The Old Monk

quote:

... the phase every programmer goes through during which
he overestimates his abilities, has no sense of scale, and
lacks sense for robustness. In short, he's proud,
ignorant, and dangerous. He believes that libraries are
bloated and slow, that he can out-perform standard
implementations. He optimized prematurely, avoids function
calls, abuses the ternary operator, and doesn't use a
profiler.

Eventually, these programmers grow up, but in the
meantime, they've written a significant amount of horrible
code. I've seen this pattern again and again. As the
parent mentioned, software developers have no "engineering
culture." I imagine that in more established engineering
disciplines, students have the above attitude beaten out
of them before they graduate.

Very very true. And I'm guilty as charged, but I have reformed (or at least I like to believe so).