully not :) Check the "Density" tab to see eg. 53 year old programmers recorded for C# and Python.
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jrapdx3 3751 days ago
Even better, looks like there are a few programmers (CPP and HTML) >60 years old, though the graph shows n=0 for those data points, so do those guys actually exist? If so, the oldest programmer is 86.4, now that's impressive.
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rzzzt 3750 days ago
I was also wondering about that. Y-axis values are rounded to integers, even in the data source contained in a script node on the page.
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Mikeb85 3751 days ago
I think there's just enough young programmers in the sample that that's the highest mean age...
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Retra 3751 days ago
Older programmers are probably less likely to use Github.
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