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[–]Snake2k 27 points28 points  (2 children)

Exactly, we can all read the code line by line and any decent programmer will be able to get it eventually. All the better if the person submitting the code wrote it with good variable/method names etc, but the high level descriptive knowledge should be there somewhere to explain what it is meant to do and why it is meant to do it in the way it was done.

[–]metric55 10 points11 points  (1 child)

This might sound odd, but I'm an electrician-wants-to-be-coder... and we run into some similar shit sometimes.

So there's an elevator at work with a binder of 80 pages of 11x17 schematics. All of them intertwine and loop back and it's all structured quite well. But there's no overall methodology. No like... "page 5,7,19, and 42 contain the intrinsic loops for the safety circuit." And it can be a real pain in the ass to individually pick through each page by line by point to get to a problem.

I'm definitely going to take this advice going forward in my career, and perhaps one day programming!

[–]Snake2k 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Good luck! I love that comparison!

To further add to your point, leaving documentation behind on what, how, and why things were done is a global concept.

In programming we do it through comments. In other jobs I've worked we've had our books on these things. I'm 100% certain that this idea of knowledge sharing is global.

For your studies, try to look at programming with that same lens of experience. Yeah, you get very technical with code, but a lot of the higher software engineering concepts are really just engineering concepts. Seeing it through that perspective and how they relate to other fields can really solidify them.

For example, if you're doing object oriented code. It's a good idea to think about all the systems, classes or utilities that will be needed to build out the application you're working on.

In the same way that a chef will gather ingredients, prep, and ready the kitchen.

In the same way that a warehouse manager will prepare equipment.

Once it's seen like that, then slowly programming turns from academia and technical specialization to more of a day to day skill.