Programming is Terrible: Lessons Learned from a Life Wasted

Today I watched the great talk by Thomas Figg @tef from EMF2012 "programming is terrible - lessons learned from a life wasted" (YouTube, 1h 6min).

In his very humorous and sometimes sarcastic talk, he describes some very interesting issues about the programming industry and programming in education.

Just to make you interested in watching this talk: Why optimism is the biggest mistake in programming, why optimism is necessary, what is wrong with learning programming nowadays, unmaintainable code, on not using every fancy language feature, the danger of generalizations in programming, the myth of the genius programmer, difference of males and females, how organization structure and personal opinions are visible in resulting code, when groups get wrong (the bike shed), leading by example, how to hire good programmers, why brain teasers in interviews are stupid, why the waterfall model is bad (the author of it mentioned this in the first place), JavaScript as a good first language, C or Java as a very bad first language, learning programming while having fun with it (what do you want to build?), how to learn programming, why he hates Jeff Atwood (coding horror; link), why he hates Joel Spolsky, why you don't have to teach OOP or functional programming first, avoid learning to avoid things, how math is not really that fundamental to programming, why being smarter than everybody else is a bad programming habit, how to get the most productive bug fixer ever seen, the CC-game, the ultimate guide to be a good programmer, don't try to write correct code, try to write code that is less painful when you're wrong, don't write code that is easy to extend, write code that is easy to replace, why Stack Overflow does not support real good advice (wait for the Q&A), and much more:

Additional material: PDF slides, draft script of the talk.