[tjholowaychuk]

99% of the popular people out there are just above average enough to make useful projects for those lesser experienced. Most truly talented people are not very well known, they're busy hacking on v8, the kernel etc. Tools for average programming just get more of a spotlight. Is Express complex? no, people just use it, is coffeescript complex? no, is boostrap complex? no..

[murloc]

Like anything else in life there is front facing people that are generally good at marketing and would use other people's hard work to build technically inferior stuff on and be famous for. Not necessary a bad thing. The truly talented most of the time choose to go unnoticed. And there is always trolls like you who I don't know how they find the time to ship code ;p

[strait]

Perhaps you are being too hard on yourself. The majority (more than half) of the well known programmers truly are "superstars". It's all very subjective, though. Where is the standard for complexity or even cleverness? How is it different than simply being esoteric. Maybe I am personally fascinated with regular expressions and after much study, can belt out a half page of parse and extract 'magic' that would make the uninitiated shake their head and crown me a genius. But to me, it's simply assembling larger ideas from smaller ideas.

Personally, I would say that a truly talented programmer is simply someone who is very capable in mathematics and can produce a working and extendable program in a reasonable amount of time, that does something new and useful. This criteria alone leaves a ton of people out, you know!

[tjholowaychuk]

There are certainly truly epic people out there that are well known, but hell me and Jeremy have many more followers than the guy who wrote openssl along with people like Mike Pall who could out-code most of us any day, it's a weird thing, but you're average programmer isn't concerned about lower level things like that, so they simply don't care. There are of course exceptions to this, people like Carmack or Linus, but still, you see my point.

[murloc]

I think it has already been proven that there is no obvious correlation between being capable in mathematics and being a talented programmer. Thats so 1950's

[strait]

Not a direct coorelation, but there is certainly a dependence on being capable in mathematics. A math wizard does not make a good programmer, but one cannot be hopelessly average in math and be a talented programmer.

[valisystem]

Actually it really depends on what math skills you talk about. Is it really the material you are taught and can apply to software that brings a lot ? The ability to solve problems ? The culture of correctness ?

The common ground between math and programming is the requirement of a very good capacity to manipulate abstract concepts in a defined frame of known validity. But it pretty much stops here. In mathematics, you define all your abstracts concepts and frame of validity, in programming, you are given a (very shaky and detailed) frame of validity on which you build up abstract concepts.

The ones that are good in approaching the discipline through the study of details to build up stuff that will work on top of it will make the developers. The ones that needs a strong and well defined frame for their work, for it brings a much more powerful ground and enable to reach very high levels of abstraction, will feel more comfortable on mathematics.

No wonder why those that can combines both of those approaches can yield stunning results.

[iso8859-1]

Average of what? I'd bet 80% of 40-year-olds wouldn't be able to pass a high school level maths exam.

[itmag]

How is it different than simply being esoteric. Maybe I am personally fascinated with regular expressions and after much study, can belt out a half page of parse and extract 'magic' that would make the uninitiated shake their head and crown me a genius.

Sounds interesting, tell me more.

Personally, I would say that a truly talented programmer is simply someone who is very capable in mathematics and can produce a working and extendable program in a reasonable amount of time, that does something new and useful.

I would also say a criterion is that he really understands abstraction and how to get more from less. Ie think of how John Carmack creates abstraction which is just right for the problem (and in C at that). Or think about the metalinguistic paradigm in programming (or OOP used right, for that matter). Or how JQuery (and these days Coffeescript) makes client-side web code clean and accessible to everyone, without the previous Javascript hacks and DOM-spaghetti. An average programmer just plods along and hacks out a solution in a linear manner, a great programmer will traverse levels of abstraction to not only solve the problem but also shine a light at it from a superior perspective.

[tjholowaychuk]

jQuery nor coffeescript really imply "clean" client-side code, in fact I would argue that most uses of jQuery are the opposite if you compare communities like mootools. As far as coffeescript goes you still need a good sense of structure like regular javascript, nothing new there really.

[the_mitsuhiko]

Mootools still disqualifies itself in my mind by patching around on builtins.

[tjholowaychuk]

certainly, but that's besides the point. If you look at the jQuery community vs the others, jQuery's is filled with much much more spaghetti code

[ryanflorence]

jQuery makes the DOM so dang accessible that people use it as their data, which is completely backwards. Fortunately stuff like backbone has brought back some sanity.

[danso]

That sounds like a really accurate statistic. So what's your metric for this? Besides the obvious law that low-level code is the only grounds for elite coding, I mean.

[murloc]

Easy, he hand picked a 100 people of the JS community (including him) and then decided that hes the only competent programmer amongst them.

[tjholowaychuk]

umm no haha, I'm certainly amongst the average. Trust me writing parsers is very trivial, I've written many. Thinking you're a good programmer is perhaps the most naive thing you can do

[iso8859-1]

Parsing: the solved problem that isn't: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327313

[murloc]

I know its trivial once demystified specially using parser generators. But language design isn't though. Anyways i think your a pretty decent programmer.

[tjholowaychuk]

sure it is, take a few features from ruby, a few from python, add yaml and there you have it, coffeescript.

[murloc]

What do you think about node? Does it fall in your category of above-average people building tools for the average programmer?