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                     Six Things I Learned About Programming
                                        
This [1] is an interesting meme: Three Things I Learned About Software While
Not In College (via reddit [2]). And a lot of the comments are centering on
three things learned in college and out of college.

So I'll play along here.

Three things I learned while at college (Florida Atlantic University) [3]:

  1. Not many students “got” programming, and far too many were there for the
     money (ha ha, the joke was on them come the Tech Stock Crash of 2001
     [4]).
  2. It is possible to get into an upper level class and still have no clue
     how compilers work (“Where do the comments go?” indeed … ).
  3. Make friends with the system adminstrators—that way, you'll stand a
     better chance of avoiding … um … “complications” for 
[DELETED-pranks     
-DELETED]
     
  3. misunderstandings gone awry.

And the three things I've learned since:

  1. Clear code is better than clever hacks. Especially if you end up
     maintaining the codebase.
  2. You Aren't Gonna Need It [5].
  3. Not many people “get” programming, and far too many are proving this in
     Perl and PHP.

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThreeThingsILearnedAboutSoftwareWHILENOTInCollege.aspx
[2] http://programming.reddit.com/info/225ds/comments
[3] http://www.fau.edu/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
[5] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?YouArentGonnaNeedIt

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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