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Boris Orekhov
Boris Orekhov

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Scientific problems are not real problems for programmers

In 2020, a rather famous person wrote to me through one service for sharing scientific papers. This person is a programmer.

First, she asked about the Master's program at our university, whether it was worth going there. We also talked about the website that this person had created. The site is very famous and useful.
Then, as part of my reflections, I suggested thinking about adding some functionality to this site. This functionality would have to be at the backend level, and would require the implementation of free third-party libraries.

This idea seemed unfortunate to my interlocutor. She did not want to implement any third-party code. But the main thing is that I heard a number of insults against me. According to her, I did not understand the subject of the conversation.

To show that I had studied the subject of the conversation, I went to the site and, opening the source code of the page, discovered the use of jQuery there.

In my opinion, this was already an implementation of someone else's library. To this I received an even greater stream of insults.

One of the ways to hurt me, which my interlocutor chose, was to attack my abilities as a programmer. “You are not a real programmer, you just use programming for your small scientific tasks, and you don't understand anything”.

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This is true, by the way, I am not a real programmer and I write academic code which is much worse in quality than the one created in the industry.

But the most interesting thing here is the contrast between my “little science tasks” and the apparently big and serious stuff that programming is actually for.

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