Because I desperately wanted to create something, and because programming is, gloriously, the only black and white part of my life. I can make something work once, and know it will keep working. It’s under my control. Love that. Always have.
Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
241–245 of 245 posts
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
It helps if you can get your IDE's indexer configured, so that you find refererences to functions and variables reliably. More importantly is to use an IDE with a good fast global search function and get comfortable with it. At least for me, 99% of navigating a large codebase is global search.
Is there a way to get vscode to this level.
For C++, I use clangd (works fine for GCC projects). The only config it needs is the path to compile_commands.json, which can be automatically generated by CMake and some other build systems. For TypeScript no config is needed. For Java there is the redhad Java plugin in VS which provides good indexing.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be surprised how common it is.
I've worked in many industries, and none of them put up with the poor state of tools and treat it as a given like the software industry does.
Hmm again I think mining are pretty good at making do with the poor tools they have
Very different situation
I've also found that the software industry obsesses over tools more than any other industry
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#244Learning the syntax of my language really well.
Eh, I've worked in PHP for more than a decade professionally and I still need to double check the argument order for array_walk. The syntax of how we express ideas abstractly is probably a better thing to focus on than any specific details tied to the language.
Standard library != syntax
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, I've worked in PHP for more than a decade professionally and I still need to double check the argument order for array_walk. The syntax of how we express ideas abstractly is probably a better thing to focus on than any specific details tied to the language.
Standard library != syntax
Sort of? It depends on the language but a lot of times syntax is just a fancy sugared way to invoke weird functions - i.e. `if (a === b)` might just be `if (a.equals(b))`. I work building tools to make other people more productive so a lot of the time I'll build out functionality I'm implementing using sugared syntax to make it cleaner. In some languages this isn't possible but most modern languages allow metaprogramming of some form or another.