Sunday reading #1

3 May 2020 20:01

read the article by programmers on coming back to mathematical background

Cure Impostor Syndrome with Functional Programming: Journey of a senior developer switching to functional programming by Loïc TRUCHOT

The new day on quarantine started with the routine: reading the mail, watching the news, studying the next chapter of the “Creating and sustaining value” module. Than for changing the scene, I started completely fresh movie series ‘Hollywood’ 2020. Well, it was a straightforward genre and battered plot, but suddenly it has a profound message and great actors’ play. But in parallel, I’ve been reading the article which became the subject of my today note.

I don’t believe any evangelists. I think all of them are an upstart, at least most of all. They cling to a popular idea and with their mediocre acting and charismatic ability to hold the audience in impatient wait for a miracle just to spin up the view! The article has the exact title “Cure Impostor Syndrome with Functional Programming” by Loïc TRUCHOT.

The author is a practising programmer with 10-year experience and the position of the senior. He recently started to teach and write the articles for Medium.com.

It is the practitioner-programmer’s confession in all possible deadly sins of modern programming. It evokes sympathy and attracts attention: “Who, after a degree and ten years of practice in a field, can feel like an impostor; an eternal newbie? Programmers, of course.”

We are teachers and do the creatures of imposters, upstarts, eternal newbie? We teach all that crap: “DDD, design patterns, API, microservices, TDD, linters + prettiers, comments, GitFlow, best frameworks and libraries, Docker, CI/CD and DevOps, KISS, Redux, ReactiveX, Agile management, task runners and transpilers, pair programming and reviews, etc.”

YES! That is all the spaghetti code in mind of the future programmers! We program the students with the idea to make mistakes and then struggle to overcome them! “It’s bug oriented programming.”

When I came to the second part of the article I’ve been convinced it is the gospel! It can not be anything else! Just listen to this:

“Stop filling the endless void with more code.”

“Stop combining unreliable tools without knowing the basics.”

“Stop developing new data structures without expressing the potential of existing ones.”

“Stop being an impostor.”

“Have you heard about functional programming?”

Unbelievable! Behold, and be happy! And there is the preaching the righteous path.

I still am in doubt and looking for the path. I am at the beginning of it. Anyway, the articles like this one give a hope our students will take the advice: “I still have everything to learn from math, because I avoided it for all those years. But now, my impostor syndrome begins to vanish.”

I hope you will find 9 minutes for reading the article and reflecting on new arguments!

Stay functionally healthyі!

Vyacheslav Grebenyuk