June 01, 2015

Why Fizz Buzz the Musical?

For foreign language credit. That’s actually a semi-serious answer.

Going to another country (in my mind) is made up of a few surface-simple parts:

  • Seeing how things are laid out given a new set of environmental constraints and conditions.
  • Listening to a new language.
  • Embarrassing yourself as you have no idea what the social norms are.

I’ve had the fun of working with a lot of languages in my time as a programming panda. But programming in a new language is only half the battle. It kinda doesn’t count, in my mind, if you don’t actually do as the Romans do and still act like (in my case) a crass American pig dog tourist.

Every language or platform that is doing things that matters in the real world usually has the vast majority of the following, if not all of it outright:

  • The Leader or Owner (e.g. Java has Sun/Oracle, Python has BDFL, you get the idea)
  • A person that you hear of 5 minutes after joining the scene who is a positive/negative deity of sorts (e.g. Douglas Crockford). Bonus points for the high karma StackOverflow account (Alex Martelli is such a dream boat <3).
  • Official documentation on a well-maintained site that you end up depending on.
  • Tons of code snippets scattered among docs, blog posts, newsgroups, most of which are at least two years old or may be total junk, but somehow you always manage to find your particular case somewhere.
  • An xUnit framework
  • Community created libraries that follow roughly the same usage formats
  • Community-created opinions on what the best way to do almost any task is, at times wildly contradictory
  • A standardized, automated build -> test -> deploy
  • A genuine belief that it’s the Right Way, or at least Better Than __

I’ve been dropped into code bases like a shock trooper to make things happen without having a clue on what the normal conventions of the language are or how to get stuff done beyond simple syntax. Some people are lucky enough to find a few languages they love and dive deep into those. Others spend enough time hacking on their own or on OSS projects that this education comes naturally.

For me, however, as generally a language agnostic hacker-for-hire of sorts, I’ve generally been stuck in pre-fab development environments and only really started doing things in a semi-correct way relatively recently. Fizz Buzz ends up as a way to have to write a project with a baseline foundation of simple build-to-test processes in place while still being stupidly short. That part gets a baseline knowledge of the language, how to navigate it, and what a generally acceptable process for build tools could be.

Code bowling is where the interesting learning comes in. It’s easy to write tons of superfluous code in a language you are unfamiliar with (e.g. Python has a one-liner for everything, with the right module). It’s much harder to make a satire of a language that takes a perfectly reasonable convention to an extreme because you have to know the passions of the community for it to be truly effective, like the Kingdom of Nouns, even though it’s technically a rant.

Of course, the other reason people learn a language is for the exposure to the hot-and-exotic <insert desired gender here> for mating purposes. That doesn’t really apply in my case, but being able to connect with people over language prejudices and passions is more or less the same thing. At least, I’d like to think so.

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