No post body was provided.
Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#2[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#3Related, from 5 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/mump9/if_you_were_be...
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#4This: https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis
But then I grew tired of waiting and just did it already :)
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#5A Bitcoin trading bot that makes me a tonne of money
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#6The "hard" programs I've come up with over the years very rarely have anything to do with programming skill.
A content-first web browser (think Reader-Mode for every page), depends on: a) Learning the differences between the HTTP|HTML|CSS|JS specs, and what browsers actually implement, and b) heuristically lifting out the content.
b) is a programming problem, not easy to solve well, but there's been a lot of work in that area to lean on.
a) is a documentation/people problem. Not my area of expertise, but definitely the harder problem of the two.
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#7It's rarely me not being good enough that's the problem. If I had more time, that would allow me to write the programs I'd want to write.
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#8It's rarely me not being good enough that's the problem. If I had more time, that would allow me to write the programs I'd want to write.
I love this comment because this is how I always feel.
Programming just feels like a large game of managing expectations. It often feels like I never have time to do anything "right", so I have to make trade-offs before some impending deadline. This is a serious source of discomfort in this profession that never seems to want to go away.
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#9As neilsimp1 mentioned, it's not about not being good enough, as that's fixable with sufficient time.
To answer your question, I'd write a fantasy economic sim game like a sequel to Patrician III or something, except with wizards and weird races and stuff. A big bit of the game would be negotiating with customers for custom goods and services.
Exactly how much money would it cost to for a casting of Bull's Strength before a mercenary engagement? What are the obligations a wizard has in the event their town gets attacked? When is the Teleport spell economically viable vs just taking a boat? How do you negotiate with beings very alien to you?
Classic pet project that I've wanted to do for years, just never had the time/concentration to do it.
Re: Ask HN: If you were better at programming, what program would you write?
#10A daemon app that saves my slack messages to gmail or even local text files, so I can find older messages. I know this is not difficult, but wish I had some bandwidth to work on this...