5 types of programmers that you will ever encounter

Programmers are a curious breed. They excel at churning out wonderful little codes at the expense of coffee and caffeine. But not all programmers are similar. Just as there are dozens of programming languages (each with its merits and faults, no need to fight people), there are a number of different types of programmers that you will meet in real life. Let’s take a look at five type of programmers you are most likely to encounter in your daily life.

1- Tabs versus Spaces

Wars have been fought over this issue. Blood has been shed. Friendships are torn and relationships are broken over which is better. Tabs or spaces. What to use for indentation? You will definitely encounter a programmer once in a while who swears on either tabs or spaces. Things can get ugly if you try to engage such programmers. It’s best to just agree with them or you can end up on a very wrong side of them.

2- Copy-and-paste coder

Anyone who has studied computer science will know about this one. Don’t really know what they are doing, but the one thing they do pretty well is copy and paste the code from Google. You can find them working on simple assignments to highly classified mission-critical projects and they would still probably have the same amount of expertise as a freshman studying Intro to Computer Programming.

3- The fixer-upper

These programmers will rather write three more functions than fixing the one function which is broken. If condition doesn’t work? Let’s try to put another if in there and see if that will fix the first one. Their code will work but it looks more like it needs to go through a spaghetti straightener rather than a compiler.

4- The perfectionist

These type of programmers don’t care how much time it takes to code, or how many resources they burn through. They want every line to be inch perfect. They will scour through dusty pages of old and buried documentation to find a way to reduce the code by three lines.

Can you find the occurrence of a substring in 30 lines of code? Pfft. They can do it in 10, and they still won’t be satisfied by the efficiency of their work. It certainly helped to have them around when there was only 64 KB RAM on computers, but now it just gets annoying sometimes.

5- The smart one

The last type of programmers are the smart ones. They know that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel and do the work that somebody has already done. So instead of writing the same type of code, again and again, they just use an API to make use of the functionality that someone else is providing. These type of programmers can use the work that has already been done and dedicate their efforts towards improving upon that existing technology.

If you are a programmer and you are hoping to be more like the smart programmer, you can learn a lot more about APIs by taking a part in APIthon, Pakistan’s first ever API-based hackathon, which is being held on 13th and 14th January in Lahore.