Re: [Caml-list] Vector Fabrics is hiring!

[Alexey Rodriguez <alexey@vectorfabrics.com>]

Hi Phil,

I am posting this on behalf of Martijn Rutten.

Cheers,

Alexey

8-<---------------

Fair point. When we started the company in 2007, the experts in
Silicon Valley told us that our ambition to develop tools to create an
efficient, parallel embedded system from sequential C and C++ code is
the "holy grail" of embedded system design. In the same sentence, they
told us it could not be done.

It is widely acknowledged as well as debated that there can be an
order of magnitude difference between a real good and an average
programmer (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/14052/is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-super-programmer)).
Often these talented programmers are called a "rockstar", "free
electron" (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electron.html),
or just plain "awesome" for their ability to quickly sort out the many
trade-offs in software architecture and design. Without these talented
programmers to design and implement the algorithms to make sense out
of the literally millions of data dependencies that can make or break
parallelism, our company's vision would still be just that: a vision.

You are right, if the talent comes with a rockstar's ego, forget it.
No matter how smart, you are always part of a team. As for
craftsmanship, what we did learn is the huge difference between
functional programming and imperative programming. Our analysis engine

is fully written in OCaml. Obviously that allowed us to focus on the
algorithmic problems at hand without ever wasting time in debugging
stray pointers (the one week debugging such a Heisenbug was spent in
the few hundred lines of C interfacing with OCaml). I am sure I am
preaching to the choir here when I say we learned that thinking functionally
allowed us to much better reason at the algorithmic level and we generally
wrote significantly cleaner and more reliable code.

My 2 cents,
  Martijn Rutten, Co-founder of Vector Fabrics.

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Phil  Tomson <philtomson@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, April 7, 2013 10:30:40 PM UTC-7, Stefan Holdermans wrote:
>
>>
>> * Your friends and colleagues describe you as a "rockstar" programmer;
>>
>>   your programming ability is way above average;
>>
>
> I thought we (as in industry) were over this "rockstar programmer" thing?  What does a "rockstar" do?  S/He breaks guitars when not happy.  Rockstars are petulant and hard to work with.  We need less rockstars and more craftspeople.
>
> Just my 2 cents.
>
> Phil
>



--
Alexey Rodriguez Yakushev

O +31 (0)40 8200960   |  D + 31 (0)40 8200974  |  F +31 (0)40 8200979
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