Well, Grammar
Sean Moore
“Would a rose by any other name not smell as sweet? That is, assuming you’ve remembered the semicolon.”
Would you mind telling your level of experience with programming languages?
What a loaded question.
It’s an HR rep, of course, who’s asking you. Just an orifice to some half-baked web form. A translator, a temporary measure, until our machines no longer require typing an an input to chew the cud on a line of best fit between your skills and some dead end job.
Would you mind describing that on a scale of one to ten, please?
How do you rate a skill that you’ve spent the past five years using on a daily basis? For that matter, how do you rate a skill that you’ve picked up by studying some books and watching some YouTube videos over a weekend or two?
The knowledge that the skills we learn, that we use, that we teach ourselves, don’t readily map to a neat and tidy scale won’t set the world on fire. It’s the product of our quantified world.
And yet, the people hiring these knowledge workers treat these skills – and for what it’s worth this isn’t solely about programming (though it is where I’ve seen some of the more heinous acts) – like vessels to be filled. Or a balance to be weighed against. Or some sort of standardized assessment.
As if.
Like a lot of other, though admittedly more established, professions, knowledge workers, and programmers specifically, are craftsmen and women. Just as a writer is not judged on how she constructs a singular sentence, or a woodworker is measured by her sanding technique. In every case, it’s all about the end product.
Most misunderstandings come about from errors in attribution, not comprehension. And it’s exactly the case here. Because programming languages, as we call them, on their own aren’t languages. They’re grammars.
“Language” implies this vast remapping of the mind; the ability to understand a language, in the more colloquial sense of the word, is a cognitive undertaking. Learning a new programming language amounts to little more than reading a sentence written by a different author. Some are like Hemingway, and are terse; others prattle on. Like your dear narrator.
In the first programming class I had my professor remarked that he knew twelve programming languages. Me, the neophyte, listened on, mouth agape. Nowadays, I’m not far behind (and yes, that is the humblest of humble brags).
The surrounding culture of the programming language – the frameworks, the libraries, the APIs – this is what constitutes the act of learning the language. It’s one thing knowing how to conjugate Latin verbs correctly. It’s another to give a sermon in Vatican City.
Again, it’s all about what the final product was. It’s not difficult to be a syntactically correct programmer. It’s another to make something people want to use.
Another great craftsman, Frank Vonnegut, once said of another great stylist, “You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. [E.B] White expressed himself if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.”
Make sure what you make, and what you love, is perfectly enchanting. The rest – rankings of skill or not – will follow.