Sunday, December 30, 2007

My programming sucks

Despite being able to compete in the finals in two separate programming competition (DGX 2001 and PanaGeek 2007), I can't help but thinks that I actually do suck in programming. Allow me to explain.

You see, programming is not just about writing error-free codes. It's also very much about solving the problem using the most efficient way. Computers nowadays may be fast, but there exist problems that could that ages to compute even on the fastest of modern personal computer. Besides that, your code must also look simple. Like they say, the difficulty is not on solving the problem, but solving it and making it look simple at the same time.

To claim that you are a good programmer, you need to be exposed to many different paradigms of programming like functional programming (e.g. Haskell, ...), concurrent programming (e.g. Erlang, ...), logic programming (e.g. Prolog, ...) and etc. For myself, I have limited experience with these kind of languages. I'm currently trying to learn Haskell myself, which is a functional programming language. However, my Haskell journey is far from complete.

If I'm really that good, well, I should be:
  1. Working for Google.
  2. Writing complex 3D games with millions lines of code.
  3. Compete and win in eGenting programming competition.
  4. Compete and win in ACM programming competition.
  5. Solving algorithmic problems in topcoder.com in record time.

Well, all that hasn't happen yet, even though those are some goals I'm trying to achieve. I mean, who wouldn't want all that? All programmers would like to have some of these in their resume, no?

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