Originally Posted by carpediemracing

My brother is a high end programmer. I asked him about the 2-3 other high end guys at my old job (he is still there). He said that all programmers think their code is better than another "equal" programmer's code.

It's when you go 2-3 levels up that a programmer may begrudgingly admit that, yeah, that guy writes good code.

There's also the whole thing with bugs. "It's not a bug, it's a feature."

There was one guy that would razz everyone else on their bugs. When he had a bug he'd quickly add a feature so he could re-release the package with a feature update rather than a bug fix. I forget the way the package naming stuff worked but it was like version.feature.something.bug. So 1.1.2.0 meant 1st version, 1st feature, 2nd something, and no bugs. The one guy would carefully re-release his stuff so the last digit was always zero.

Question is how perfect should you make it. If you make it absolutely bug free it could take too much time (inefficient). If you release things too quickly it'll be buggy (inefficient).

My bro said there were one or two programmers (apparently well known to him but total strangers the other way) who wrote basically bug-free stuff efficiently. He'd talk about them with a lot of respect, kind of like bike racers saying, "Yeah, Voigt is pretty tough".