Brian is the only person in this thread who has been, and who gets regularly laid.

I made no such assumption.

I am saying that doing something for a living does not logically imply that you know what you're talking about. Therefore it is incorrect of you to use "I write perl code for a living" as a means of demonstrating that you're an authority on the subject. I know plenty of people who make a living doing things they actually know nothing about, and the majority of them are in fact software developers.

I hate to enforce the stereotype, but are they Indian? There are so many Indian computer science majors at RIT and CWRU that have no idea what they're doing.


Burnsauce.

Nope, they exist in equal proportions in all ethnic groups. The problem is that it's very easy to write a program and get paid, but it's very hard to write good code. Most people settle for getting paid and never bother to learn how to do things well.

It wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at the majority of perl "programmers" I've met and worked with.

However, in my years of software development experience (11), many graduates of software engineering schools don't know jack anyway. They may be able to use the buzzwords and recognize patterns they learned about in school, but they have a really hard time articulating why the methods they learned in school are better than other methods. Most of the time they have the ideas right but have no real-world experience and it really shows. They also tend to overcomplicate and overengineer things.

On the other hand, those without schooling who are "fresh" in the business can't recognize patterns, don't know why they're useful, slap things together haphazardly, and generally don't have any idea that there is a difference between program design and "programming."

In my experience, 10% of the programmers I've worked with are great, and their greatness doesn't seem to correlate with whether they've had formal training. The 30% below that generally have degrees, although not in any tech-related field, and are generally functional. The remaining 60% should get a new job.

I think you read way too much into what I wrote.

No, i didn't read anything into what you wrote. I made an aside remark, that's all.

Felt like getting something off of your chest, did you?

I think Rob's comment makes more assumptions than any other post in this thread

I think that may hold true for many fields.

When you have to write something significantly complex and/or large, the value of a functional IDE shows. It's about productivity. Frequent operations should be as intuitive or simple as possible; you have enough to get confused about in what task is to be accomplished. No one gets anything done with obfuscation or unnecessary hassles on a regular basis. If you can use Vi/Vim proficiently, then you can use it well in completing tasks. If you truly feel it makes no sense at all, you should either (1) learn how to use it properly or (2) switch to an editor that is easier to use without sacrificing functionality.

Not anymore.