The required skills of a programmer

What does it take to be a programmer (my other job)? If you are serious about being a programmer you will need to develop the following skills:

• The ability to think macroscopically and microscopically about problems. That means the ability to take a “holistic” view and also a strictly compartmentalised view. In applied terms, you need to be able to bear in mind the purpose and activity of an entire application while also being able to concentrate exclusively on small parts of that application.
• Meticulous, almost natural, attention to detail.
• Utter determination. An ability to spend long periods of time (hours on end) honing projects and eliminating problems.
• Vision. You should be able to bear in mind the end result, the interactive work of art you are creating with your code, even as you are concentrating on single lines of computer instructions. Others will not have such vision – you are special to have it.
• Intellect. You need to be reasonably intelligent to do this job. At times you will be required to understand complex concepts. You do not have to be a genius, and the natural intellectual requirements can often be offset by adequate determination, but you need to be fairly intelligent. You also need to be logical but you do not, usually, have to excel at mathematics.
• Initiative. You need to extremely self-motivated and happy to read very big books and understand them (back to determination again). You need to be keen to find your own answers to problems.
• Communication. You will need to be able to articulate what you do in clear English to lesser-skilled people who have no understanding of programming (and they will often be being paid more than you and demanding things that are not feasible).
• Patience. See above.
• Pride. You should try to do the best that the time will allow, every time.
• Humility. You should be aware that however good you think you are, there is someone better than you – and be aware that is not what it is about anyway. Be modest, happy to share what you know, and to learn from others what you do not know.

The required skills of a trainer

What does it take to do the work I do, a trainer? Here are some of the things:

• Confidence. You have to be happy to stand at the front of a class and talk to complete strangers who will review you at the end. You also have to be able to walk into any company, any situation, adapt quickly and meet requirements.
• Social skills. You should be able to build a rapport with virtually anybody and build a rapport between other people too.
• Managerial skills. The ability to motivate people do things and do them to the best of their ability.
• Tact. The ability to point out errors positively.
• Patience. You must be content to repeatedly correct spelling mistakes when you would rather be discussing concepts, and repeat instructions countless times, because you were ignored on previous occasions.
• Tolerance. You must get used to people coughing at the most inopportune moments, forgetting your earlier instructions, and requesting your help during break times. You’ll people claiming “I did that!” when they logically cannot have performed the specified action, starting to ask questions without first thinking through what they actually want to ask, and calling you over to help them without first putting the code on the screen for you to see.
• Optimism. In general, people with aptitude learn on their own and do not go for training – only those without aptitude are sent. As a trainer you know that no matter how well you teach most people, they will never really be competent (partly of a lack of aptitude and partly because they are not interested). But you must be able to put this out of your mind and continue just the same.
• Technical expertise. You have to be ready to answer any question on an enormous range of technical issues – or at least find the answers fast.
• Communication skills. You must be able to demystify and explain complicated issues in plain English.
• Acumen. The ability to gauge and pitch a topic and at an accessible level for the trainee (perhaps telling only 50% of the story, for now).
• Low ego. You must remember that you’re not there to show off what you know and what you can do. You’re there to relay the maximum amount of information possible suited to the client’s needs. Your success is exactly correlated to their understanding.
• Reliability. You cannot miss a day. When people travel from around the world to see you (as they do, on occasion, to see me) you have to be there every time, without fail.

Design rules

“The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there.”
Gordon Bell

“There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.”
C. A. R. Hoare

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Albert Einstein

“All that is good is simple and all that is simple is good”
Mikhail Kalashnikov

“In Jeet Kune Do, one does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”
Bruce Lee

Source

Nice quotation

“God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When god says the same we call him ‘loving’ and build churches in his honor.”

William C. Easttom II

Guido Fawkes

This rather messy and advertising-ridden web site is run by a certain Paul Staines, and it revels in (by its own admission) “tittle tattle, gossip and rumours about Westminster”. Happy to dish it out, Mr Staines (who made his money in hedge funds and hides behind the name of an attempted murderer) is a little more shy when it comes to actually saying things openly under his own name. He was outraged when his identity was revealed.

I agree with the likes of Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman that his utterly irreverent and cynical musings are are on the whole not admirable or helpful and do not constitute serious journalism. They are just cheap pot-shots from a distance – in fact it is rather like a tabloid on the Internet.

Nice quotation

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

Thomas Paine

Nice quotation

“Manners are of more importance than laws. .. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in.”

Edmund Burke

News absurdities

Here are some recent news absurdities from the mainstream BBC news, not from tabloids:

• The nation is up in arms as “Shambo“, the “sacred” bull, will have to be put down for medical reasons. This so ludicrous is barely even merits a mention here. But of course, so politically correct were the BBC that they never called into question whether or not this livestock should actually be considered “sacred”.
• Not enough women in top jobs. I wonder if any of the feminists have considered that not all women might want to go into so-called “top jobs” and many might instead have an interest in the most important job of all: bringing up the next generation.
• The town of Tewkesbury lies under flood water. The BBC journalist interviewed the local vicar as the voice of authority. Can you believe he neglected to ask him why God had decided to bring such inconvenience to the community?

Nice quotation

“Those who can make you believe in absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.”

Voltaire (1694-1778)

In defence of reason

A friend of mine, a lady in Orlando, Florida, recently wrote on a forum about the problem of violent and aggressive Christians who are intolerant of her atheism. My response follows:

It’s hard to imagine your experience because in London, although religious people are unfortunately frequently given preferential treatment out of political correctness, they do not (as it stands) have the same level of domination as they do in the USA (although some suspect Blair went to war largely because of a shared religious zeal with Bush). Often when I speak out about my atheism (as I frequently do) I find that people agree with me – it was just that previously “the truth that dare not speak its name”. As Richard Dawkins has said, the time for this luxury is over, and if we don’t start speaking sense in large numbers, these crazy people will remain a serious risk to all of us.

I would like to second some of the replies on here. Certainly people are hostile because they are afraid, and they are afraid because they do not understand – a consequence of low intellect, religious brainwashing, ignorance or willful self-delusion (the “comforter” Dawkins has mentioned).

I think, providing it will not threaten your physical well-being, you should not hide your atheism and if you receive any threats from believers your best weapon is the Bible itself (but also not forgetting the law). Because the Bible is so full of contradictions it is easy to find passages to justify whatever you like. Simply turn to the “Love thine enemy” line for starters (which Jesus himself did not do, incidentally, since he condemns unbelievers to the fictional Hell).

Also I agree with people that it’s a good idea to present atheism in a positive light. Like Sam Harris, I don’t even like the term atheism because of its negative connotations. See Max Beran’s quote “If Richard Dawkins’ atheism can be called a belief, can I say that my not collecting stamps is a hobby?”. We do not have a term for people who don’t believe in the flying spaghetti monster – just “normal” should suffice. I present myself as a humanist, which includes not believing in silly superstitions which are immoral and for which there is no evidence.

Although we don’t experience your environment day to day, I can imagine how uncomfortable it is to be ostracised simply for being rational and refusing to accept primitive dogma. If it is any consolation, one only needs to read their books to see that Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens are all well aware that America is the most crucial ground to convert to reason first of all, and the ball is rolling… And if ever you need any support at all in the defence of reason and yourself, turn to this group and to me, and you will get it.

Encarta article on atheism

Here is the article on atheism from Microsoft Encarta of 2004. I quote it here because it is a truly excellent summary by the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn:

Atheism (Greek, a, “not”; theos, “god”), lack of belief in any form of deity.

I INTRODUCTION

An atheist acknowledges no God or gods. Atheism is stronger than agnosticism, which is the view that we have no knowledge either way. An agnostic denies both that we know that God, or gods, exist, and that we know that they do not. An atheist may disagree with this, claiming even to know that no God exists, for example through having a disproof of such existence.

But many, or even most, atheists would agree with the agnostic that this is an area where knowledge is not to be had. However, an agnostic could hold that while we lack knowledge, our best bet is that some kind of God exists, so we should fill the gap by trust or faith in the existence of some kind of divinity. An atheist will reject any such leap of faith as well. An atheist holds that the most reasonable attitude is not to believe in any God or gods. Our attitude to a Christian God, or Jehovah, or Allah, should be the same as most contemporary people’s attitudes to the ancient gods of Greece and Rome, or to Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. Belief in any divinity is mere superstition.

II ARGUMENTS FOR ATHEISM

Atheism is defended by a number of considerations.

First, atheists will reject traditional attempts to prove the existence of a god. Second, atheists will reject the propriety of a leap of faith, or unsupported claim to the existence of such a being. For atheism, bare faith is not a virtue, but a vice, for it is extravagant and irresponsible to believe in things when there is no reason to do so. In everyday life this is obvious, and we ought to apply the same standards whatever the subject of belief. Atheists typically hold that human beings are drawn to religions by fear of the unknown, against which we defend ourselves in the vain belief that proper prayers and sacrifices can ward off illness, disease, famine, and death. The atheist sees this as immature and regrettable.

Atheists may also try to show that it is highly unlikely that any god exists, since the features ascribed to the deity are too improbable, just as the doings of Santa Claus are too improbable for grown-ups to believe that anyone could perform them. Thus it seems highly improbable that an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful Being would allow the multitude of evils that beset animal and human existence. The standard religious reply””that these are mysteries that it is not open to us to fathom””leaves a concept of God sufficiently far removed from human life not to be worth serious attention.

Finally, atheists will typically stress the dangers of religious belief. These dangers may vary with the exact religion in question, but both in history and in the contemporary world, belief in the jealous, vengeful God of the Bible and the Koran spawns sectarianism and intolerance, bigotry and self-righteousness. There are passages in holy texts that literally command intolerance and hatred of those who are different, contempt of women and shame at sexuality, mistrust of science and reason, and subordination of all other ethical duties to the supreme obligation of the particular religious body or Church.

III HISTORY OF ATHEISM

Atheism has an ancient history in the East, especially in India, where various early schools espousing rationalism and materialism existed. The most notable was the Lokayata school, perhaps dating from the 7th century bc or earlier. Buddhism, at least originally, was close to atheism, while some schools falling under the umbrella of Hinduism, such as the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara can be regarded as atheistic.

Atheism was seldom voiced in the Christian world until the 18th century, since it was too dangerous to do so. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the first of the moderns to attract the dangerous label of being an atheist, although his writings are carefully ambiguous. A more common, although risky, halfway house was deism, which followed the belief of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc) that while there might be gods, they had no apparent intercourse with human beings, and no apparent interest in their doings.

The prevailing climate until the mid-18th century was that no thinking person could possibly be an atheist, and that atheism in practice would dissolve all the morality that ties together civil society. Even David Hume (1711-1776) refused the label of atheist, although he wrote eloquently and convincingly against the involvement of religion in morality, and also against superstition, enthusiasm, reports of miracles, and arguments for the existence of God and the afterlife.

In France philosophers such as the Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789) were more forthcoming in avowing atheism, though other leading Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and Diderot were deists. Perhaps the most remarkable progress was marked by the Constitution of the United States of America, which in Thomas Jefferson’s words entrenched the “wall of separation” of Church from State, effectively confining religion to the sphere of the private, at least in principle.

By the 19th century the climate changed markedly, and writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as well as philosophers were happy to acknowledge their atheism. The emergence of rigorous historical analysis of the Bible and other texts, and then the increasing power of Darwinism to explain what had otherwise seemed divine in nature, both contributed to the increasing secularization of the modern world.

While they reject religious belief, atheists can differ over their attitude to many features of religious expression in art, music, poetry, or architecture. Some may find such expressions too heavily contaminated by what they regard as false dogma to be enjoyable or illuminating. Others may distinguish. A poem or piece of music that is conventionally called religious may be a profound expression of love, hope, despair, or triumph over despair. These are emotions all human beings share and an atheist can value expressions of them for their own sake. Thus while some atheists would feel ashamed of being moved by the words of some of the Psalms, or the Book of Common Prayer, others might accept and admire them as poetical expressions of the emotional needs of mankind. An atheist might be drawn to this more tolerant attitude by reflecting that religion itself is a human invention, and presumably takes something from the better as well as the worse parts of human nature.

This less combative attitude protects atheists against the charge of being shallow or materialistic or lacking higher feelings. It may in turn come close to the position of some modern theologians and churchmen, who, without admitting in so many words that they are atheists, wish to strip away any taint of childish superstition, childish belief in the supernatural, or childish beliefs about historical events, from the practices of religion, which they nevertheless insist on preserving. But in the opinion of most atheists these are desperate strategies to avoid admitting the obvious.

Advertising lie

Watching the highly entertaining Die Hard 4.0 last night exposed me to some pre-film advertising from Vodafone, among others, who were saying:

“Vodafone – the Internet is now mobile.”

Although Vodafone imply here (with – at best – delusions of grandeur) that they represent the whole of the Internet, I’ve been using MSN Messenger, Internet Explorer, Flash Player and e-mail on my (Orange network) phone for several years now. There can be only two possible explanations:

1. Vodafone have no idea about the state of technology and what their competition are doing.
2. This is a stupid facile advert.

Which do you think it might be..?

Past versus present

Some British MPs are currently being criticised by the infantile tabloid media for admitting they sampled cannabis in the past. We should be worried if they hadn’t. Such a mild degree of experimentation is only to be expected from enquiring minds who were at university during the sixties, and in any case having tried this drug the MPs are in a better position to judge it.

In addition to this, what a person has said, done or believed in the past is irrelevant to what they say, do or believe now.

The behaviour of men

The things I am about to say are slightly unusual, as I usually prefer women to men and am quick to sympathise with them, appreciating that many men are oafish and ignorant (and all too often have a childish obsession with sport). But what I will say is both true and and politically incorrect, so on those grounds well worth saying.

When a man starts seeing a woman than leaves her, he is often condemned as having been seeking “only one thing” (this being the thing she most obviously advertises and promotes). How could he behave in such a deplorable way?

Well, I’ll tell you how: because there is another side to the story, one that is rarely told. Have you considered that the man might also have been looking for a full and lasting relationship but discovered – to his intense disappointment – that the woman could not deliver the intellectual companionship, or other qualities of character, he had hoped for?

When a woman protests “You only wanted me for my body!”, such a man might reasonably counter “You only had your body”.

Similarly, a woman might complain “You dumped me!” after a relationship ends following her own bad behaviour (indeed I have had this said to me by a very beautiful and – unsurprisingly – tempramental woman). “You dumped yourself” is the appropriate reply.

Yes, shock, horror, feminists, but there are many silly, shallow and manipulative women in society (as well as, of course, many lovely ones). Such women need to understand that their looks alone are not sufficient to win them a relationship with any self-respecting man – and nor should they ever wish them to be.

Respecting people’s views

We are often told in this age of political correctness that we should respect the views of other people. This is absurd. We should respect their right to hold whatever view they like (whatever this has to do with it) but we are certainly not obliged to respect anybody’s views per se.