How is it different than simply being esoteric. Maybe I am personally fascinated with regular expressions and after much study, can belt out a half page of parse and extract 'magic' that would make the uninitiated shake their head and crown me a genius.
Sounds interesting, tell me more.
Personally, I would say that a truly talented programmer is simply someone who is very capable in mathematics and can produce a working and extendable program in a reasonable amount of time, that does something new and useful.
I would also say a criterion is that he really understands abstraction and how to get more from less. Ie think of how John Carmack creates abstraction which is just right for the problem (and in C at that). Or think about the metalinguistic paradigm in programming (or OOP used right, for that matter). Or how JQuery (and these days Coffeescript) makes client-side web code clean and accessible to everyone, without the previous Javascript hacks and DOM-spaghetti. An average programmer just plods along and hacks out a solution in a linear manner, a great programmer will traverse levels of abstraction to not only solve the problem but also shine a light at it from a superior perspective.
jQuery nor coffeescript really imply "clean" client-side code, in fact I would argue that most uses of jQuery are the opposite if you compare communities like mootools. As far as coffeescript goes you still need a good sense of structure like regular javascript, nothing new there really.
jQuery makes the DOM so dang accessible that people use it as their data, which is completely backwards. Fortunately stuff like backbone has brought back some sanity.
Sounds interesting, tell me more.
Personally, I would say that a truly talented programmer is simply someone who is very capable in mathematics and can produce a working and extendable program in a reasonable amount of time, that does something new and useful.
I would also say a criterion is that he really understands abstraction and how to get more from less. Ie think of how John Carmack creates abstraction which is just right for the problem (and in C at that). Or think about the metalinguistic paradigm in programming (or OOP used right, for that matter). Or how JQuery (and these days Coffeescript) makes client-side web code clean and accessible to everyone, without the previous Javascript hacks and DOM-spaghetti. An average programmer just plods along and hacks out a solution in a linear manner, a great programmer will traverse levels of abstraction to not only solve the problem but also shine a light at it from a superior perspective.