Hi Phil, I am posting this on behalf of Martijn Rutten. Cheers, Alexey 8-<--------------- Fair point. When we started the company in 2007, the experts in Silicon Valley told us that our ambition to develop tools to create an efficient, parallel embedded system from sequential C and C++ code is the "holy grail" of embedded system design. In the same sentence, they told us it could not be done. It is widely acknowledged as well as debated that there can be an order of magnitude difference between a real good and an average programmer (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/14052/is-there-such-a-thing-a...)). Often these talented programmers are called a "rockstar", "free electron" (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electron.html), or just plain "awesome" for their ability to quickly sort out the many trade-offs in software architecture and design. Without these talented programmers to design and implement the algorithms to make sense out of the literally millions of data dependencies that can make or break parallelism, our company's vision would still be just that: a vision. You are right, if the talent comes with a rockstar's ego, forget it. No matter how smart, you are always part of a team. As for craftsmanship, what we did learn is the huge difference between functional programming and imperative programming. Our analysis engine is fully written in OCaml. Obviously that allowed us to focus on the algorithmic problems at hand without ever wasting time in debugging stray pointers (the one week debugging such a Heisenbug was spent in the few hundred lines of C interfacing with OCaml). I am sure I am preaching to the choir here when I say we learned that thinking functionally allowed us to much better reason at the algorithmic level and we generally wrote significantly cleaner and more reliable code. My 2 cents, Martijn Rutten, Co-founder of Vector Fabrics. On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Phil Tomson <philtomson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, April 7, 2013 10:30:40 PM UTC-7, Stefan Holdermans wrote:

...

* Your friends and colleagues describe you as a "rockstar" programmer;

your programming ability is way above average;

I thought we (as in industry) were over this "rockstar programmer" thing? What does a "rockstar" do? S/He breaks guitars when not happy. Rockstars are petulant and hard to work with. We need less rockstars and more craftspeople.

Just my 2 cents.

Phil

-- Alexey Rodriguez Yakushev O +31 (0)40 8200960 | D + 31 (0)40 8200974 | F +31 (0)40 8200979 Vonderweg 22, 5616 RM | Eindhoven | The Netherlands www.vectorfabrics.com | alexey@vectorfabrics.com On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Phil Tomson <philtomson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, April 7, 2013 10:30:40 PM UTC-7, Stefan Holdermans wrote:

...

* Your friends and colleagues describe you as a "rockstar" programmer;

your programming ability is way above average;

I thought we (as in industry) were over this "rockstar programmer" thing? What does a "rockstar" do? S/He breaks guitars when not happy. Rockstars are petulant and hard to work with. We need less rockstars and more craftspeople.

Just my 2 cents.

Phil

-- Alexey Rodriguez Yakushev O +31 (0)40 8200960 | D + 31 (0)40 8200974 | F +31 (0)40 8200979 Vonderweg 22, 5616 RM | Eindhoven | The Netherlands www.vectorfabrics.com | alexey@vectorfabrics.com