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Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
101–110 of 337 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#102Probably 20 years ago, you were not excited by programming... You were excited by what you can achieve with it... Get back to that realisation again by coding something that's impacting someone... For example, Take google spreadsheet and generate inference from some public data, further more do some automation around it and get more stuff.. See if you can help people at this time of crisis.. Get back to the excitement of achieving...
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#103Learn LISP/Scheme and lots of fundamental concepts you probably have a feel for, but in a far more profound way: 1. First watch the SICP series ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB... ) 2. Then work through the book ( https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/... ) If you really do the exercises (an hour here and an hour there), you can feel you brain getting wrapped around…
I've been going through SICP for a year and a half now on and off. At this point I don't feel I've been getting back all the effort I put in it.
I think it's mostly recommended by people who didn't do all the exercises, or casually browsed through it and all they were left with was the fact that you can write a programming book without mentioning assignments until halfway through or that it's more easy to write a scheme interpreter in scheme than other languages.
But the book is really dense, and you won't be left with much after trying to debug your hundreds line script meant to solve one problem.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s wrong with js?
It's rushed half-finished edge case riddled language with awful tooling. Some of the issues are outlined here: https://blogtitle.github.io/lets-talk-about-javascript/ Of the many programming languages I have used over the last 20 years, there are several I prefer, several I would rather not use, but PHP and Javascript are the only two I refuse to ever touch again because they are so utterly unpleasant to write anythi…
I find it ok for it's intended original use, which is browser scripting. It's totally fine to write small JS scripts to make the pages a bit more interactive.
People got it wrong when they started writing huge applications in JS.
Just because a language is Turing complete, it doesn't mean it's fitted for everything.
It's like you did your job fine as a carpenter using carpenter's tools and you get a dentist job, but you insist on using carpenter's tools because you already know them.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#105Subjective perspective from personal experience:
We program for various reasons.
We got into it because we loved it then it became our job and what started as something we do for fun became something we do to survive. We no longer have a lot of freedom what we want to program and we are required to code for objectives that doesn't interest us.
On top of that, it becomes something that identifies us and more or less the only tool we have at hand to prove we are successful.
Many start dreaming how can they change the world with this tool and invent the next big thing.
We start attempting to hit jackpots by creating one project after the other and failing miserably in all.
By late 20s mid 30s we get burnt out from failure and many move to management.
The ones that stick are the ones that program for no reason other than they enjoy it and are content with that. They aren't trying to change the world, become super rich etc. Sometimes they do by mere luck but it wasn't their intention.
My suggestion here is to tinker. For example, when was the last time you benchmarked a string comparison function and found out exactly why it bottlenecks down to the cpu instructions, instruction ordering, barriers, caching etc ? It's fun and can suck you in for days and a great learning experience. The example here is specific, but the gist of it is not. I hope it helps you.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s wrong with js?
Not OP, but I personally could not use JS, and would outright refuse to use, in production. It's fraught with headaches that seem trivial but drastically change control flow, == and === being my favourite example. Linters help, but it feels like a band-aid solution. I've had good fun with JS in my own time (where else can you get a GLES window up in 3 lines of code?), and I've written my fair share of helper applicat…
>where else can you get a GLES window up in 3 lines of code?
Everywhere somebody built an abstraction to do it.
#include
...........
SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO);
SDL_Window *window = SDL_CreateWindow("MyApp", 0, 0, 1920, 1080, 0);
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#107I'm in a bit of a reverse situation. I left programming some 12 yrs and want to get back into it. But I find it so hard with all the commandline installs, config files etc. The barrier to just getting to "hello world" seems so high now. Pasting my recent ask HN here in case I have better luck:
What is the easiest way to launch a simple PHP website these days?
-A simple CRUD web app
-No new sytax to learn (just good ol' PHP)
-Simple flexible front end library (I have used Materialize CSS, is that the best?)
-Any easy way to make the MySQL pieces easier to manage? Any boilerplates?
-Any end to end integrated development environment? I have codeanywhere subscription and inmotion hosting. Is that good?
Essentially I have decent experience with PHP/MySQL from past and want to launch a simple CRUD website using as much off-the-shelf pieces as possible. Looking for the easiest path to get there.
It would be gravy on top of some day I can wrap it into a mobile app (for location, camera etc.)
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#108Probably 20 years ago, you were not excited by programming... You were excited by what you can achieve with it... Get back to that realisation again by coding something that's impacting someone... For example, Take google spreadsheet and generate inference from some public data, further more do some automation around it and get more stuff.. See if you can help people at this time of crisis.. Get back to the excitemen…
I get into this because I see my first program coming out. Think that RSTS/E basic.
Studying zhuangzi these days.
To be a big bird to float over to a neverland. And to think may be you are a butterfly dreaming of being a man.
To each poison or meat.
As long as he/she enjoys it again, whatsoever.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#109Programming 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…
I second the nod to logic programming. I've been working on a board game engine in Prolog as a side project, and I'm having the most fun programming I've had in a very long time :)
Can you recommend some prolog learning resources? I googled a lot but it's still kinda hard for me to grok - especially CLP.
Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?
#110I do not have any joy as most of the things are done in job - I did something not in the job like fpga. Or go back to emulate mainframe and run my old 370/xa but not ESA assembler etc.