Does good programming come with experience ?

Hello everyone,

I have about 14 years of programming experience.
It started at school, with Pascal programming lessons.
Then it became a hobby and after about 7 years it
actually became my profession too.

I like the Martin Fowler quote:
"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.
Good programmers write code that humans can understand."

From the beginning, I've had that same philosophy,
so - though my programs are not perfect either -
I do always write code that is reliable and maintainable
and stays that way when doing enhancements.

At work, I've seen quite a few colleagues come and go.
Most of them had lots of bad habits, for example:
- Way too long functions (even making the compiler fail).
- Bad choice of function and variable naming.
- No separation of UI, business logic and data access.
- Commenting the obvious, but forgetting about
the really important details.
- Reinventing the wheel (badly).
- Not doing the necessary 'refactoring' in preparation
of doing enhancements.
- etc.

I'm wondering more and more ...
Does good programming come with experience or is it much
more a matter of talent ? ( You have it or you don't )
What's your opinion about this ?

If it's mostly a matter of experience, then how can we 'teach'
our new colleagues the right habits and philosophy and make that
'stick' ? They went to school, so why didn't that work ?

If it's mostly a matter of talent, then how do you more successfully
identify the talented people during recruitment ?

Greetings,

Anonymous coward
.

Relevant Pages

  • Call For Participation: 9th Int Summer School of the Assoc of Constraint Programming, Jan 2013 (Summ
    ... 9th International Summer School of the Association of Constraint Programming ... Constraint programming (Peter Stuckey, Melbourne and NICTA): ...
    (comp.constraints)
  • Re: women in comp sci
    ... striking all over France. ... high school graduate can, for instance, enter La Sorbonne's ... the problem does not have any solutions I can see: however many kids go ... I have been programming for a long time, and along the roads, I've ...
    (comp.lang.scheme)
  • Re: Reorganising the teaching of computing in British schools
    ... basics of computer use and as the evil empire has a 95% market share it ... programming packages for free. ... I read about one school who had Micro$oft for the kids to learn on but an open source back end for the school office and servers. ... I built a test laptop for a teacher friend to take to her school to prove to them that they could reuse their existing laptops using Linux rather than buying new ones with windows 7 on them. ...
    (uk.comp.os.linux)
  • Re: Offshore Outsourcing
    ... Those who sit by and let such things happen without a response ... Germany) sets an example which allows both prison guards and Internet ... "programming" is not a distinct profession about which ... The Trench Coat Mafia students at Columbine High School weren't ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: If you were in charge of RISC OS...
    ... skills we need without having learned programming at school. ... We use Textease as the core of our ICT teaching for 4-10 year olds. ...
    (comp.sys.acorn.misc)