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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?

#161

Post by irchans »

Haskell.

I lost my enjoyment for programming. I wrote very little code for about 5 years after burning out. One of my friends wanted to do a joint coding project and he suggested Haskell, so I solved one or two hundred project Euler problems in Haskell. I never got good at Haskell, but I really do enjoy writing smaller projects (less than 5,000 lines of code) in Haskell.

Haskell inspired me to read two fairly easy books on Category Theory. I really enjoyed that also.

I still don't write a lot of code. Every few months, there will be a problem at work that needs my help and then I write the equivalent of 3000 lines of C++. Or, there will be a math problem that I want to solve on the computer. I really enjoy writing those shorter, self-contained programs.

(PS: I started writing code in 1980.)

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

#162

Post by verandacoffee »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #53
yellowapple wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point about the Perl example, but Scheme and Common Lisp (including both Chicken and SBCL, last I checked) support (if not outright require) full numeric towers with rational number types, so these are indeed exact representations (unless you explicitly request binary floats for e.g. performance reasons) and not just rounding during printing. There are lots of other examples of doing it "right" (using m…

I am aware of numeric towers and actually checked whether that was going on. sbcl 1.4.16 uses single floats: https://ideone.com/ruw5qi I don't know enough about Scheme to dig under the covers to see how it's being represented internally.

sbcl (and other Common Lisps) uses what you want it to use: read-default-float-format

(setf read-default-float-format 'single-float) (+ 0.1 0.2) => 0.3

(setf read-default-float-format 'double-float) (+ 0.1 0.2) => 0.30000000000000004

On LispWorks 7.0 I get 0.30000000000000005 for double-float. Hmm.

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

#164

Post by DarwinMailApp »

I'm about 10 years into my software development career. I have felt exactly what you are describing once or twice. From time to time I feel myself become somewhat tired of programming and tend to move onto other avenues of running a SAAS product, for example, marketing and sales.

I found that the core reason I temporarily lost my love for programming (or nearly lost it on multiple occasions) was because I was coding all the time and was burning myself out.

The monotony of working as a software developer during the day and then coming home to work during the night on my side projects[1] had left me feeling down when my tasks in work or my projects at home didn't work out the way I had planned. On the flipside, when I did things which I considered to be an achievement at work or at home - I felt better in both environments. Almost like a surge of energy. Work/life balance is, of course, a two sided coin and they both have implications on the other.

I think one really needs to find other creative pursuits besides those which they are inclined to practice on a daily basis. It's fantastic to hone your skills in a particular field however I have personally felt that switching off from time to time and dabbing in completely unrelated work would allow me to recharge. In fact, it would help me think of new ideas as my mind had time to process my thoughts and the work I had completed.

When I 'burnt out' in the past I needed several weeks to rest, read, explore my city & countryside, cook my favourite foods, watch my favourite shows and just take care of me.

In order to avoid burn out, I decided to pick three hobbies: one to make me money, one to keep me in shape, and one to keep me creative. I'm sure I read that somewhere! Some of us do this by default, and there is a lot more to life than those three hobbies.. all I know is it has helped me to pace myself[2], to enjoy life a lot more and to achieve my goals at the same time :)

[1] https://www.darwinmail.app/mail [2] https://twitter.com/joeytawadrous

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

#165

Post by irchans »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #151
kylestewart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jumping in this post to recommend the exact same idea. Learn a new language outside the type of language you're used to using. I've been using my extra time indoors to learn Clojure and Forth. The things I'm learning are already changing the way I write Swift. I'm also excited about making things on microcontrollers again because Forth gives me a way to escape the horrible tooling forced on us by the chip manufacture…

Forth was the answer, at least for me. It's hard to explain, but no other language has given me such joy in perhaps decades. If you look back on those times where you just had a booklet and a simple BASIC interpreter or C64 Assembler crafting your tiny little applications and games without third party libraries, distracting ceremony and best-practices anxiety. Those times where you could be so proud of every little a…

I used to love Forth. I haven't written Forth code since the 80's. Maybe it's time to try it again.

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

#166

Post by jamil7 »

tomg wrote: post #42
tfleming wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As someone considering leaving the web development industry after 12 years: JavaScript is a never ending grind. Callbacks, then Bluebird, then Promises, then a sync await. a new testing framework every six months. a new web framework every couple of years. aimless, massive changes to the language (classes in a prototyped language? Why not). JavaScript then coffeescript then three versions of typescript. too many UI l…

Well said, I was close to 8 years in web development and jumped ship a little over a year ago. Working in javascript development felt like a hamster wheel but maybe I just needed something different.

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

#168

Post by cutler »

jerzyt wrote: post #137
ojnabieoot wrote: post #38

20 years is a long time in anything. My first piece of advice is that nobody here knows who you are, nobody here knew you as a teenager, and nobody is going to understand what "love programming" and "don't enjoy it" actually means for you. The point is: anybody who claims that they got de-burned-out with this one trick isn't necessarily dishonest or naive, and if something in the comments here resonates, then by all…

>>> In my current job I write Python, which I really don't like very much and I get burned out on Python-specific things. I've used Ruby for several years, and I love the language. I wish I could use it today, in my daily stack, but unfortunately, Python won in the marketplace. Syntactically, Ruby and Python are pretty much equivalent, with Ruby appealing more to me. However, Python won - no arguments. Got to go with…

I've been stuck on the horns of this dilemma for a while, at least for choice of a scripting language. Ruby and Python adoption is pretty similar if you're working in web devlopment rather than data science. In London the number of Rails and Django jobs is fairly equal. Agree, though, Python is racing adhead of Ruby in general and that makes me sad.

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

#169

Post by OskarS »

matesz wrote: post #136

Great write-up on that subject is in the first chapter of "Mythical Man-Month". Here is small excerpt. Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight…

Such a great quote. I think the thing is that people weight these "joys" differently. I know that for me the learning part is probably the most important: I love the feeling of becoming better and getting a deeper understanding of unfamiliar systems. Doing the same kind of coding for decades in the same language seems very dreary to me.

On the other hand, the "making things that are useful to other people" is not that important to me. I mean, it's nice when the stuff I make is useful to other people, but it's not the primary thing that makes me love programming.

So, I think the thing is that you need to figure out why you loved it in the first place? Is it "joy of learning"? In that case: go find a weird new programming language and dive deep into it (become one of those weirdos that think everything should be made in Haskell or Prolog!). If on the other hand you like making things that other people find useful, go look for open source projects you can contribute to. Think deeply about what it was that made you love programming in the first place, and what parts are missing now that existed back then.

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