If you tell me a programmer wrote a thing in a month, and another programmer wrote a similar thing in a year, I'd assume nothing about either, because there’s too many parameters at play.
If a project took only 1 month, I’d be very cautious with calling it easier to work with, because it likely means fewer tests (leading to lower velocity long-term) and fewer hours spent by other developers trying to understand it, and giving feedback on how to improve legibility.
Creating something quickly can be really important in specific contexts, but actually KEEPING something flexible to work with, hard to break, and easy to understand is more important when dealing with software that’s supposed to last over many developers and a long period of time.
Maintaining velocity requires you to spend more time on keeping the code base healthy.
I find the notion of being a fast programmer irrelevant in a business-context. Because there I think it’s more valuable to be a programmer that can ensure business goals are met on time, ensuring the correct problems are solved, ensuring contracts aren’t broken, while still keeping the code base professional (i.e. well-tested, clean, consistent).
Being a fast programmer is great and all, but being reliable is the more favorable trait if I had to pick one. Both require huge amounts of active training.
Explain the differences in the following to a new developer:
something - a regular variable
$something - just another regular variable with a fancy char
#something - now that’s a private variable
!something - this is… uhm… a regular variable cast to… eh… boolean, then inverted…
~something - type cast blah blah bit flipping magic
!!something - same as !something except inverted again, because using Boolean(something) is not 1337
//something - a comment
Yeah… personally, I much prefer the more explicit ways to write code. it’s cryptic enough as it is, why make it harder for your peers