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What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?

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Re: What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?

#31
This is what I've learned over the years (since 9/BASIC in 1989.)

1. Number of active users of language matter more than the language itself.

1.a Fads come and go.

2. Math matters.

3. Elaborate design/architecture before programming is a waste of time. Emphasis on elaborate, not architecture.

Re: What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?

#34

Use an IDE, not VIM

Really? This sounds like nonsense to me.

Learning Vim has been one of the best professional choices I've made.

With dynamic languages I've seen a couple of IDEs that weren't able to actually deliver the refactoring or search tools they promised.

What you were left with was a large, slow editor with a poor keyboard interface.

I'd rather be closer to the operating system in Vim or Emacs and add refactoring using external tools like tern, rope, godoctor, etc.

Terminal based tools allow you to work anywhere and support easy collaboration using things like tmux.

Re: What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?

#35
post #24

"9. Trying to understand everything is a lost cause. In the beginning, I tried to chase down the “why” to every problem I encountered. This isn’t necessary." Nonsense. That is literally the worst advice you could give to an aspiring programmer. It is precisely necessary to get to the bottom of your programming problems and bugs, that's the stuff that increases your knowledge and lets you understand systems deeply. Be…

Wanted to write exactly this. This is a hurtful advice.

Re: What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?

#38
Don't drop critical thinking and "hammock time" in favor of Agile. Some problems require a bit of personal reflection, without it you can easily end up building something atrocious, even while following all the "best practices". I spend a couple of years at a SCRUM shop and all we did was "finishing stories" without any regard for architecture. The technical debt was truly stunning. These days I easily spend a day just thinking about the problem before writing some code, which then still happens in a REPL-driven style to allow for experimentation and feedback. Best of both worlds I think. Also, most programming is actually fairly easy. Focus on the (business) problem you want to tackle instead of the code. Code is ephemeral, the only thing that matters is the business value and the user experience for getting there.
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