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Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

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Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#11

Post by airstrike »

tfleming wrote: post #7
elviejo wrote: post #2

Programming is 1,000 room hotel of which we live in only one. I recommend you study different programming paradigms because in them we can find really interesting approaches to solve problems. For me those have been: - functional programming (with Haskell) - logic programming (prolog) - Constraint Programming with the excellent Coursera class on minizinc. Those paradigms made programming fun again for me . PS: I also…

What was it about JavaScript that wanted you to leave programming? I'm just curious.

    0.1 + 0.2 → 0.30000000000000004

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#14

Post by dkulchenko »

sigwinch28 wrote: post #10
dkulchenko wrote: post #5

For me, I took 2 years off of programming entirely and did something completely unrelated (started a monthly subscription box, so mostly marketing/sales/procurement). I was completely burned out and couldn't stand to code even side projects when I started the hiatus. When I was ready and got back into it again, the passion was 100% back. Still going strong 3 years since.

How did you start a monthly subscription box without programming? outsourcing? hiring?

I used Cratejoy to handle the e-commerce backend, so the extent of it was some minor HTML/CSS work. There's existing solutions for Shopify that do the same as well, so no programming needed.

Later on (still running 5 years later), when I got back into coding again, I got rid of Cratejoy and wrote the backend from scratch in Ruby.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#15

Post by dkulchenko »

airstrike wrote: post #11
tfleming wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was it about JavaScript that wanted you to leave programming? I'm just curious.

0.1 + 0.2 → 0.30000000000000004

That's not unique to JS.

  $ irb
  irb(main):001:0> 0.1 + 0.2
  => 0.30000000000000004
  irb(main):002:0>


  $ iex
  Erlang/OTP 22 [erts-10.6.2] [source] [64-bit] [smp:16:16] [ds:16:16:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe]

  Interactive Elixir (1.10.2) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)
  iex(1)> 0.1 + 0.2
  0.30000000000000004
  iex(2)>

  $ python
  Python 2.7.17 (default, Dec  2 2019, 13:23:33)
  [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 11.0.0 (clang-1100.0.33.12)] on darwin
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  >>> 0.1 + 0.2
  0.30000000000000004
  >>>

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#16

Post by davidwf »

I similarly have loved programming ever since I was a teenager, and had grown super-cynical about the whole enterprise until about a year ago, and now am 100% back in love. The biggest reason for this is shifting my focus from "programming as a job" to "programming as creative act", somewhat a la our gracious hosts article:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

In order to actually make that shift I personally was recommended the book "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. If you are anything like me you may experience an intense aversion to something so "artsy", and I 100% understand. BUT I decided that since following that instinct had led me to what I thought was a dreary dead end of bad code forever, I should at least give it a chance, and it was indeed as effective as promised.

Joy is out there, don't lose hope, and good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#17

Post by akeck »

Stop programming. Do something entirely different (painting, through hike, buy a one way ticket and wander, landscaping, sculpture, etc.). Let the well refill. If you're not financially able to take such a break, start saving like mad. Put a stake in the sand (say two years hence) when you will stop to recover.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#18

Post by beders »

I had the same issue. Then I went back to the roots: Lisp

And learned Clojure.

You will feel like you know nothing. You will feel handicapped. You will be confused.

Then, one day, you will understand what simplicity means and how Clojure's design embraces that more than in any other language I know. By then you will have embraced the flying-by-your-pants-exploratory style of programming at the REPL. And don't want to go back anymore.

It's awesome!

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#19

Post by yjhoney »

My journey to rediscovery the joy of programming started at a local FreeCodeCamp meetup group. I simply showed up every meeting and got to know some of the regular students. I helped them with problems that were simple for me, but explaining concepts creatively to them was a very interesting experience.

The students needed a project to show on their resume so I got together with them to have weekly sprints like a mock engineering team. I taught them good coding practice and slowly built up an engineering team of student engineers during my free time. It helped me rediscover engineering practices and finding open source tools that mirror what I use at work is really eye opening and made me a stronger engineer at work. I understand things with a greater depth.

I don't contribute any code, I just code review, do product planning, and conduct weekly sprints. We try to document a quick summary here: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app/wiki/Sprint-H1-2020

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