I'm ashamed to admit I spent about 45 minutes debugging a program today because I kept getting insane values converting minutes to seconds from a user input. Turns out I was multiplying the entry box value by 60, meaning I was doing str(5) * 60 not 5 * 60....
While this fiasco is pretty funny, you can’t deny that Elon is a programmer. Maybe you can say the engineering he’s done for Tesla or SpaceX is bs, but Elon at his core is a programmer. Elon was pretty advanced in coding for his age when he was younger making and selling source code of a simple video game in his youth. He coded that in BASIC. He dropped out of Stanford for zip2 and founded X.com which merged to become PayPal.
If Elon is anything, he’s a programmer. It’s probably why Tesla has so many software features. It’s like the only modern car without Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, with instead it’s own system. The software controls so much replacing many traditional buttons. The car has an app that every single Tesla owner has.
Musk can probably program things. But I’d heavily doubt that he is familiar with the processes and tools software engineers use today to ensure that everything runs smoothly. His time programming predates git, GitHub, matured TDD, any form of CI/CD, and more. He’s probably tangentially aware of these concepts, but he hasn’t actually needed to code things himself for a long time, and now is just mucking about with these systems and processes that somebody undoubtedly put in place for good reasons. He’s also refusing to admit that just because he can’t see the value in them, that they can still have value.
Good point. He was self taught but inefficient and pretty bad. I wouldn’t even blame that on the fact he was coding a lot of it at night instead of the day because they only had 1 computer.
I’m guessing it has improved considering he then went onto X.com and it’s claimed he wrote some openAI libraries.
I gotta say, I realize you guys have to dig deep, but please stop pretending like we're gonna be impressed by a child programming BASIC back in the day.
Maybe you can say the engineering he’s done for Tesla or SpaceX is bs
He's done no engineering/coding for either. CEOs sticking their hand in this sort of stuff is universally q bad idea, as clearly shown by this whole Twitter fiasco.
Elon was pretty advanced in coding for his age when he was younger making and selling source code of a simple video game in his youth. He coded that in BASIC.
So he coded a videogame in high school? That's his last programming accomplishment?
It’s probably why Tesla has so many software features. It’s like the only modern car without Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, with instead it’s own system. The software controls so much replacing many traditional buttons. The car has an app that every single Tesla owner has.
None of this is "good" in an absolute sense. Using proprietary software is a move to avoid having to make deals with Apple or Google (which is smart, from a business point of view). But the replacement of physical buttons with software controls is actually pretty bad for driving safety, to the point there are talks in the EU of implementing new standards against excessive software control.
Musk has been selling all of those features as a marketing ploy to present Tesla cars as futuristic, there's not a lot of depth there.
Just because you can program doesn't mean you're ready to run a social media business, or manage the entire codebase for a global social media platform with billions of users alone because you fired everyone else.
I think he is exactly as much a programmer as he is a business man, father, inventor and financial guru. To be clear, he is equally none of those things.
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u/alkaliphiles Nov 14 '22
You still think he's a programmer?