Good Programmers Make Bad Designers

I got an email request to publish this article a few days ago.

I was actually on the verge of moving the email to the trash when I noticed the first name of the author: Rand.

For those of you not familiar with the Wheel of Time series, the main character’s name is Rand.

I admit that it’s an embarrassing weak reason to respond to a strange email, but reading some 10,000 pages of a fantasy series obviously messes with your mind.

Then again, it’s probably no stranger than Rand Mendoza wanting to publish his article on this blog to begin with.

Anyways, enjoy…

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Do Not Get a Good Programmer to be a Systems Analyst, Software Engineer or Software Architect

When you are on the lookout for someone who will occupy the coveted position of Software Architect or Designer in your team or company, the first thing that usually comes to mind is to hire the best programmer that you can afford. Don’t. Avoid hiring good programmers for the position. Promoting one of your senior programmers for it is just as bad.

It might sound weird at first. Why should I not get a good programmer to design solutions? After all, she will be designing programs , won’t she? Actually, yes, she will be. But the thing to remember is that designing programs requires a totally different skillset than writing programs or programming .

Let us see why a good programmer will not be a good software designer. But first, let us ask ourselves what makes a programmer good, or even brilliant. To be a good programmer, you must be able to implement real world, critical software. Being able to write a simple text editor is simply not enough.

To be capable of implementing non-trivial, complex programming problems, a programmer needs to have years of experience in a particular programming language. This means she has to focus on this language in order to be fluent in it and to be familiar with its idioms. Herein lies the problem.

To Someone Who Only Has a Hammer, Every Problem Begins to Resemble a Nail

If you focus only on one language to gain proficiency in it, you will be restricted to the paradigm of the problem domain for which your language was designed. In short, if all you know is PHP, then every programming problem starts to look like Web development problems. In the same manner, if Java is all you know, you will try to approach every problem from the object-oriented standpoint even if the problem is better solved using procedural programming as in the majority of systems programming.

Knowing only one or even two programming languages as good programmers should, will severely limit your capability to solve problems. For example, if your language is C, you will find it very difficult to think of the problem at hand in an object-oriented way because your programming language does not readily provide that functionality. Unlike Haskell programmers, C++ programmers cannot approach a problem the functional way either. Whether your programming language offers structs and enums or not can greatly affect how you attempt to dissect the problem. If your language is inadequate or if you only know a few languages, your ability to solve problems efficiently will likewise be hampered.

Language Shapes the Way We Think

Some say that our language shape how we think and perceive the world . I tend to agree. A speaker whose language requires that the gender of nouns be specified obviously thinks differently than someone who thinks that the police are not feminine. Someone who speaks a language that does not distinguish the color Blue from the color Green obviously perceives the world differently compared to a person whose language does.

If we look back at the Trivium, they are described as follows: Grammar deals with how concepts and objects are represented in writing and in speech so that they may be dissected in thought using Logic and thereafter communicated to another mind with the aid of Rhetoric . For our purposes, grammar is the syntax of our programming language. If our language is inadequate, we will also have an incomplete view of objects and concepts and how they are represented.

Language, the kind we use to talk to humans and to computers, clearly affects how we think. The richness and number of the languages we know can either aid or hinder our problem solving capability.

So, Who Would Be a Better Fit?

Therefore, a good programmer, who is a specialist in one or two programming languages, will have limitations in approaching a problem. She is restricted to what her programming language allows her to do. As such, she cannot be a good designer or analyst.

But if we shouldn’t hire a good programmer, who could we call upon to design our software? Certainly not someone who doesn’t know programming at all? Certainly not, but we need someone who is a generalist. A good designer must be familiar with procedural, object-oriented, functional, and logic programming languages—not to mention good software engineering practices. She must not be tied to a single paradigm like the specialist. Of course, she cannot write a complex program herself because of her broad but shallow approach to learning programming languages; nevertheless, she can properly determine the right tool for the task. If the problem is a nail, she can bring someone in who is well versed with a hammer; if the problem is a boulder, well, she could call in the explosive ordnance division instead of pounding it up futilely with a hammer.

 

From : http://www.caffeinatedcoder.com/guest-post-good-programmers-make-bad-designers/