Long-held, incorrect programming assumptions [closed]

Answer 1

I thought mainstream design patterns were awesome, when they were introduced in a CS class. I had programmed about 8 years as hobby before that, and I really didn't have solid understanding of how to create good abstractions.

Design patterns felt like magic; you could do really neat stuff. Later I discovered functional programming (via Mozart/Oz, OCaml, later Scala, Haskell, and Clojure), and then I understood that many of the patterns were just boilerplate, or additional complexity, because the language wasn't expressive enough.

Of course there are almost always some kind of patterns, but they are in a higher level in expressive languages. Now I've been doing some professional coding in Java, and I really feel the pain when I have to use a convention such as visitor or command pattern, instead of pattern matching and higher order functions.

Answer 2

That my programming would be faster and better if I performed it alone.

Answer 3

That I know where the performance problem is without profiling

Answer 4

That you can fully understand a problem before you start developing.

Answer 5

That programming software requires a strong foundation in higher math.

For years before I started coding I was always told that to be a good programmer you had to be good at advanced algebra, geometry, calculus, trig, etc.

Ten years later and I have only once had to do anything that an eighth grader couldn't.

Answer 6

For the first few years I was programming I didn't catch on that 1 Kbyte is technically 1024 bytes, not 1000. I was always a little perplexed by the fact that the sizes of my data files seemed slightly off from what I expected them to be.