Real programmers

Now, we got tons of people into programming, but what really constitute a real programmer? Now I choose the word real to differentiate between mass mediocre ones, and the great ones.

I dare say, real programmers are the ones who understood what is meant by computing. What that word really means. It's not just hammering out some codes on your IDE, and getting some program to work. Yes, of course, for a living, you have little choice but to keep on hammering up some codes, so the rest of the non geek world will pay you, so you could get your next XBox 360.

Now, in college, there was two subjects that was most dreaded by students.First, Theory of Computation, and second Compiler Design. I was initially, as a freshman, figuring in my head, wow...these two subjects must be the killer subjects. It would be hard to score good grades.

But after going through it, in fact, I found the real essence of computing, and how computing machines work, thanks to our father of modern computer, Alan Turing. Basically, computers are good problem solvers by repetitively solving chunks of problems. He had the foresight of inventing a machine that could solve scientific calculations. Now how he figured out that, is by thinking, "could we break down calculations into discrete problems that could be feed into the machine to be solved?".

Another thing that opened up my mind, was when I was studying compiler design. Although I could just finished 2 out of 7 phases of creating my own compiler, but that is enough to make me realise, the beauty of grammars (used to define how to parsed language syntax), and recursion.
In fact, our natural languages like english, has their own grammar (which we all learnt since young). And through this grammar, is how we construct complex sentences.

So back to the real programmer issue. I won't consider a programmer knows his stuff, until he understood turing machines and compiler design. It's not that it's necessary to know, but knowing this brings you to a higher level, where you could see things more clearly.

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/