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Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

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Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#61

Post by Yaggo »

> Most clients just want a complete functional website not just a design. So I learned HTML, CSS and eventually Javascript, and PHP.

I think you are answering yourself. If your clients are your motivation to learn coding, it doesn't surprise me at all that you don't love it. Most of (good) coders learn to code because they are simply fascinated by the coding itself. They are not paid for it.

If graphic design is what you love, maybe you could try to extend your contact network to digital media / e-business companies that would buy your designs and do the actual coding for their CMS? I used to be a web frontend developer in a company that regularly bought designs from "trusted" freelancers.

Having knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS is one of the key requirements for a good web designer, so your learning is absolutely not misspend.

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#62

Post by Ixiaus »

It's boring because you are "coding" and not "programming". Coding is just pasting together libraries and pieces of code that have been written by someone else; there is little fun in that. Even the passionate and brilliant programmers out there will tell you that.

So, what parts of a project when coding are boring and monotonous? Program it, don't code it; IOW, create a utility or tool to automate that aspect of it.

Instead of copy pasting your controller from project A to project B to get started, write a script that will generate the skeleton of that controller for you. Find the little nooks and crannies of your project that could be cleaner, clearer, or abstracted enough to reduce duplicity of effort.

Programming is thinking and coding combined (you always have to "type" something), coding has the thinking aspect removed, which is why it gets so boring.

As has been stated, you simply may not be wired for it - in which case you should sub-contract the programming work to someone who is good at it and enjoys it. That's how I made the majority of my living the past year, I was sub-contracted by a designer who managed his own clientele.

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#63

Post by weavejester »

"I love solving problems too, but conceptually not through coding."

What's the difference? In my experience, finding a solution to a problem with a good programming language is easier than trying to do it entirely in my head.

That said, I don't count PHP as a particularly good programming language. Certainly not one I'd use if I could avoid it :)

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#64

Post by chronomex »

ableal wrote: post #33
alexwyser wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's a great search engine, and its all due to their brilliant algorithms and codes and everything. I get that. The programmers at Google are tackling a lot of problems and coming up with birlliant solutions. I get that. I just cant imagine someone has fun writing those thousands of lines of code. Even more so when the code isnt for a cool new feature but for a mundane fix. I image a lot of programmers at Twitter…

> spend hours writing code just so their site/product can handle all the traffic. How it that fun? It's a personal offense to have something that could work at, for instance, 20MB/s, only performing at half the speed. Sometimes management has to step in and and put a stop to that if it's not worth the effort. Could be worse - seems athletes put many hours in shaving down a couple hundredths of second in races, etc. O…

I'm currently writing an emulator in assembly, I certainly spend hours shaving microseconds. :)

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#65

Post by Yaggo »

rimantas wrote: post #59
nopassrecover wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding". I was forced to use PHP on a recent project and I felt like tearing my eyes out it was that bad and immature compared to other methods. It was like telling a formula one driver they have to drive through peak hour in a rundown 1970s ford and then asking if they like driving.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding" So sad to see similar statements. I am the only one who loves working with HTML and CSS? I wouldn't say I love PHP, sure it is not the best language out there, but it is not that bad. Unless you never bothered to check out what's in PHP 5 (or 5.3) and keep going with PHP 4 code. Don't dismiss HTML. Sure, it is not programming, but so…

> I am the only one who loves working with HTML and CSS?

No. HTML/CSS coding (or "markupping") is somewhat under-valued skill. Maybe that's because everybody and their neighbour's dog can do it (well, at least produce some results), but only those who really master it can see what's the huge difference between good and average/bad markup.

The only thing which really bothers me about web frontend coding, is huge quality variance of different runtime implementations (read: IE). Working for my own startup partially solves this problem, because I can decide whether I want to "support" these flawed implementations. To summarize, I want to solve real problems with proper tools, not artificial barriers caused by poor work of someone.

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#66

Post by access_denied »

rimantas wrote: post #59
nopassrecover wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding". I was forced to use PHP on a recent project and I felt like tearing my eyes out it was that bad and immature compared to other methods. It was like telling a formula one driver they have to drive through peak hour in a rundown 1970s ford and then asking if they like driving.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding" So sad to see similar statements. I am the only one who loves working with HTML and CSS? I wouldn't say I love PHP, sure it is not the best language out there, but it is not that bad. Unless you never bothered to check out what's in PHP 5 (or 5.3) and keep going with PHP 4 code. Don't dismiss HTML. Sure, it is not programming, but so…

I love working in HTML/CSS/PHP too! It is a little bit like writing visual effects for a game. You have that imediate feedback loop. You improve the code a little and the next second you can watch how it looks like on the screen.

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#67

Post by nopassrecover »

rimantas wrote: post #59
nopassrecover wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding". I was forced to use PHP on a recent project and I felt like tearing my eyes out it was that bad and immature compared to other methods. It was like telling a formula one driver they have to drive through peak hour in a rundown 1970s ford and then asking if they like driving.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding" So sad to see similar statements. I am the only one who loves working with HTML and CSS? I wouldn't say I love PHP, sure it is not the best language out there, but it is not that bad. Unless you never bothered to check out what's in PHP 5 (or 5.3) and keep going with PHP 4 code. Don't dismiss HTML. Sure, it is not programming, but so…

I hate HTML/CSS because of how much better it could be. Don't get me wrong it's nicer than other layout formats but it's still terribly designed for what it could be, not to mention implementation issues galore. Having said that, I love that there are people like yourself who love diving into this stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#68

Post by nopassrecover »

robryan wrote: post #14
nopassrecover wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding". I was forced to use PHP on a recent project and I felt like tearing my eyes out it was that bad and immature compared to other methods. It was like telling a formula one driver they have to drive through peak hour in a rundown 1970s ford and then asking if they like driving.

Anything in particular that makes you really dislike PHP?

I think a post is needed because I'd just be rambling crazy mutterings right now. The only thing I like in PHP is associative arrays, just about everything else is wrong. If you want a quick throwaway script PHP is fine but if you want any level of decently sized and maintainable system PHP is not your friend.

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#69

Post by angilly »

leftnode wrote: post #21

A lot of other posters are saying that the web dev you're doing is boring (and as someone who's been doing it for 10 years, I can concur). Setting up the 1000th Wordpress blog or making a basic 10 page website gets boring after a while. So, pick harder problems to work on. As the web expands, they're definitely out there. If you're setting up basic Wordpress blogs, you'll rarely encounter them, but if you work on som…

Slightly off topic, but this jumped out at me: "In hindsight, I could've used something like Apache Solr or Lucene, but I just enjoyed finding the solution to a complex problem and building it myself..."

If I were your client I could see getting fairly annoyed at this. Is/was your client pissed that you spent (wasted) time building something from scratch when you could have just used something open source? Or were there legitimate reasons in this case to build something from scratch?

Re: Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?

#70

Post by gte910h »

rimantas wrote: post #59
nopassrecover wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding". I was forced to use PHP on a recent project and I felt like tearing my eyes out it was that bad and immature compared to other methods. It was like telling a formula one driver they have to drive through peak hour in a rundown 1970s ford and then asking if they like driving.

Yeah HTML/CSS/Javascript and PHP are some of the worst possible examples of "coding" So sad to see similar statements. I am the only one who loves working with HTML and CSS? I wouldn't say I love PHP, sure it is not the best language out there, but it is not that bad. Unless you never bothered to check out what's in PHP 5 (or 5.3) and keep going with PHP 4 code. Don't dismiss HTML. Sure, it is not programming, but so…

> I wouldn't say I love PHP, sure it is not the best language out there, but it is not that bad. Unless you never bothered to check out what's in PHP 5 (or 5.3) and keep going with PHP 4 code.

The issue is you rarely just get to work with your own code. There's lots of crappy crappy php out there, and while php5 is better, it's still not going to exile all that bad code away.

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