TITLE: "I'm Not a Programmer" AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: January 08, 2014 3:06 PM DESC: ----- BODY: In The Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3's Source Code, Shawn McGrath first says this:
I've never really cared about source code before. I don't really consider myself a 'programmer'.
Then he says this:
Dyad has 193k lines of code, all C++.
193,000 lines of C++? Um, dude, you're a programmer. Even so, the point is worth thinking about. For most people, programming is a means to an end: a way to create something. Many CS students start with a dream program in mind and only later, like McGrath, come to appreciate code for its own sake. Some of our graduates never really get there, and appreciate programming mostly for what they can do with it. If the message we send from academic CS is "come to us only if you already care about code for its own sake", then we may want to fix our message. -----