Not All Programmers Are Good | Prime Reacts

I'm clearly proud to be a 100x bug developer, few people can beat me at it. Sadly, it's a skill nobody's really looking after. Except consultancy companies.

true. Learning to understand that there is actually a hierarchy of skill levels in just about any undertaking and job, it's okay. there will always be someone better, smarter, faster , with deeper understanding. Striving to be become just as competent in a positive way is imho a worthy goal.

I love your take on talent as an xp booster. That's exactly how I see it, I hate when people refuse to try a skill cause they think "I don't have talent" as if that means they can't get good at it, it just might take more commitment is all.

Heartbreaking : The worst person in the world just made a good point

I think talent exists, but I also think that working hard can get you into the top 1%. You might not make it into the Olympics but you’re still gonna be an amazing player

What angers people so much about differentiating skill levels is that they feel such a discussion naturally limits them and people similar to them. The other problem is that, as best as science can tell, cognitive skills are based on G which is general intelligence. That means there is no such thing as someone who is naturally good at chemistry and not naturally good at physics. People get different skill levels because they pursue different things, but if two people who have different levels of G but are otherwise equal put in equal time and effort in a cognitive field the person with the higher G will be better at whatever they are trying to do.

The notion that you can be intelligent in particular ways is called the theory of multiple intelligences, but it is not a theory it is a hypothesis. It is a hypothesis that has no evidence for it and lots and lots and lots of evidence against it (including MIR scans that clearly show you do not have specialized brain regions for different types of cognitive reasoning), so much so that it is effectively abandoned.

Psychologists use NMMTG as a shorthand for "not much more than G" because it is so incredibly common that they try to measure people's ability using some other proposed cognitive factor or personality trait and then determine that the differences they find are just the result of their tests being correlated to G.

An example of this is EQ. When examined it was found that nothing about it was new it was effectively testing a combination of G and personality traits, it served no useful purpose as you could just test those things more accurately individually and the difference in ability they measured was NMMTG.

The closest anyone has ever come to "debunking IQ" was a recent study that showed there are different abilities in particular factors like short term memory and processing speed (I don't actually remember I think it was 5 things,) and the authors of the paper had very negative things to say about G but they never showed that the factors actually mean anything WRT real cognitive tasks. I would argue that their criticism was unfounded and G is simply a higher level model of the brain that is built. on top of the factors they determined. I see it as someone claiming benchmarks are meaningless because computers have specifications for things like processing speed and memory when we know that for computers benchmarks are actually a better predictor of performance because what you do with them matters and it's hard to calculate all the interactions of the various specifications in play.

Some devs are just crap though, no matter what help they have.

ok but what if im good at something that, I dislike doing, doesnt pay well, is illegal.

I find prime tends to effectively argue for G (ie intelligence which is best measured using IQ tests,) but then arguing against it in ways that don't tend to actually make sense. IQ is a measure of G, G is intelligence which affects a person's ability to learn among other things. People with higher G will tend to build more knowledge over time than other people. They tend to make better decisions and develop cognitive skills faster. They don't develop skills that they don't do work to develop but they could if they tried and would do so faster than people with lower G. Non cognitive skills are not as affected by G and perhaps not at all. Dunking a basketball requires hand eye coordination and significant and rare physical attributes that G is unlikely to meaningfully change. People with high G can tend to get bored of tasks and stop developing relevant skills when they get bored. People with high G dominate all jobs that require significant cognitive ability but generally do worse in jobs that require extreme attention to detail and long term skill development because they get bored and don't put in the time. Everything Prime talks about in terms of talent lines up with the dominant theory of human intelligence, which is the theory of general intelligence ie G, everything Prime says to discount IQ/G from the conversation is a misinterpretation of what that theory says.

Great take on the talent part. Especially how it's a double-edged sword.

That's why people with IQ above 115 fail at universities more often -> Their ability to understand stuff lead to their underdevelopment of studying habbits.

I find this to be a weird problem, because getting around a more sophisticated programming language / using any programming language at large scale to build something are vastly different things and a great programmer is still gonna often reach for the swis knife just because of how 1) fast the development is and 2) because even the best developers need alot of time to understand thousands of lines of code and it's gonna be a much smoother experience if your whole project isn't written in assembly.

someone in the video: "says a word"
prime: let me talk about that word about 30 minutes

Could have segued into race realism here 😏

Well one of the issues with this thought process is that people exploit what is "natural" or "instinctual". There's always a tradeoff. Reactionary judgements from this angle can get out of hand. From online discourse, so many people use "what is natural" to lean their argument on.

"We aren't gonna put a safety on the gun because only idiots blow their foot off." - Jonathan Blow if he was a firearms designer probably

This guy is never going to finish his game

Jon Blow is so out of touch has clearly never worked in a even medium sized business or on anything large.

It's the correlation between ability and value/ability to survive that upsets people. Some people have talents that have no market value. Having market value is necessary to live. If you say that someone has no talent in any marketable skill you're consigning them to poverty. If you say that they don't have a marketable degree of talent in a field their invested in, you cripple them.
"It's very hard to get someone to understand a concept, when their paycheck depends on them not understanding that concept."

My problem isn't that talented people exists, but that we still rely on heuristics that can be manipulated to demonstrate it. It's all about subjective perception. People try their hardest to hide how long they've been working out, or how long it took them to learn Hiragana in an attempt to show-off how smart they are. And since you have no access to the facts (how long it ACTUALLY took them) you default to "they must be saying the truth" out of sheer plausibility.

I understand, I also have multiple children 😂

I voluntarily deploy javascript to production :)

ofc there are bad programmers, its me.

zig and rust optional pointers don't cost additional space.

That is precisely why I think rust is actually not that good a language. It's very much designed defensively with all it's safety featutes, but in a too complicated way for simpletons.
so what you end up with is a language that is too dull to be effective with that only those can use who actually would want a sharp knife.

Who is some coding guy? I can’t find him…

It doesn't matter whose the best programmer. It matters whose the richest.

To me it depends what the purpose of the language is to decide if there’s defensive designs for beginners built in. If it’s for corporations vs creative programming vs embedded systems vs serving too many audiences etc

when he says "there exists talent", He means natural talent. The lack of Natural qualifier is the literal only reason why chat gets conflicted. I've been watching over a year now and he seems to believe that chat doesnt think "talent"(natural talent) is a thing. It's miscommunication. Having a Natural talent gives you the multiplier. Learned talent and natural talent are different, and simply using the word talent only refers to the outcome of natural talent * learned talent. Learned talent might not be the right qualifier but the word talent itself is not the same as natural talent, thats a subset. The speed at which you can learn concepts multiplied by the work you have to put in. It's just another one of those words in our language that people stopped using the qualifiers for. Another example that is much easier to with me on is "Entitled". Self entitled is what people mean when they say someone is "so entitled" with the negative connotation. Being entitled to something is more of a right that doesnt come from you but another entity. "Did you see that race, Mike? That runner is darn well Entitled to that getting that medal!"

I blame simplified (American) English just because I'm a programmer and have to write color instead of colour like its some lorum ipsum rubbish and im angry but... mostly because of the trend of removing words seems stronger there. It happens because "self", or "natural" becomes redundant if you only use "talent" or "entitled" in one way.

At college I had a guy in class who punched through the screen of his laptop during an introductory programming course out of frustration.

Somehow I ended up giving him private lessons. Even the simplest stuff just wouldn't stick or even get through to him. I felt sorry for him and totally understand why he punched through his laptop screen.

He quit college soon after. Last time I met him he told me he was going to join the police forces. I think he was a decent guy, but I hope he got his anger issues under control.

Triggering people is talent. Eventually, you'll meet people leveraging it on a daily basis. And you'll know, for better or for worse. My dad expressed the worse of it at home and the best of it outside so my flesh is talking here. LoL

What? talent is a thing? And... what... Natural talent is a thing?
WiiiiiIIIIITCH!!
BUUUURN HIIIIIM!
😂😂😂

“You just have to type things in sometimes” The only sentence needed for computer programming.

Languages are designed for productivity. To make software faster and make money faster. Some are designed for quality. Few are both

Tagged unions for pointers don't have to take up more memory.

Let's say you have an Option<T> and T is a reference in Rust, or any other type that can't be null. The tagged union can be optimized so that it still only takes up a pointer, where 0 is the tag for `None` and any other value is the tag for `Some`.

In fact, this niche optimization is common in Rust.

over a billion dollars for the obamacare website

I'd like to press against the "Obamacare website" anecdote. I don't know the two projects personally, so I cannot say how truly wasteful it was, but one thing must be made abundantly clear: the two people building a better version of the website were working with knowledge of the existing process. This agrees with Mr. Blow's argument that small team can do a lot with existing systems. I think Prime's argument here is something we all fall victim to very frequently, where we gravitate to the scrappy underdog without giving due credit to the prior art.

I like protections imposed by the language because, if done right, they lower the mental burden on the developer, i.e. you don't have to constantly think about every little detail. I find that this reduces the accidental complexity of the software, it doesn't completely avoid it, but it does reduce it somewhat, and that's a good thing. Of course, it all depends on whether or not the runtime cost is acceptable.

The goal of golf is to play as little golf as possible. I’m a golf pro, because I don’t play any golf.

I can't tell that I am REALLY disappointed with modern algos of content feed. Am I stupid?

great speech about talents at the end. it is a sad thing that it have to be explained in our days.

Go as good as fuck

Go is designed for Grug. But Grug no simple son.

When compared to Zig, despite C being more “forgiving” I don’t find myself writing better code in C despite having spent the last 2 years doing 10h of C, and doing everything from scratch, like I’ve made a 3d rendering engine, in C did all my data structures myself, and on the CPU alone I was able to get a cool 200fps, took me 2 weeks to get it right, when I decided to reimplement it in Zig, it took one day to get it right, and the naive implementation was reaching 230fps, and yes I was using all the good flags for C, but the point being that even considering the fact that it’s always easier to rewrite something once you done it, I just don’t feel like C is a good language, and you don’t have that much control, in Zig it’s so easy to do SIMD, to use compiler intrinsic and communicate precise intent to the compiler. In C this sucks hard. And in C you also have to check for null pointer if you want your program to be correct so like 10% of my C code is literally:

If (!ptr)
return NULL;

So I don’t think there’s a big difference.

Its a known fact - Take N people working on anything. sqrt(N) people will be contributing more than the other N - sqrt(N) people. I.e, say you have dept. with 100 devs, managers, middle managers and so on. Approximately 10 of those people will be doing the majority of the work. The other 90 will just be along for the ride.
There are about 700 comments here. About 25 of them will be worth reading, the rest will just be "me too"s. This video is 20 minutes long. Approx. 4.5 minutes will be worth watching. The rest will be filler.

Did I just hear about unprotected pointers in an unexpected way :-o

Pre-watched

I like languages to be safe by default, but allow you to be an adult and take manual control if need be. Junior devs should not be allowed to work on mission critical stuff or push code to production without a review by someone with more experience.
It's not the language's responsibility to worry about your team issues.

JBlow's sleeves are driving me crazy

On the languages, It's a balance. Keeping things simple is generally good even for smart people. But just blocking tons of foot guns is an issue for many kinds of things. Rust kind of have this with the unsafe blocks.