Robot Monkeys

I posted this on slashdot, but I thought it was just too good not repeat here.

The difference between a competent and an incompetent programmer is that an incompetent programmer thinks his/her crap code is the best, while a competent programmer knows that his/her code is crap.

Sure this is funny, but there’s an underlying truth to this. Someone that knows what he/she is doing, knows all the ways the code could fail and all the the checks and exceptions that should be there, but aren’t, and how the assumptions of the underlying algorithm may not be strictly guaranteed, and so the code is just waiting to break. Someone that doesn’t know what his/she is doing thinks everything is great since it passed his/her incomplete unit test.

Or to put it another way: Ignorance is bliss.