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What Programming is Never About (Informal Lecture) by Abner Coimbre is a 43 minute video about some fundamental software principles.

What Programming is Never About (Informal Lecture)

Here is the gist of it.

Summary

What Is Programming

  • Dan North: write software to move information around — information is the real deal
  • Noel: programming is about transforming data, process input data to create some output data

What Is Programming Never About

  • it’s not about the code itself, but rather what you do with the code
  • educational materials put emphasis code
  • focus rather on problem solving
  • spending time on cleaning up “messy code” while you try to figure out the structure of your program is a waste of time
  • don’t waste time thinking about the code instead of the problem: the end goal is not having clean code, it’s having good, working code
  • you only have to think about clean code insofar as it has an effect on the end product (bug-free, working code)