Programming talent isn't bimodal, in fact it isn't a question of traditional talent at all.
There are only two levels of programming ability: "Bad" and "Good Enough". In all but the rarest of edge cases, everything else is a matter of preference. You think that someone's code is elegant, simple, clean, optimized, etc? That's great, but only other programmers might care about those things. The only question that the majority of people care about is, "Does it work?"
Obviously code can be written so poorly that it causes noticeable performance problems, or doesn't work at a scale past the initial requirements. But that falls under the "Does it work?" question. Basically if I'm using it and it isn't annoyingly slow, whoever wrote it was "Good Enough". I don't care if they were a l33t 10X rock star ninja or some guy who just finished a "$language For Dummies" book.
It is genuinely cool to see code that is well designed and well written. And doing that consistently does require the innate talent of a special mind. But let's not confuse elegance with doing the job. Doing the day in day out work of programming is like being a journalist: the most important thing is getting the facts straight, not writing something pretty. The truly talented can do it with the rhetorical flourish of a poet, which is awesome, but not required.
All that most people ask of code is that it's good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. If we want to turn it into a poetry contest then it's definitely a bimodal distribution, and most of us will end up on the wrong end of the curve.
Your argument falls apart completely when you take the long term lifecycle of the code into account. Which is exactly why we keep having these discussions.
And by the time we pay the price everybody cares. Of course, by then it's way too late to start caring about such esoteric programmer obsessions as elegant, simple, clean, and most of all: open to change.
Yes, all people ask is code that is good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. They just have no fucking clue of what it is that the code is supposed to be able to do besides satisfying their short term needs.
This speaks nothing about maintainability or extensibility, which can add great value to a product in the long term. These factors aren't a matter of style or aesthetics, and they go beyond simply getting code to work.
> It is genuinely cool to see code that is well designed and well written. And doing that consistently does require the innate talent of a special mind.
And we've immediately returned to the bimodal myth.
I would say it comes from someone who (1) cares about the quality of their work, (2) has a sense of what constitutes good or bad code (a sense most often acquired through experience), and (3) has the foresight (also usually acquired through experience) to make early design decisions that pay off later. None of this requires an innate genius.
There are only two levels of programming ability: "Bad" and "Good Enough". In all but the rarest of edge cases, everything else is a matter of preference. You think that someone's code is elegant, simple, clean, optimized, etc? That's great, but only other programmers might care about those things. The only question that the majority of people care about is, "Does it work?"
Obviously code can be written so poorly that it causes noticeable performance problems, or doesn't work at a scale past the initial requirements. But that falls under the "Does it work?" question. Basically if I'm using it and it isn't annoyingly slow, whoever wrote it was "Good Enough". I don't care if they were a l33t 10X rock star ninja or some guy who just finished a "$language For Dummies" book.
It is genuinely cool to see code that is well designed and well written. And doing that consistently does require the innate talent of a special mind. But let's not confuse elegance with doing the job. Doing the day in day out work of programming is like being a journalist: the most important thing is getting the facts straight, not writing something pretty. The truly talented can do it with the rhetorical flourish of a poet, which is awesome, but not required.
All that most people ask of code is that it's good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. If we want to turn it into a poetry contest then it's definitely a bimodal distribution, and most of us will end up on the wrong end of the curve.