Name: Anonymous 2007-10-18 12:43
The answer is visualization of course. How easily can you visualize the structure of a program? How precisely can you visualize a program? How many interaction can you visualize? etc. etc.
If you can only hold a bit of the code (a few classes) in your head at the time you're not that good of a programmer. If you can only hold objects and cannot visualize functions, then you're never going to be a functional programmer.
If you can visualize both functions, multiple threads, if you can easily explore leaky abstractions and visualize a large part of the project in your brain simultaneously, you are in the top 20%. If you can visualize the whole damn system in any possible way from top to bottom then you're going to be an awesome programmer, because then programming is just typing out the program in your mind and correcting the minor mistakes you've made here or there.
If you can only hold a bit of the code (a few classes) in your head at the time you're not that good of a programmer. If you can only hold objects and cannot visualize functions, then you're never going to be a functional programmer.
If you can visualize both functions, multiple threads, if you can easily explore leaky abstractions and visualize a large part of the project in your brain simultaneously, you are in the top 20%. If you can visualize the whole damn system in any possible way from top to bottom then you're going to be an awesome programmer, because then programming is just typing out the program in your mind and correcting the minor mistakes you've made here or there.