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You Can’t Teach Expertise

“Sadly, the same rules apply to becoming a good programmer.
Consider an application that stores some data in a file, retrieving
it each time a user launches the application. Beginning developers,
having learned the syntax to open and write data to files, simply
write the few lines of code that read and store the data. If
they’ve been programming a while, they might even write a test to
make sure the code is reading and writing the data correctly. And
because the code works, beginners think they’re done; they’ve
accomplished the task, met the specifications, and tested their
work.

“An expert programmer, faced with the same situation, knows it’s
not that simple. Sure, it’s easy to write code to read or store
some data in a file–when everything goes right. But it’s not so
easy to code the application to handle all the things that can go
wrong, even with this simple operation.”

Complete
Story

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