This is so good for your age! I don't think I made anything beyond a calculator or a website before entering college.
Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#72Here's perhaps some unexpected and unsolicited advice... so pretty clearly you aren't going to have a hard time with the CS curriculum (assuming that's what you intend to study) so my $0.02 is - find a second or even third major to augment your skill set. If you are already able to get to this level on your own, you'll likely breeze right through a typical undergrad CS course of study. So consider other courses of st…
Reading this comment and its replies, I think it's evident that there's no "rule" as far as what you should or shouldn't do goes.
For example, I had a second major in theatre, but I had no delusion of working a living in theatre that could compare with the kind of career that a CS degree typically delivers. It was and is a personal passion of mine, and to be able to deepen my understanding of it in an academic setting was valuable and rewarding to me personally.
Studying theatre paid dividends in other ways as well. Managing a production is a beast, and you learn a lot about how to manage people and get things done. Dramaturgy, often called literary analysis, was quoted by my professor (a scholar on the topic) as "what are the parts, and how do they go together?" -- a shorthand that I still use to this day when thinking about a new system.
If it wasn't clear already, I had a very positive experience in my studies at a Liberal Arts school, where the connections between fields, and the value they can offer each other, are a big focus.
Just taking on a second major won't necessarily pay off, but keeping in mind the holistic point of your education may create an outcome where the sum is substantially larger than its parts.
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#73Here's perhaps some unexpected and unsolicited advice... so pretty clearly you aren't going to have a hard time with the CS curriculum (assuming that's what you intend to study) so my $0.02 is - find a second or even third major to augment your skill set. If you are already able to get to this level on your own, you'll likely breeze right through a typical undergrad CS course of study. So consider other courses of st…
i did this and regret it (38 now and have a technical CS startup), i studied electrical/computer engineering but what i should have done was gone to a better CS school or get approved for accelerated course work. the main problem for 18 yo me was lack of visibility into what a good CS program looked like, as opposed to just knowing more than the CS teachers at an eng school not ranked for CS. also, take as much math…
Can you expand upon why you chose those particular things to focus on? I’m genuinely interested and don’t have a traditional CS background so I’d like to know what I’m missing.
(Serious question. I’m not being snarky)
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
i did this and regret it (38 now and have a technical CS startup), i studied electrical/computer engineering but what i should have done was gone to a better CS school or get approved for accelerated course work. the main problem for 18 yo me was lack of visibility into what a good CS program looked like, as opposed to just knowing more than the CS teachers at an eng school not ranked for CS. also, take as much math…
Can you expand upon why you chose those particular things to focus on? I’m genuinely interested and don’t have a traditional CS background so I’d like to know what I’m missing. (Serious question. I’m not being snarky)
> lisp ocaml haskell
Covers all of the major programming languages in a deep way.
> interpreters (SICP), compilers, type systems, transaction processing, effect systems, FRP, concurrency
These subjects are the core of almost any system that you'll encounter, in practice - academic or industrial.
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
i did this and regret it (38 now and have a technical CS startup), i studied electrical/computer engineering but what i should have done was gone to a better CS school or get approved for accelerated course work. the main problem for 18 yo me was lack of visibility into what a good CS program looked like, as opposed to just knowing more than the CS teachers at an eng school not ranked for CS. also, take as much math…
Can you expand upon why you chose those particular things to focus on? I’m genuinely interested and don’t have a traditional CS background so I’d like to know what I’m missing. (Serious question. I’m not being snarky)
Thoughts from a Stanford CS graduate:
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What does this even mean? There is a lot of good wisdom from the 60s, 70s, 80s that people forget and end up re-inventing. I don't think I'm the first person to make this comment. > OO It's very subjective I'll admit. But I don't like OO, and it took me along time to realize why. There are many people who feel the same way. The difficulty is in explaining it. Because you have to look at large systems, explore the e…
You say so but give no actual evidence against it. I can't learn from that.
There are a ton of resources online about "why OO is bad". I think knowing that this viewpoint exists is a good lesson in itself.
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#77Here's perhaps some unexpected and unsolicited advice... so pretty clearly you aren't going to have a hard time with the CS curriculum (assuming that's what you intend to study) so my $0.02 is - find a second or even third major to augment your skill set. If you are already able to get to this level on your own, you'll likely breeze right through a typical undergrad CS course of study. So consider other courses of st…
Can't agree more with this. I ended up double-majoring Philosophy and it was fantastic and has surprisingly helped several times in my career
I still honestly believe coding should be a requirement in all philosophy courses. A system for layout out logical structures efficiently was something philosophy to this day sorely lacks, with formal logic being practically unreadable. And computer science has literally spent 50 years working on how to do that well.
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
i did this and regret it (38 now and have a technical CS startup), i studied electrical/computer engineering but what i should have done was gone to a better CS school or get approved for accelerated course work. the main problem for 18 yo me was lack of visibility into what a good CS program looked like, as opposed to just knowing more than the CS teachers at an eng school not ranked for CS. also, take as much math…
Can you expand upon why you chose those particular things to focus on? I’m genuinely interested and don’t have a traditional CS background so I’d like to know what I’m missing. (Serious question. I’m not being snarky)
As a self-taught seeker who spent 20 years in search of a better way, this is where I ended up for the heart of computer science. Most software engineering topics I picked up on the job — even distributed systems — but the actual computer science aspects I had almost zero exposure to at work. I had to seek those out, which meant rejecting the commercial methods/doctrines/thinking and escaping from Conway's Law which has infected anything touched by money. "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"
I now see actual CS exposure in industry as rare broadly (you'd have to work in a research org, which is both rare and also requires a PhD or other credential for one to be selected for the opportunity). Furthermore, the bulk of the CS literature & papers I encountered is embedded in those three programming languages. Now editorializing: I think Haskell is like "the periodic table of computation" as well as basically "math notation for computational structures." These deep science-y topics are hard to learn outside of school, the material is dense and there's no clear and accessible trajectory to get there, and to even identify such at trajectory you need role models and teachers of which kind industrial programmers aren't exposed to.
In conclusion, I'd likely have gotten to where I am today at age 30 instead of 38 and regret the lost time wandering in the swamp of silicon valley arrogance. FWIW my startup is a CRUD Spreadsheet, we apply functional programming research to user interfaces and web development as per https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand upon why you chose those particular things to focus on? I’m genuinely interested and don’t have a traditional CS background so I’d like to know what I’m missing. (Serious question. I’m not being snarky)
Thoughts from a Stanford CS graduate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SiFgB1lGxw
Laughing, funny video. I don't agree with the thesis though (is he being sarcastic? I only skipped around), what the guy seems to want is a 2 year apprenticeship in software engineering aka bootcamp and internships. So in the end comes off to me as a childish and ignorant perspective
Re: Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand upon why you chose those particular things to focus on? I’m genuinely interested and don’t have a traditional CS background so I’d like to know what I’m missing. (Serious question. I’m not being snarky)
> lisp ocaml haskell Covers all of the major programming languages in a deep way. > interpreters (SICP), compilers, type systems, transaction processing, effect systems, FRP, concurrency These subjects are the core of almost any system that you'll encounter, in practice - academic or industrial.
if only the industry recognized this – the-world-if.jpg. We get Conway's Law instead, which I'll cynically restate as "the org is a reflection of it's leadership" or "the org exists to lever up it's leadership, recursively" and that unfortunately has little to do with science