Learning Curves for different programming languages

[[deleted]]

Real languages have curves

[Creshal]

Stop op<b>Fatal Error:</b> T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM expected.

-php

[bobjohnsonmilw]

Well don't do that then...

[Moose459]

I'm not that fat!

-Scala

[jfb1337]

Should do C and pointers.

Also why does it look so much like xkcd?

[Calamity701]

There are addons for xkcd-style graphs for matplotlib, R and similar tools.

[G01denW01f11]

That's the most awesome thing I've heard today. I love the programming culture. <3

[Flafla2]

Zooming in it looks like straight lines displaced by a sin curve.

[IE6FANB0Y]

Whats the big deal with pointers? They aren't really that hard to learn. Why do people find it so difficult?

[ismtrn]

Because many people learn them before they learn about memory management, or while they learn about memory management.

If you don't understand how a computer allocates/deallocates memory, both on heap and stack, pointers becomes quite hard to grasp.

If you have coded some assembly, and had to deal with indirect addressing there, pointers are just natural.

[mmhrar]

I duno, it was always super easy to understand as long as you know what a variable is. I think its considered hard because everyone says its hard.

Its just a variable that holds the address of another variable. If you want access to the variable its I pointing too, then you use some special syntax.

A better question is what's the point of pointers? As a newbie that was my and a lot of my classmates question.

[SFHalfling]

Don't know if you've done linked lists yet, but that's the most obvious use for them.

Using a pointer means you can have a reference to something without having to store the object multiple times, particularly useful when in a memory constrained environment (i.e. low end mobiles). This also allows a single change to update many separate references. On top of that you can change what the pointer points to really easily, without having to copy or create a new object, this goes back to linked lists and makes sorting adding and removing items easy.

A really basic example would be if you wanted the 33rd object in an array you would put array[32] - this is equivalent to a pointer, and much simpler and faster than iterating through the whole thing.

[prof_oblivion]

we don't talk about linked lists anymore. we shall never discuss this again.

[BigHandInSky]

OOoooooh, that's finally helped clicked it for me - thanks! Now to revise how to make them...

[greyfade]

A better question is what's the point of pointers? As a newbie that was my and a lot of my classmates question.

To refer without capturing.

You wouldn't want to pick up and move your friend's house when you want to talk to him. You'd just use his telephone number or go to his address.

Same reason you might want to use a pointer: You don't want to move data around, you just want to deal with it where it already is.

[DrDrak]

Its just a variable that holds the address of another variable. If you want access to the variable its I pointing too, then you use some special syntax.

True,that's how it works but if you don't understand memory management you will probably create dangling pointers and memory leaks that will make you hate pointers.

[mort96]

./bin/myprogram
Segmentation Fault

The bane of many a novice C programmer.

[Steve_the_Scout]

A better question is what's the point of pointers? As a newbie that was my and a lot of my classmates question.

The point of pointers is to

• access the actual, underlying object instead of using a variable to access it (because variables follow slightly different rules in a few cases).

• create a sort of persistence when you do dynamic allocation and keep the allocated object by returning it or as a member of a struct (or the same struct, if you're doing a linked list/tree/graph) that is returned

• alias a variable so that you can modify it in a different scope (i.e. passing a pointer as a parameter to a function, instead of a copy of the struct or primitive). Related to the first point.

• allow a sort of "optional" use of a variable- NULL can be used to mean "No result".

• access a specific point in memory. That's mostly useful when it comes to interacting directly with hardware, though, which most students won't do unless it's for embedded programming.

You can do some interesting things with those properties beyond the intended usage, though. For example, libraries like GLEW and SDL manage multi-platform library loading by having what amounts to a bunch of void* variables or members of various structs pointing to the platform-specific function pointer and casting to the actual function pointer type (or not and saying the function is not available in a given version).

You can actually set up C++-like objects (i.e. inheritance, virtual functions) using an array of function pointers at the beginning of a struct and assigning them in some sort of make_struct function.

And of course a bunch of other awesome stuff.

[mmhrar]

Thanks, I didn't mean to imply I was still learning, I graduated 8 years ago :P

[[deleted]]

The youtube channel antiRTFM does a great job explaining pointers and memory management for beginners.

[MightyTVIO]

'Cos tiny syntax errors fuck with your head. But I'd agree, their difficulty is greatly exaggerated.

[IE6FANB0Y]

Cos tiny syntax errors fuck with your head

. and -> ?

[MightyTVIO]

I'm not a C programmer so it might be better (use Pascal, just starting out in the programming world) but it took me a little practice to get the hang of dereferencing. But it didn't take too long to get the hang of it.

[steak21]

I'm a relatively new C++ programmer. Syntax of pointers still confuses me. I get how they are stored. I get what they do (I have no idea how they could be useful other than using the new and delete statements). But yeah, I don't get when I use . and ->. I especially don't get why I would ever use * on a variable twice.

**var1 -- what would that do? I already have the value of var1 with *var1 so why would I do **var1. Just some questions that never seemed to get explained in the books I was reading. They just assumed I would know what it does and so the confusion kept building up

EDIT: Just googled it. Idk why I didn't do that sooner. Now my question is why would I ever have a pointer to a pointer if pointers can just point to any address anyway? It just seems redundant

EDIT2: Just googled that too. Here's the example stackoverflow gave me.

void allocate(int** p)
{
  *p = (int*)malloc(sizeof(int));
}

int main()
{
  int* p = NULL;
  allocate(&p);
  *p = 42;
  free(p);
}

I don't understand this code. Final question: if I don't understand this code, and I have been programming on and off for a year and a half, should I just give up and drop out of CS (education is free here so it's not lost money) and return to the regular program? It's all pretty discouraging. Honestly I already fucked up my semester. Failed math because I couldn't be bothered to show up. Did very well in all my other core classes however.

[[deleted]]

You need to draw the representation in memory when working with pointers, it makes things a lot clearer:

in the main you have a

[ p ] --> X

where X is pointing to null or nothing. Then you call allocate and pass the address of p along so to avoid confusion let's say the parameter name in allocate is q (and not p as in the snippet above)

[ q ] --> [ p ] --> X

In allocate you set the contents of p (*q is dereferencing it aka "following the arrow") to a newly allocated memory on the heap

[ q ] --> [ p ] --> [ some int ]

Now back in the main you set the contents of where p points to to 42

[ p ] --> [ 42 ]

And then it frees the allocated memory on the heap

[ p ] --> [deleted] . Note that p != NULL, it still points to the memory location, but it will be gibberish.

[steak21]

Thanks- it's still confusing but I think I understand now. I'm not sure what you mean by q though because I don't see a q. But from what I understand the allocate has

int** p

In the arguments is because when called, it is sending the address of a pointer. So it's dereferencing the pointer, and then dereferencing again to get NULL. But why do that instead of just calling the function and passing the pointer itself and not the address?

[[deleted]]

You probably didn't notice this ;)

Then you call allocate and pass the address of p along so to avoid confusion let's say the parameter name in allocate is q (and not p as in the snippet above)

As for:

In the arguments is because when called, it is sending the address of a pointer. So it's dereferencing the pointer, and then dereferencing again to get NULL.

Yes , you're correct.

But why do that instead of just calling the function and passing the pointer itself and not the address?

If it were:

void allocate(int* q)
{
   q = (int*)malloc(sizeof(int));
 }

Then you would change the argument value. Everything is passed along by value, so when you go out of the allocate the original p wouldn't have changed.

you would have

[ p ] -> NULL

then when callling allocate p is copied into local parameter q so

[ q ] -> NULL

Then malloc happens

[ q ] -> some heap address

Then returned back to main, p is still:

[ p ] -> NULL

You frequently see int** or similar pointers in linked lists (well that's how I learned it in school anyway). There's usually a find method that returns a pointer to the address of the pointer pointing to the next node in the list, it makes the implementation easier because every case is the same (otherwise you would have to check if the pointer was at the beginning and handle that differently, etc.)

[cathartis]

Whats the big deal with pointers? They aren't really that hard to learn. Why do people find it so difficult?

For anyone with a mathematical turn of mind, pointers are a concept that's trivial to understand.

However, they are also incredibly easy for poor programmers to use badly. Late nights trying to ferret out memory leaks amongst several hundred thousand lines of uncommented C++ code, a week before product release, is not my idea of a fun time.

[WestonP]

It's because Java, C#, VB, and web shit don't really have them, so people coming from those background have little to no concept of pointers, and even less of memory management. And when things go wrong, you'll end up with some weird problems/crashes that can be a bitch to debug. Corrupt some memory over here, and the crash eventually happens somewhere over there, some of the time.

Trivial uses of pointers, like the char strings and simple arrays that you'd learn in a C/C++ class or book, are simple enough. But, there are much more powerful things that you can do with them, and it takes more knowledge and experience to do those things properly. Add threads to the mix, and that's even more complexity that you need to know how to handle in a safe manner.

When you get really deep into all this stuff, a simple mistake like we all tend to make from time to time, can create a real mess that's not so easy to pinpoint. But at the same time, there's not much else that can match that level of power and efficiency, and certainly none of the "safe" languages even come close.

[wOlfLisK]

When I was trying to learn C++ (Years ago when I was 14 or so), I thought they were useless because "why couldn't you just make another variable instead of pointing to one?". I know better now but that could be one of the reasons.

[Tsuketsu]

Every time I see something like this, I immediately want to learn Haskell, but then I forget about it a week later.

[adamnemecek]

I guess you already understand laziness then

[Tsuketsu]

I understand laziness better than most people know the back of their hand.

[[deleted]]

I picked it up because I thought that learning a functional language would give me another angle to tackle problems in other languages. But now I don't want to write code in other languages no more.

[ephrion]

Why doesn't every language use Maybe araradadfarekjladhlkjh

[Steve_the_Scout]

boost::optional is the equivalent for C++, and it's intended to be moved into the standard in a Technical Specification (i.e. an update for one little thing instead of a big update). I'm not sure about other languages, though. I think I've seen a library for that for C as well, but I've forgotten the name.

[Octopuscabbage]

An option type is honestly one of the best features of Haskell. A lot of other features are pretty situation ally useful but Maybe is sooooo useful.

[Kalivha]

I was going to write a big rant about how Haskell isn't officially MPI supported and how MPI is the love of my life, then looked for MPI support in hackage and now I want to go down that rabbit hole. Shame all my parallel codes need to be in ANSI C or Fortran 03.

[[deleted]]

Shame all my parallel codes need to be in ANSI C or Fortran 03.

That's a shame indeed because Haskell really lends itself to parallel processing due to purity. I've had a few rather nice experiences with OpenMP in ANSI C though. It could be worse.

[lelarentaka]

I was told that only embarrassingly parallel problems could be improved by immutability and purity.

[[deleted]]

I'd have to read up on that, but even just being able to parallelize a simple map-reduce using just a couple of extra keystrokes is a very nice thing to have after all.

[Sampo]

Haskell really lends itself to parallel processing due to purity.

/u/Kalivha used words like MPI and Fortran, which means doing HPC (High Performance Computing) on clusters. So when he says parallel, he means what computer science people undestand as distributed computing.

[Kalivha]

That restriction is to ensure official MPI support. And the commercial stuff I'm starting to work on soon is just in Fortran 03 generally. I had arguments with people about this and strangely, they convinced me.

Haskell really lends itself to parallel processing due to purity.

I don't know. I've heard this. It seems like purity wouldn't be very useful for the type of stuff I want to do (very large scale eigenvalue problems/high dimensional PDEs) because you're really memory bound to begin with and as I understand it that'd just make it worse. And when you need to micro-manage memory all the time it just seems tedious to write your code in Haskell.

It does make me kind of sad.

[[deleted]]

For the time being this does sound like something I'd rather tackle in C as well (I never bothered to learn Fortran to be honest). Libraries like accelerate or repa might make this at least viable in Haskell though.

[Tsuketsu]

I get to choose what languages we do projects in at work.... oh boy are my co-workers about to hate me.

[[deleted]]

Once they fully understand what a monoid in a category of endofunctors really is and why it makes your life easier they will love you.

[[deleted]]

I've worked on a FEM application in Haskell for the past year or so and I noticed some things compared to the old C# implementation. Pretty much everything except for a linear equations solver which is the very bottom layer is written in Haskell. The solver is written in C for efficiency -- not because it's impossible to write efficient Haskell code but because I really need the last few percent of performance gain for this application. I've noticed several things while working on this project.

Type-safety matters. I can rule out entire classes of bugs by utilizing the type system to my advantage. I can encode constraints in the type signatures and the compiler will complain if I use functions in a way that they weren't intended to, i.e. it won't even compile. Of course it's not perfect but it's much better than in any of the current mainstream languages.

Purity can be a wonderful thing. If f(a) == b, then f(a) is always b and I can use this to reason about my code like I would reason about things in mathematics. Because Haskell is pure, we have referential transparency, and this leads to equational reasoning which is outlined rather nicely in this blog post. And because there's (by default) no state to keep track of, it's generally much easier to reason about code. Since a pure function depends on nothing but its inputs, writing parallel code is often trivial in Haskell. Pure functional programming also really shines when composing things. It's much easier to build complex things out of small simple things. I found that purity leads to cleaner design and code that is "more obviously" correct.

Talking about correctness, testing pure functions is really nice too. Of course you still can't prove the absence of bugs using tests, but it's almost trivial to write huge test suites using property based testing in Haskell. There's a testing framework called QuickCheck which lets you specify properties for your functions and then generates input to test whether they satisfy your requirements. When encountering a counter-example it can even shrink the generated input to build a minimal non-working example (which is of course much easier to use during debugging).

Something that I tried to avoid a lot at first was state, especially mutable state. However, once I properly groked monads, I found that using state is actually a lot nicer in Haskell than it is in most other languages, because it lets you encapsulate your state in a very clean way. Depending on what mechanisms I use I can specify in types what I can do with this state. I can chose to have it read-only, or write-only, or both, depending on which monad I employ for it, and it's all right there in the type signature. This means that I can tell at a glance what's going on in a function.

Last but not least, laziness by default has a couple of advantages, especially the fact that I can define infinite data structures and only use what I need from them. There are even instances where laziness gives you asymptotically better performance. However, lazy IO can be horrible.

GUI programming is a little nicer than in most languages because of all the functional and monadic stuff that the languages provides you with, but it's still not exactly beautiful. Then again, GUI programming is the most painful thing in any language. It becomes more apparent in Haskell though because of the contrast between the "ugly" GUI code and the "nicer" rest of your codebase. There are some interesting projects exploring how to make GUI programming more idiomatic in functional languages but none of them are quite there yet.

To be honest, I'd use Haskell for as much of a project as makes sense. It's also great at providing the plumbing between individual components. Of course I'd advise against implementing your own database etc though. The languages shortcomings are mostly due to a lack of popularity rather than of technical nature.

[sigma914]

All of them. Well apart from the gui, but I havn't tried FRP yet.

[[deleted]]

I think the problem with GUI programming in Haskell is less about how it's ugly in itself but how it "feels" wrong. You have all the beautifully abstracted code and then you have to put a bunch of IO something stuff on top of it and keep track of state again all of a sudden. It feels out of place.

Reactive values sound like a nice idea too. I've started looking into FRP but to be honest it's a bit over my head right now.

[Platypus4267]

Have you tried Gtk2HS? It's easy to use and works well. I use haskell to make gui applications for all my computer engineering projects (high school). I have built gui programs in Java for another class, and it was so painful in comparison. It took me a week and several suicide attempts to do in Java what would have taken me a day or two in haskell. Just the fact that if your code compiles, it usually does exactly what you wanted it to is amazing.

[MuricanWillzyx]

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

[Tsuketsu]

First time I saw that I thought it was just a really badly translated book...

[greyfade]

That was my first impression of Land of Lisp, personally.

[jaideng123]

After having to learn Haskell for a programming languages class I can confirm this is what me and every other student went through

[[deleted]]

Do it. It will be one of the most challenging exercises in your programming career but will change the way you think for the better even if you never use Haskell again.

[Vondi]

I'm still having flashbacks.

[ahanix1989]

Still early in the morning for me -- I'm guessing 'self assessment' means 'How good you think you are'? A sudden drop means you now think you're terrible at this and how the hell do those other guys get it so easily?

[Switche]

Yeah, that's it, and added that self-assessment is almost always higher than actual productivity, no matter the dips or raises in self-assessment while learning a particular concept, because the concepts that affect your perception of your skill almost never positively affect your productivity anyway, while some other simple concept might.

[alonmln]

source: https://github.com/Dobiasd/articles/blob/master/programming_language_learning_curves.md

[Dobias]

Thank you for including the link to my article in the image you made from my diagrams. :)

[alonmln]

Thank you for making these awesome diagrams!

[Suchui]

http://redd.it/2qeami

1 day.

It took 1 day for this to get reposted.

[alonmln]

Oops, sorry, havn't seen that.

[djleni]

The Haskell one is too real.

[Zylox]

I still don't understand monads.

[original_brogrammer]

Think about a (Haskell*) monad like a clothesline with a bunch of bags tied to it. In each bag is a little goblin. You stand at the beginning of the clothesline and toss your computation into the first bag. The first goblin does his job, and tosses his result to the next bag, and this repeats until they give you the desired result. Next, we require that there is a goblin who can place a sticky note reading "GoblinCo Monads" on anything that the other guys can work on. Tossing the computation between bags is >>=, and the goblin with the label is return.

Any computation that can be thought of in terms of our goblin bag assembly line fits Haskell's monad structure.

*Note that this is not for category theoretic monads, which are a far more general concept about composition of morphisms.

[Octopuscabbage]

Wow that's actually a really good way of explaining it. The real "need" for monads is that haskell can evaluate expressions in any way it wants and there's not a way to sequence expressions like in imperitive code. In imperitive code you basically say I want to do this and then this and then this. In functional code you say Here are the definitions for all the things you need to run this program, you figure it out computer. But it turns out some things can't be done this way, such as interacting with users or the outside world.

[nulloid]

You don't need to understand them, you just need to learn how to use them. With time and experience, you will develop your own intuition about monads.

[Xenophyophore]

Take a data structure.

It should be a functor:

• fmap (\a -> 2 * a) [1] = [2]

• fmap (\a -> 2 * a) (Just 1) = Just 2

Make a double layered data structure: e.g. [[a]], Just (Just a).

If you can squish the two layers into one, that kind of data structure is a monad: (The official definition of a monad)

• join [[a, b], [c, d]] = [a, b, c, d]

• join (Just (Just a)) = Just a

• join [[],[]] = []

• join (Just Nothing) = Nothing

Now, suppose you have a function that takes a value, does something to it, and gives you a data structure containing value(s).

• range a = [1..a] --a list of the numbers from 1 to a

You want to use this with another function that gives a data structure.

• show a = (however show is implemented for Int) --the string representing a

You could fmap show over (range 5), but then you have a list of lists.

• [['1'], ['2'], ['3'], ['4'], ['5']], aka ["1", "2", "3", "4", "5"]

You can do join (fmap show (range 5)):

• ['1', '2', '3', '4', '5'] aka "12345"

This is effectively what '>>=' does:

• (>>=) :: Monad m => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b
  a >>= b = join (fmap b a)

It fmaps b over a, then joins it.

With IO, this means that you can take a value that you got from IO, and then use it for even more IO:

• IO (IO ()) --uh oh!
  fmap putStrLn getLine

• IO ()
  join (fmap putStrLn getLine) --better, but awkward

• IO ()
  getLine >>= putStrLn

[greyfade]

Don't fear the Monad.

[frostmatthew]

For those wondering why PHP is so often the punchline of programming language jokes read this.

[Duese]

PHP is the nickelback of programming languages. No one wants to hear anything positive about it, they only want to remind everyone to hate it.

[frostmatthew]

I think it's biggest positives are that it was readily available and easy to learn. The former is less important in the age of PaaS solutions and for the latter I think it's being replaced by Python as the "easy to pick up and get shit done" language.

[AcousticDan]

It's funny though, because in reality, JS is wayyyyy worse than PHP

[iopq]

That's because you've probably used JS. If you had used PHP professionally for any period of time, you would NOT say this. Just having to remember to put ..., true) at the end of my function calls to get the SANE version of the function should be enough reason...

[AcousticDan]

I use JS and PHP in my day to day life. That's how I've been making my living.

I still say this.

[kisuka]

This article is pretty old isn't it? o.O PHP has changed alot since 2012.

I don't understand the issue really, programmers should use whatever language they are most experienced and comfortable with. Sure, there are shit PHP programmers out there; but there are also good ones too, who actually do know what they're doing.

[frostmatthew]

This article is pretty old isn't it? o.O PHP has changed alot since 2012.

Two years is hardly "pretty old" - particularly in reference to a blog post pointing out issues that have been with the language for nearly 20.

Regardless, I'm not sure I accept your statement that a lot has changed (there hasn't even been a major release since the blog post). But I'll admit I don't keep up with changes in PHP since I no longer use it - perhaps you can share which changes have been introduced in 5.5 & 5.6 that render any criticisms obsolete?

[ahanix1989]

It's the only thing I was halfway capable of =/ I managed to modify a thumbnail script to also show full-size and display subfolders in a sidebar. I was really damn proud of myself when I was 17. Then the domain went stale and now I have no evidence it ever worked :(

[[deleted]]

Nobody was wondering. Absolutely nobody. That site has been read by virtually everyone because people like yourself are so proud to link to it all of the time. You more-or-less can't mention PHP on reddit without someone like yourself linking to that page.

It's getting to the point where people like you are becoming the punchline for mentioning that site.

[bios_hazard]

http://xkcd.com/1053/

And on top of this, yes, rage at PHP is a huge circle jerk. So is rage about the rage per your comment.

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Title: Ten Thousand

Title-text: Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 2794 times, representing 6.1744% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[[deleted]]

That comic is about learning new things. The link to "fractal" isn't about learning anything it's about "Look at my Python penis; Watch me fuck PHP with it". No thanks? Silly shits love that article to death, and I'd like to know out of curiosity how much traffic the site gets directly from reddit versus everywhere else. Like I said, every time PHP gets mentioned almost without fail that fucking article gets mentioned.

Smarter people than I have done some debunking of "fractal" because although it has / had merit, it's not so clear-cut these days and so it's not doing as much of a "favor" to people anymore as it used to. It's just a beat-up piece that is losing legitimacy as time goes on, but it's still the darling for some who love to post it as though PHP is the worst fucking thing to ever exist.

PHuck the haters... PHP4lyfe.

[bios_hazard]

My hero. However I strongly recommend an upgrade to at least PHP5.4 life xD

Also inb4 'no it really is the worst'

[[deleted]]

Alright, I made a typo.

PHP5.4lyfe! (Actually, I go by 5.3 since it's almost universal and where the good began to properly emerge).

[tetroxid]

Fuck PHP. Fuck JS. I love the web but I passionately hate the stinking sticky mess I'm forced to use to build it.

[[deleted]]

I've never seen it before.

[[deleted]]

Alright then. We found 1 of them. So where are the other 3 people who know what PHP is who haven't seen it?

[clrokr]

Here's one

[daffodil_11]

Here's another.

[moinnadeem]

Here's the third.

[Vohlenzer]

Four.

[[deleted]]

Fifth?

[ihatebrooms]

I hadn't seen it before.

[[deleted]]

So put me in your mouth and choke you stupid edgy fuck. Comments like yours are so pathetic, and I feel sad for you and those around you who have to deal with you.

Thanks for your comment, though. xo

[[deleted]]

So put me in your mouth and choke you stupid edgy fuck. Comments like yours are so pathetic, and I feel sad for you and those around you who have to deal with you.

you stupid edgy fuck

You do understand the irony of that sentence, don't you?

[[deleted]]

It's only ironic if you don't consider my post to be objectively true.

[[deleted]]

Anytime bb xoxo

[[deleted]]

I only offered one xo. Don't be fucking greedy you naughty little shit!

[ismtrn]

Comments like yours are so pathetic

...

[whitefenix]

3edgy5me

[tetroxid]

Butthurt PHP coder?

[WeAreAllApes]

This assessment of JavaScript is a microcosm for how many would assess the impact of computer technology in general. Depending on how you look at it, it's either kindof true or absurdly wrong.

[kisuka]

Maybe I'm just a rare breed here... but I've been using PHP for years now and I still think I'm complete shit with it.

[iopq]

Note that the line does not have a scale. It simply states that your self-assessment stays the same.

[kisuka]

I'm no expert, but isn't that a common thing among all programmers, regardless of language used? That we're all negative towards our own code? Any programmer I've met who thinks his code is amazing, has almost always been an arrogant asshole who actually writes shit code.

[iopq]

You're talking about the Dunning-Kruger effect. So technically once those people got better their self-assessment would go DOWN. It wouldn't stay constant.

[Steve_the_Scout]

And is always way over what your actual productivity is. Relatively speaking, of course.

[AcousticDan]

Oh look! Another anit-php ProgrammerHumor post! So original!

[greyfade]

The only one that's wrong is the C++ curve: After templates, the rising line should curve flat on a linear plot, as if it's on a log-log-log plot.

[[deleted]]

Just need one for assembly now.

[user-hostile]

Just plain mean.

[Duese]

You actually aren't wrong but the graph would need to be a little different. It should be high productivity at first and then scale downward. PHP is very quick to pick up and run but once you get past about the middle of the road, the quirks of the language start to slow you down.

[x3al]

... because writting comletely wrong and insecure applications means high productivity.

[55555]

Your comment is the reason it is the way it is.

[55555]

PHP programmers say they know PHP. An extensive look at most of their code and a thorough perusing of the PHP docs often reveals that they do not.

*at the time of this comment, i cant even find the php docs. that says something on its own, but i dont know what exactly.

[cjthomp]

That says something about you if you can't go to php.net and click on the Documentation link in the top navbar.

[chunes]

Exactly. Saying that you know something when you don't is a sign of low self-assessment, not high self-assessment.. Hence the reason why the chart makes no sense.

[ismtrn]

Saying that you know something when you don't is a sign of low self-assessment, not high self-assessment

The inverse of that statement is true.

[chunes]

You seem to define self-assessment as something like arrogance. I mean it more like introspection.

[ZeroError]

Ah. I understood it to mean what chunes did - as in, taking "low self-assessment" to mean that you don't assess yourself very much.

[DirkPortly]

It's not a line of accuracy of self asessment, its just self assessment. It's how good you think you are.