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by darod 1167 days ago
first "code ninjas" now "street fighting" engineers and "martial art" engineers? really? I feel like these monikers are getting a little silly especially since you'd never see the reverse.
6 comments

> you'd never see the reverse.

Excellent point!

Competitive TKD practitioner: "Approaching this match, aware my opponent was a highly-ranked veteran competitor, I asked myself: what would a techbro do?"

There's been a glut of these "two types of programmer" articles the last few days, it's just a stupid trend.
Well I'm a HEMA swordsman moonlighting as a backend/LLM programmer and in many cases I think while wrestling with my spaghetti code: "How would Meyer deal with it?"

Human cross-domain capabilities are amazing.

Fiore would just twist and throw the problem until it's obvious, solved, requirements are met or it's left for someone else to deal with. ;) Very direct. Force and control inputs, thus outputs will be ensured correct. Manhandling code has a long tradition.

Meyer would evaluate a series of varying weights of golden hammers. Try to defensive code all possible cases. Find a decisive insight into a problem.

And Polish sabre school would cut off the angles until the solution is all that remains possible. Feint all sorts of evil cases for testing.

Now the fun part is that basic principles are the same.

You write code that works and does what is required or you are not a programmer.

You win swordfights or you're dead.

Both of the swordmasters worked from first principles...

The reverse/inverse is taking about a physical sport in cerebral terms, like the other commenter comparing boxing to chess.

Another analogy would be someone talking about their music like (a) code.

Sure, but no one is comparing a quarterback with a physicist or in this case a programmer. I just think that our field is developing descriptions of ourselves to over embellish what we actually do and it's not necessary. We sit behind computers, think, and write code. We're not swashbuckling, throwing stars, or grappling with opponents in the streets.
LFM 10x rockstar/street-fighter (no LLMs!) SWEs PST
reminds me a bit of this Elon Musk tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1527774704018280448?s=20
He has an interesting mix of good ideas and bad ideas.

Which is good and bad, in a society in which he can do almost anything he wants, and almost no one will tell him no.