Cleanish Code

I’ve been reading the Coders at Work during Christmas and one thing keeps nagging at me: the expertise of the interviewed programmers is narrow. There are a few who are more of the Jack-Of-All variety, but most just have mostly done one thing, but done it a lot.

This kinda leads to thinking how much your first couple of jobs shape your career? My first programming job was building a web application on .Net with VB(back in 2005-2006). After that I’ve done a bit of Perl during my civil service and continue that as an employee(must have done something right during the civil service). Now does this make me a web programmer?

These couple of jobs have certainly laid the groundwork to continue the path to truly being web developer. It’s just that I’m not sure if that’s the path I want to take in long term. In the short term writing some simple Perl scripts and maintaining bunch of web app wrapper scripts does give me some perspective to what good and clean code is.

In some answer at Stackoverflow there was a remark “hell is other peoples Perl” along the lines of Sartre. Little harsh maybe, but there is a seed of truth there. I guess the problem is the same with any language(eg. PHP and Javascript) that is used by many non-programmers.