Life of a programmer

I was stumbling, as usual, and this cartoon came up, and it made me laugh because it reminded me of when I was learning simple assembly code. I had to write a small app that could determine if an integer was a prime number or not. I did some coding, basically divide X with 2,3,4….X^0.5 and multiply again to see if it was X(integers would get floored).

I knew this was a stupid way to do it and a few optimizations were made, like not testing any numbers dividable by 2. But then an idea struck me and I coded it the way I saw it in my head, and it worked, however I wasn’t able to describe why. Fortunately my teacher was able to tell me, and this made me think; If I was able to code something “brilliant” but not really able to understand it, how would I ever know if I’m a good programmer or just another code monkey?