Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

https://treeform.github.io/devcompas/

by todsacerdoti • 11 months ago

211 110 11 months ago

treeform.github.io

austin-cheney• 11 months ago

Abstract ↔ Concrete: -2 Concrete

Human ↔ Computer Friendly: -5 Computer-Friendly

corv• 11 months ago

Seeing Treeform here immediately made me think of Nim, and lo-and behold that's what the Javascript is generated from, cool!

treeform2• 11 months ago

Thanks! It's all Nim, all the time.

BarryMilo• 11 months ago

+17 human+friendly, I guess I don't care what computers think lol.

thewebguyd• 11 months ago

-11 concrete, +14 human friendly lol.

"You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code"

Sounds about right.

silisili• 11 months ago

More concrete/less human friendly, but same message. And I couldn't have summed up my own philosophy towards code better, to be honest.

ilovefood• 11 months ago

Almost exactly the same score :)

PeterWhittaker• 11 months ago

-1 concrete, +16 human friendly.

Feels about right.

joshdavham• 11 months ago

This was fun!

Also, I'd recommend NOT telling the test taker which dimensions they're getting scored on as it will affect the responses. For example, if you gave me a test telling me that you're gonna score me on Introversion-Extraversion and Neuroticism-Emotional Stability, then I may be more biased to answer questions to score me as an emotionally stable introvert since that's what I identify as.

Oh, and Abstract ↔ Concrete: 0 Neutral | Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +11 Human-Friendly

jonathrg• 11 months ago

Yes, it's so easy to tell which direction each question will push the result, that it kinda distracts from thinking about the question

josephg3• 11 months ago

I landed right in the middle - -1, -2. Which seems weird because I’m very opinionated about a lot of this stuff. I like a lot of the questions but a lot of my answers felt like I was arbitrarily picking something. That’s probably why.

Eg for testing, do I want “whatever finds bugs most effectively” or “property based testing”? Well, property based testing is usually the most time efficient way to find bugs. So, yes both of those. Debugging: do I use print statements, or a debugger, or logically think it through? Yes all of those. But if I arbitrarily said I use a debugger in a multiple choice test, I don’t think that tells you much about how I code!

I do - controversially - think some of the answers are naming bad practices. Like abstraction first is a bad idea - since you know the least about your problem before you start programming it up. Abstraction first inevitably bakes in whatever bad assumptions you walked in the door with into your code. Better to code something - anything - up and use what you learned in the process to iterate on your software architecture decisions. I also generally hate modern OO and these days I prefer static types over dynamic types.

But yeah. Interesting questions! Thanks for putting this together.

Y_Y• 11 months ago

Same. I got dead centre, even though I feel like I have strong biases, and rarely agree with my coworkers on design and style choices.

dang• 11 months ago

Maybe your preferences are so contradictory that they cancel each other out :)

I got very close to centre also, just slightly on the "concrete" and "human friendly" sides. But who wouldn't want to be concrete or human-friendly?

andai2• 11 months ago

I forget who said it, but "I don't truly understand a program until the 6th time I've written it."

treeform2• 11 months ago

That's such a good quote. I can't find it anywhere, so I'll attribute it to you.

massung• 11 months ago

Sounds like something Chuck Moore would have said. I have no idea if he did, but it made me think of him.

Supermancho2• 11 months ago

+1 abstract and 0 Neutral.

I thought the imperative vs object oriented was strange, since they are the same thing.

teapot72• 11 months ago

Yes! The number of lousy articles and blog posts I've seen that talk about "imperative, oo and functional programming"...

josephg3• 11 months ago

Mmm I don’t think I agree. The way I structure code in C or rust is subtly different than how I’d write the same program in Java. OO python or Ruby looks different from data oriented Python or Ruby.

They’re all imperative programs though. “OO vs Imperative” isn’t the right name for that design choice.

IgorPartola2• 11 months ago

Same. I am dead center but this did not really give me any hard questions. For example I controversially believe that user applications do not benefit from unit testing and that manual testing is both faster and superior in quality. Similarly, I believe that for most situations Python’s optional type system is a waste of time and mental load. It is not what catches bugs.

I think both are appropriate for well-scoped library code. But application code is just not well defined enough in most circumstances to get any benefit from it. But this quiz didn’t ask that and I suspect this would swing the score quite strongly.

b33j0r• 11 months ago

Ok. But then I took it 4 more times. I tried to maximize in any direction, and always stayed within the bullseye center-right. One time I was more computer, but I never made it out of the center 20% radius.

Maybe the message is that none of us are extremists, because we care? I like it

Waterluvian2• 11 months ago

I tried to finish this quiz but just can’t. Every question I got was a very big, “it depends on context…”

“Do you prefer strong static or dynamic or a mix?” Well… are we teaching 9th graders an intro to coding, writing a quick script to answer a bespoke data question, or writing a data processing library?

“On algorithms I focus on…” Okay, well… do we care about performance? Where is it running? How often will it run? Will the code be disposed of soon or live a decade? Do we need it working today or next week?

I just don’t understand how to even begin formulating an opinion on any of these questions without any context.

To use the compass analogy: shouldn’t you want to best know how to use a compass? What value is there in saying, “my favourite bearing is east-northeast”? That is, the substance in any of this is the “it depends…” portion. Any answers to this quiz are really just a proxy for the kinds of contexts people are solving problems in.

arjonagelhout2• 11 months ago

I have the same issue. For many of the questions my answer is "all of the above, but A in context A, B in context B, etc.". Many are also not mutually exclusive.

Take this example: "When debugging I typically:"

Write tests to isolate the problem

In the case of math functions, or more primitive building blocks, writing tests can help ensure correctness of the underlying functions, to exclude them from the problem search.

Reason about the code logically first

This is always useful.

Use a debugger to step through code systematically

Useful when dealing with a larger codebase and the control flow is hard to follow. The call stack can give quick guidance over trying to manually decipher the control flow.

Add print statements to understand data flow:

Useful when debugging continuous data streams or events, e.g. mouse input, where you don't want to interrupt the user interaction that needs to be debugged.

thierrydamiba2• 11 months ago

Is the fact that the answer isn’t easy a feature or bug?

IgorPartola2• 11 months ago

I took it as “when working in the kinds of things things I prefer to work on using my preferred tools.”

For example, I prefer a mix of static and dynamic typing. Even for performance optimization where technically I do all four of the options, trying to write performant code from the start is what I prefer to do when possible.

This isn’t about the right tool for the job as much as what kinds of tools to you prefer to work with when given the choice.

fuzztester2• 11 months ago

yes, the mutually exclusive answers (radio buttons) are a quiz smell. they could have used a mix of radio buttons and check boxes, per question, as appropriate, i.e. check boxes for questions where more than one answer is applicable, and radio buttons for the rest.

rk06• 11 months ago

pick what you would choose by default. in case of multiple options, pick the first option you would try.

it is not a DSA test, but more like intuition test

jll29• 11 months ago

That's why I hate (and never use in exams) multiple choice questions.

xigoi• 11 months ago

These questions would be better if they were multiple choice. The main problem is that they are single choice.

keepamovin• 11 months ago

I’m that way with personality tests haha but this one i screwed down:

Abstract ↔ Concrete: -13 Concrete Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +7 Human-Friendly

mhh__• 11 months ago

"it depends on context" is a personality trait

ethan_smith• 11 months ago

The "it depends" instinct is actually the hallmark of an experienced engineer - context-awareness is precisely what separates dogmatic programming from effective problem-solving.

hiAndrewQuinn3• 11 months ago

Avoiding questions just because it depends on context might be a valuable way to signal to other people that you're careful and considerate, and that definitely has value.

But quizzes like this are explicitly designed to be contextless. You're supposed to answer with your gut feeling, the first step in the random walk.

Someone who actually depends heavily on context and doesn't have a strong preference either way will answer quickly, and end up near the center on all dimensions of interest - that's where I landed:

""" You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code. Abstract ↔ Concrete: -2 Concrete Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +5 Human-Friendly """

baq2• 11 months ago

Experienced engineers will have a gut feeling of ‘it depends’ and if there is no extra context given the question is pointless and any answers are useless.

senko• 11 months ago

But quizzes like this are explicitly designed to be contextless. You're supposed to answer with your gut feeling, the first step in the random walk [...]
Someone who actually depends heavily on context and doesn't have a strong preference either way will answer quickly, and end up near the center on all dimensions of intere

Which is basically all that this test is good for. If you're not somewhere around the center, you're either a junior dev or not a very good dev.

mannykannot5• 11 months ago

The analysis you quote smells of vapid pop psychology. What empirical evidence exists for supposing that the result is reliably objective, let alone relevant?

hoistbypetard• 11 months ago

I had that feeling about several questions. The one that stood out to me was

"""

When debugging, I typically:

* Write tests to isolate the problem

* Reason about the code logically first

* Add print statements to understand data flow

* Use a debugger to step through code systematically

"""

and I typically do all 4 of those things. If I don't understand the dataflow yet, I'll start with either print statements or the debugger to understand that. If it's code where I already understand the dataflow, and I can reason about the code already, I'll do that. Otherwise I might first write tests to help me reason about the code. But I generally do all of these things and the order depends on my specific problem.

bogomog• 11 months ago

Yeah, that stood out to me as a virtual tie also. When I got pretty good at debugging was when I began to recognize which of these approaches would likely be most effective in a given situation, and when to back out and use another approach, or mix approaches.

mannykannot5• 11 months ago

I agree, but would add that it is just one of its problems. Even before we get to the questions, we are told that one of the outcomes will be a score on a “friendliness” axis. What would it mean to be computer-friendly, and why would it matter?

foxbarrington• 11 months ago

GPT-5’s results:

Your Programming Philosophy

You prefer elegant, high-level solutions that are intuitive and accessible to other developers. You likely favor functional programming, clear abstractions, and code that reads like prose.

Abstract ↔ Concrete: +3 Abstract

Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +11 Human-Friendly

abhishekbasu• 11 months ago

Interesting. Deepseek R1:

You prefer elegant, high-level solutions that are intuitive and accessible to other developers. You likely favor functional programming, clear abstractions, and code that reads like prose.

Abstract ↔ Concrete: +4 Abstract Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +9 Human-Friendly

vjvjvjvjghv• 11 months ago

You prefer elegant, high-level solutions that are intuitive and accessible to other developers. You likely favor functional programming, clear abstractions, and code that reads like prose.

Abstract ↔ Concrete: +4 Abstract Human ↔ Computer Friendly:+7 Human-Friendly

I like "code that reads like prose" :-)

stego-tech• 11 months ago

Concrete and human-readable here, which is exactly what I expected to get coming from IT (with short job cycles, high turnover, comparatively low wages) where my guiding principle is not being a dick to the next person by making sure they understand why I did things a given way, and where time to learn new things is very much a “thrown in the fire” type scenario (e.g., learning Asterisk while your global support line is down and your contractor holds non-regional business hours for support).

bravesoul2• 11 months ago

I got outer bull. 25. Is that good?

__loam• 11 months ago

0 concrete +1 human centered. Just put the code in the bag I guess.

zzo38computer• 11 months ago

It does not display the quiz. I found the JavaScript file, which is compiled from Nim, and I found the source code, and the questions.

For many questions, the answer depends on the specific use, and/or will be something other than what is listed there. (For example, debugging will involve all of the four things that are listed there.)

I am also not so sure that the quiz describes the programming philosophy very well, but this is a general feature of these kind of quiz anyways.

I seem to disagree with many modern programmers about programming philosophy, but some I seem to have more agreement with some people who do some things in the older ways (although not completely).

h4ch1• 11 months ago

You prefer elegant, high-level solutions that are intuitive and accessible to other developers. You likely favor functional programming, clear abstractions, and code that reads like prose.

Abstract ↔ Concrete: +7 Abstract Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +11 Human-Friendly

Spot on I'd say; code is the best documentation unless I'm writing some bespoke mathematical algorithms, even then I try to offset it by writing and using clear variables/function names.

sbrkYourMmap• 11 months ago

You focus on efficiency and performance. You like to work close to the metal, optimize for speed and memory usage, and prefer direct control over system resources.

We write code for machines. For humans we write human-readble media and formats; like document, diagrams, specifications, and ect...

cardamomo• 11 months ago

I would love to see how this overlaps with folks' preferred languages, frameworks, and tools.

hermannj314• 11 months ago

This quiz is a good reminder of why I support ranked choice voting.

anonymoushn3• 11 months ago

With an algorithm that can make the result worse according to your preferences if you vote compared to if you did not, or with some other algorithm?

cyberax• 11 months ago

I ended right in the center:

You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code.

brentm• 11 months ago

You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code.

Bjorkbat• 11 months ago

Ooh, fun, a FizzBuzzFeed quiz!

JSR_FDED• 11 months ago

This was fun, and the conclusion was pretty good (slight preference for human-friendly and concrete).

At first I was frustrated that the answers were very much “it depends”, but then I decided that (a) this is low stakes, (b) just pick the closest one as if someone held a gun to your head. End result was fine.

flufluflufluffy• 11 months ago

Abstract ↔ Concrete: -3 Concrete

Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +21 Human-Friendly

Pretty much what I expected. Probably also depends on what kind of code you write. I assume somebody who writes kernel drivers would lean more towards computer friendly.

bogdanoff_2• 11 months ago

I'm not even sure what the options for the first question mean...

revskill• 11 months ago

Bad. It is annoying to do 20 questions quiz. The author is a bad developer.

0xDEAFBEAD• 11 months ago

These appear to be the possible programming philosophy descriptions (found by doing a keyword search in main.js)

Abstract/Human-Friendly: "You prefer elegant, high-level solutions that are intuitive and accessible to other developers. You likely favor functional programming, clear abstractions, and code that reads like prose."

Abstract/Computer-Friendly: "You appreciate mathematical elegance and optimal solutions. You probably enjoy languages with powerful type systems, formal methods, and code that leverages compiler optimizations."

Concrete/Human-Friendly: "You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code."

Concrete/Computer-Friendly: "You focus on efficiency and performance. You like to work close to the metal, optimize for speed and memory usage, and prefer direct control over system resources."

This string is also present in the source code, but it doesn't appear possible to trigger its display: "You have a balanced approach to programming, adapting your style based on the specific requirements of each situation."

throwaway81523• 11 months ago

I got bored after the 3rd or 4th question. It's like they were all tricks.

tgv• 11 months ago

That's not how I saw it. They're very global, but relevant stances, although very much focused on beginning a new, small to medium sized project.

I ended up slightly Hitchcock (North by North West) of the center (-3, + 12). It's true I'm rather practical, but other people in here call themselves opinionated and end up near the center as well. So perhaps not tricks, but rather too broad/shallow for the measure it takes? Or perhaps the mapping from question to score is too simple.

kqr2• 11 months ago

I suspect this test gives central values to many test-takers because the internal consistency of the questions has not been verified.

Anyone can come up with ten questions and claim "these measure a programmer's fondness for abstraction". Unfortunately, we cannot verify this claim. What we can do is check statistically if the answers to the ten questions correlate strongly enough that we think they measure the same thing, whatever that is.

This involves a trial run of the quiz followed by statistics such as Cronbach's alpha and principal componoment analysis. Often one finds that the questions do not measure the same thing at all! It is difficult to come up with a set of internally consistent questions.

When we add together inconsistent questions (as is done here to get the final score), we don't get stronger signal: the noise from the uncorrelated questions cancels out and almost everyone gets a result near zero.

I know OP is not the author, but if the author reads this: if you're lucky, the data from this audience mey reveal a subset of two or three questions per dimension that are internally consistent. Use only those in the quiz going forward! Then you can trial more questions one at a time and keep only those that are consistent with the first set. (Is this not p-hacking? Yes but in this context who cares.)

BrissyCoder• 11 months ago

I suspect this test gives central values to many test-takers because the internal consistency of the questions has not been verified.

Do you prefer to use:

1. Capital letters

2. Lower-case letters

3. Numbers

4. The characters required for the text I am writing to be correct and legible

simpaticoder• 11 months ago

I came here to write a similar comment. To me it read more like: When driving, do you prefer to a) turn left, b) turn right, c) press the gas pedal, d) press the brake pedal, or e) execute a sequence of actions that get you safely to your destination? There's a good idea here, perhaps, but it's obscured by very weak questions.

eterm2• 11 months ago

The graph also seems broken, because I got +2 absract, +10 human-friendly but when plotted, the +10 appeared near the axis anyway.

The graph is would be better plotted with the radius representing standard-deviation or some other measure rather than the raw score.

procaryote2• 11 months ago

If the author is reading

pefixes and suffixes

the first word should probably be "prefixes"

fnord77• 11 months ago

Cool. I feel right in the center. Where's my job offer?

IshKebab• 11 months ago

Yeah I like the idea but the questions need serious work. I only got through a few before giving up because they're ambiguous or I want to say yes to multiple things. E.g. the question about comments - they're basically all true. Or the question about architecture - it's basically impossible to answer.

procaryote2• 11 months ago

I'm not sure these are independent variables. I mostly care about concrete code or abstractions as a way to make the code more human friendly.

And isn't being human friendly while building performant enough solutions the whole point of code? If we didn't need the humans, we'd do machine code.

draazon• 11 months ago

In a vaguely related vein, here’s a D&D-style developer alignment quiz: https://www.sallery.co.uk/lessons/quiz

ur-whale• 11 months ago

IMO not a very useful quiz.

At most questions, my answers would have been: "all of the above" or "it depends on the context"

eterm2• 11 months ago

Could someone help me understand the difference between:

    > Measure first, optimize bottlenecks only

And

    > Profile and optimize the critical path

The second seems to be a re-statement of the first?

Profiling is Measuring, and the "critical path" is the bottleneck.

raydenvm• 11 months ago

I was also thinking between these two. Still see the diffrence: I guess "critical path" is single, bottlenecks are multiple.

anonymoushn3• 11 months ago

This question in particular could use an answer about like "use an up-front design that will not prevent subsequent performance work", so it is sad that it has two similar answers.

But also, it's not really reasonable to map all these opinions onto two axes

fuzztester2• 11 months ago

I got -7 and +10.

userbinator• 11 months ago

You focus on efficiency and performance. You like to work close to the metal, optimize for speed and memory usage, and prefer direct control over system resources.

Seems about right, although I only won "computer friendly" by +1, and I suspect that's because I think "computer friendly" and "human friendly" are very close to the same thing. Code that's short and simple is as easy for computers to execute as it is for humans to read and understand. Although +10 on concrete shows just how much I hate (usually superfluous) abstraction.

anonymoushn3• 11 months ago

You focus on efficiency and performance. You like to work close to the metal, optimize for speed and memory usage, and prefer direct control over system resources.

well, it's not wrong, but i feel like a lot of these questions are "too normative" in their framing. there is some stuff that i do because of the nature of my work, and some other stuff that other people should be enabled to do because of the nature of their work, and some other stuff that really sucks that nobody should be doing and is nonetheless quite popular

anonzzzies• 11 months ago

Ended up smack in the middle. Seems wrong...

paffdragon2• 11 months ago

This isn't a good quiz. An example question (and there are many similar ones):

When refactoring code, I prioritize:
- Reducing complexity and coupling
- Improving readability and maintainability
- Optimizing performance and resource usage
- Extracting reusable abstractions

Each refactoring has some goal, some driver behind it. It could be slow performance, unmaintenable mess, high coupling, too much duplication etc... Choosing a single answers makes no sense from a programming point of view. And this is the case most questions I have seen so far on the site.

EDIT: After finishing and seeing, I think I understand it a little better why was it structured like this. If you are open to do things differently, your answers probably won't weigh in any one direction in aggregate. But if you have certain biases, you might be leaning towards choosing similar answers that shows up in the end.

paffdragon2• 11 months ago

I finished it anyway:

Your Programming Philosophy

You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code. Abstract ↔ Concrete: 0 Neutral Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +6 Human-Friendly

The compass is almost in the middle, just a little up from center towards human friendly. That's fine, since most code you write is for other humans to read, the compiler is writing for the machine, only in critical perf sensitive paths you write for computer-first... The rest was mostly neutral, because what I wrote in the parent, it depends on the situation and it can go either way depending on the project.

yardshop• 11 months ago

You prefer doing the right thing over the wrong thing, unless the wrong thing is correct in this context!

deadbabe• 11 months ago

A philosophical quiz like this needs more philosophical questions like:

How much tech debt is acceptable?

Do you have moral obligation to any code you produce?

What are your side projects?

If your code results in a death, who is responsible?

psychoslave• 11 months ago

For making user interfaces, I believe in what is the most relevant depending on context. It could be a CLI, a physical red button, among many other things including the proposed set.

An other question had the option about optimizing for collaboration, and I think apart for purely personal stuff that your write like private poetry, that should always be criteria number one.

tpoindex• 11 months ago

I nearly hit a bullseye. Cute, but limiting. I felt I needed other alternatives.

Call this a Myers-Briggs for programming style?

tonymet2• 11 months ago

Software engineering would be far better off if we divided up into factions along these lines, like Hogwarts or Divergent . Sure the author's test is a lossy prototype, but he's got the right idea.

So many "best practices" are truly repugnant, like XML, microservices, TDD, Design patterns, DRY, OOP, functional programming, codes of conduct, 75% of "devops"

Many of us found those things repugnant at the time and were lambasted for being a contrarian. Now in hindsight people are coming around. We're the ones who care about the machine, prefer short variable names, write necessary tests and do printf debugging. We just want to build stuff that is correct and elegant. Just leave us be.

I don't think any trend is good enough to apply to everyone in the trade. It would be better to divide up into factions so you can find communities that suit your preference.

I was just born this way.

srhtftw2• 11 months ago

So many "best practices" are truly repugnant like ...list of things

I have my own love/hate relationship with many of the things you list and I currently share many of your preferences. However I didn't always see things that way. Best practices start as informal approaches to address the problems of the day. After achieving a modicum of success they'll get enshrined by others as languages, features and cultural artifacts giving rise to new problems.

I find the broad tendency of unthinking "best practicification" more troubling than any particular "best practice".

Take OOP as an example. Stroustrup's early C++ presentations argued OOP meant more than "slow graphics" since people at the time were struggling to build graphical user interfaces for machines without much memory. The idea of melding state and behavior made it easier at the time to build complex user interfaces with imperative languages. But OOP isn't a silver bullet. Many attempts to apply the OOP ideas to other domains met with failure.

Fortunately we now have more powerful machines and better tools available to us.

tonymet2• 11 months ago

More powerful machines maybe, but the apps are less responsive

We must still be mindful of hertz, milliseconds , watts, bytes, airtime , watt-hours, thermals

scythmic_waves• 11 months ago

Hey it'd be great if you could rank the choices individually rather ranked-choice-style than picking just one first-past-the-post-style. I'm sure you could still compute a score, but it'd lead to less frustration from the quiz taker.

E.g. the debugging question: I use all of those methods to some degree. But I "think logically about the code" (or whatever that choice was) nearly 100% of the time, so I felt compelled to pick that one even though I didn't feel like it represented me all that well.

srhtftw2• 11 months ago

This was fun. A kind of engineering MBTI¹.

I'm +3 Abstract, +2 Human-Friendly - https://pastebin.com/Y7t4ys3J

At the end I would have liked to see how each answer contributed to the final score, perhaps plotted on the final graph.

It would also be interesting to see how many others took the test and how my answers compared to theirs.

¹- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

akk0• 11 months ago

Well that was shit. Most questions have answer options that look like:

A) I just do what's best

B) Here's what I think my professor wants to hear

C) Here's a non-sequitur soundbite I pulled from LinkedIn (not always meaningfully distinguishable from B)

D) I write enterprise Java, it's too late for me

I still finished it and ended up somewhere slam dunk in the middle, and I even avoided the A) options

satyajitBarman2• 11 months ago

Satyajit

satyajitBarman2• 11 months ago

Satyajit Barman

Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

Related Stories