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Demystifying 6 Common Software Development Myths
2. All developers have poor soft skills
Every industry has myths. These are generally created because of the inability of outsiders to completely understand it. While some of them are just amusing, some of them are outright dangerous. A lot of people have exaggerated expectations of what building software looks like and have a stereotypical view of software developers.
This happens inside the industry as well. For example, “Scala is more productive than Java.” Well, it depends on the problem you are trying to solve. Scala is both a functional and object-oriented programming language, which makes it more productive and flexible in nature compared to Java. But there are some complex features in Scala that are difficult to learn. Java is easy to learn and has a rich ecosystem of frameworks and libraries around it.
Let’s look at some of the myths around software development.
1. It’s Not a Creative Field
This is the myth that I hate the most. A lot of people think that programming is just translating the problem space into a language that is understandable by the computer. And that’s all wrong.
Yes, it’s technical and logical, but it’s also an art form. Many non-programmers overlook the beauty of elegantly written code. Even though anyone can write code, writing elegant code requires elegance.
It also takes a lot of creativity to figure out how to structure a database to model a complex, real-world scenario. And it takes innovation to put together different technologies and have them talk to each other to develop a large, complex system.
The second aspect of creativity comes with the optimization of code. When you first learn to code, your main focus is on simply getting the code to work. But after some experience and a lot of practice, you start figuring out tricks and techniques to make your code run faster and consume fewer resources.
For example, consider a naive implementation of the Fibonacci series:
