So you read code every so often. You meet a coder. Fascinating people, we are. Most of us, at least. But we’re not the same, mind you. Here’s the breakdown:

Code Monkey - lowest beast on the evolutionary scale, the monkey is generally unable to think beyond the prescribed recipes of coding and tends to regurgitate only those techniques that have been presented by the beast-trainers. Tends to churn out relatively uninteresting code that’s possibly nice to read but boring to understand.

Code Cowboy - A slightly more advanced entity, the pirate did take a step ahead of the monkey by having a stubborn personality on how to do things, even if he’s wrong. Where all else fails, brute-forcing the way through 20 or so if/else statements is OK to do. Code tends to be ugly to read but still boring to understand.

Code Pirate - Arr! Likes to slice through code with complete disregard for design principles, patterns or all that other non-sense the lawful and the mindless feel they need to do. Tends to have a slightly more advanced understanding of code but will rather blow it up than negotiate with it. Cares only about getting from A to B safely. Kind of ugly to read code but it does provide the occasional chuckle when trying to understand it.

Code Ninja - An advanced code master, the things that the ninja does are hidden in the shadows of pointer allocations. The code looks as if written by any of the above, but the other ninjas [and superior ranks] will quickly spot the marks of the passing ninja. The bursts of genius are swift and go straight to the core of the problem. Ugly to read, possibly difficult to understand but bound to have lots of gems.

Code Jedi - Uses the force. Jedis are known for participating in Code Obfuscation Contests, writing free operating systems and core system tools. They have complete disregard for any kind of design principles, they understand problems from just reading their description and know that UML stands for Upgrading to Monkey Level. Their code is completely impermeable to the untrained [both as style an as far as understanding goes] and they prefer switching bits in assembly wherever possible.

Code Yoda - dmr. The only known Yoda to date. Another shall not be, I think.