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Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

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31–40 of 192 posts

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#31
Well it's not popular (even though it ought to be), but Edsger Dijkstra's A Discipline of Programming is an approachable and informal (by the author's standards) look at solving non-trivial problems in a provably correct way. In fact the entire EWD archive[1] can be arranged into a course pretty readily, although you'll definitely want to skim or skip large chunks of it. Also some of the papers are just acerbic observations on life, which some people like and some don't.

And there's it's big brother Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics by Dijkstra and Scholten that more rigorously formalizes the same approach.

Dafny[2] is one approach out of Microsoft Research that attempts to provide automated tooling around some of those concepts.

All of the above are excellent places to start if you're interested in learning how to write better code with the imperative languages that you're actually going to use professionally.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/

[2] https://dafny.org/

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it does hallucinate, you can just paste it the latest documentation and the hallucination rate goes to nearly zero.

Or it apologizes profusely, tells you you’re correct, and fails to fix its reasoning or the examples it gives you.

I was trying to get it to write some Elixir code to handle Erlang B calculations and it just couldn't figure it out, but it was pretty confident with the wrong things it was printing out.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#34
Aside from raw theory, the best thing you can do is try to translate a project you have, maybe a toy project of reasonable complexity, and rewrite it idiomatically in the new language. Use all the preferred methods, semantics, and modeling tools of the target language. Use the language's docs and X in Y Minutes page.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it does hallucinate, you can just paste it the latest documentation and the hallucination rate goes to nearly zero.

Or it apologizes profusely, tells you you’re correct, and fails to fix its reasoning or the examples it gives you.

Sounds like you need to add some custom instructions to get the tone, accuracy, and concision you want.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#36
I would not call myself experienced, but I often find myself glancing over documentation first (building a mental model and a map of what features are offered by this thing), then trying to build something, rather than sit through a slow paced course. This may or may not work for you.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#37

Aside from raw theory, the best thing you can do is try to translate a project you have, maybe a toy project of reasonable complexity, and rewrite it idiomatically in the new language. Use all the preferred methods, semantics, and modeling tools of the target language. Use the language's docs and X in Y Minutes page.

But "which methods, semantics, and modeling tools are preferred" is probably what you're trying to learn.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#40
I'm still partial to LearnXinYMinutes[0]. It's how I learned enough MatLab/Octave in a couple hours to test out of an intro CS course.

Usually I just use that site in addition to the official tutorial when a concept really stumps me.

Here's their article on Elixir[1]

[0]: https://learnxinyminutes.com

[1]: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/elixir/

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