As a response to my previous post about why there is so many programming languages I got very interesting answer about types of programmers.
Than I have read linked article about Mort, Elvis, Einstein, and You and subsequently post The Two Types of Programmers which lead me to The Fourteen Types of Programmers .
As you have probably realized, there are many different opinions on this topic. So what is the reality? Let me add to the pile of opinions.
It always comes down to this – How do we set the criteria on which we want to categorize. Based on these criteria we can form clusters. These clusters of programmers are than our categories. You could probably do this with clustering algorithm if you can form reasonable dataset.
So basically the question how many types of programmers are there cannot be answered without specifying your criteria. And from this misunderstanding of how the question works comes discussions about how many categories there is.
There can be one category or a thousand. If you judge programmers by reading blogs about programming, there are those who do, those who do not and those who do sometimes – so you have three categories. If you add another criterion, you will have to adjust and so on.
So please, state your criteria before talking about types of anything.