Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall Reception

  • Many found the quiz fun or cute, comparing it to MBTI/FizzBuzz-style personality tests.
  • A large number of respondents landed very close to the center of the compass, often despite feeling they have strong opinions about code style and architecture.
  • Some got clearly “concrete/human-friendly” or “abstract/human-friendly” results and felt the short descriptions matched their self-perception.

Question Design & “It Depends” Critique

  • A dominant complaint: most questions are highly context-dependent, and sensible answers are “all of the above” or “it depends”.
  • Examples: testing styles, debugging methods, refactoring priorities, performance strategies—all seen as tools chosen per situation, not stable preferences.
  • Single-choice radio buttons were seen as especially limiting; several suggested multi-select or ranked-choice to express nuance.
  • Some argued forcing a contextless gut choice is the whole point; others said that makes results essentially meaningless for experienced developers.

Scoring Model, Bias, and Implementation

  • People noted you can easily guess which answer pushes which axis, which may bias responses; some recommended hiding the axes until the end.
  • Inspection of the questions JSON showed uneven score ranges (more possible “abstract” and “human-friendly” points), implying a systemic bias.
  • Several suspected the central clustering arises from poorly correlated questions; one commenter explicitly recommended psychometric checks (e.g., Cronbach’s alpha, PCA) and pruning inconsistent items.
  • The plotting of results on the circle was criticized as misleading and not scaled to the score distribution.

Interpretation of Axes & Concepts

  • Some questioned whether “imperative vs OO” is a meaningful contrast, noting OO is largely a style within imperative programming.
  • Others questioned the separation of “human-friendly” and “computer-friendly”, arguing good code can often be both.
  • There were calls for more philosophically grounded questions (e.g., tech debt, moral responsibility) rather than tool/technique choices.

Broader Reflections on Programming Philosophy

  • Several pushed back on “abstraction first”, arguing you understand a problem only after iterating on concrete implementations.
  • Strong views surfaced on unit testing, static typing, and “best practices”; some see many modern practices (TDD, heavy OO, patterns) as over-applied dogma.
  • A few liked the idea of explicit “factions” or alignments in programming style, even if this quiz is a rough prototype of that notion.