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Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

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Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#101

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

clarry wrote: post #81
baybal2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competent C devs are rare these days. Just too many did retire. At the very start of my professional career I thought of becoming embedded dev, but I was disheartened by the job market. The very few jobs I found were like "Senior C dev, minimum 7 years subject matter experience, $65k" at the time when web dev roles were paying 85k+ and were so easy and dumb... What distinguishes a good C developer? A high self discip…

> The very few jobs I found were like "Senior C dev, minimum 7 years subject matter experience, $65k" at the time when web dev roles were paying 85k+ and were so easy and dumb... This is a big problem. I love C. I'd love to have a C job. I don't even mind the salary as much.. but practically nobody is looking for C devs, and the few that are, seem to require incredible credentials.

Working in the outer NYC metro area as an embedded C/C++ dev. Pay is significantly lower than web dev work and I'm "overpaid" for my position. Never going to get a raise.

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#102

Post by soundwave106 »

photonios wrote: post #15
keyle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that today's devs are glorified plumbers. On the other hand, so much gets done, it would be insane to go back to "C for all the things!". It's a trade off, you're either a high level hacker, piping stuff together and watching for leaks, or your a low level system guy, squeezing the carpet.

Honestly, I think you underestimate things a bit. In a "modern" development stack you rely on a lot of work by others. But it's far from the "glorified plumbing" you describe. It's not as black and white as you describe it to be.

To me, your basic "high level programming" job (which usually includes the JS folks with their modern stacks) typically is all about translating business / application requirements into logic that computers can understand and interfaces that people can use.

Certainly, as a higher level programmer, I do think it is great to know as much lower level concepts as possible (it helps your higher level programming skills). But the truth is, business simply wants to Get Shit Done Fast. And having frameworks or libraries do a lot of the work for you saves a lot of time. Hence the huge amount of usage of "glorified plumbing" in the field.

(I don't think even C++ folks are immune to the "glorified plumbing" effect, eg: they have Boost, Poco, QT, etc.)

As far as I know, the separation between this side of programming and the more mathematical / inner detail "engineering" oriented side has always existed. (When I went to college, the "higher programming" pathway also had business courses, where the "engineering" side concentrated more on algorithms and the like. Now, even the business programmer folks did take one course in C++ back then...)

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#103

Post by eecc »

taneq wrote: post #95
yaseer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the state of things today...from the top-down, trickle through the stack learning 'the things' Yes, the path most people will take today is from high-level languages and high-level abstractions, down to low level abstractions. It's not any better or worse than a bottom-up approach for learning. The fact that people are going down through the stack, trying to learn and understand things as they go is to be cel…

My grandad used to say if you learn to sail a small boat properly, you can then learn to sail a big boat, but if you learn to sail a big boat first, you'll never really learn to sail a small boat properly. I think the analogy holds here.

Well, what counts as big and small in this case? C or Js?

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#104

Post by pjmlp »

pier25 wrote: post #36

Once you move to making mobile or desktop front end you appreciate how easy front end web dev really is. Contrary to popular opinion I think the DOM, HTML, and CSS, are an awesome way of defining and styling a scene graph. When I did some C++ front end I missed them every day.

I bet you didn't use any of VCL, Windows Forms, QML or XAML on your C++ front end.

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#105

Post by jasode »

jnbiche wrote: post #88
jasode wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just about anything physical could be modeled as a state machine. [...] Are you seriously suggesting we abandon terms like "unidirectional UI flow" and just describe those architectures as state machines? Fyi ... a meta observation about this type of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters It's an invisible underlying theme of many programming debates and the participants often don't realize…

I do understand the semantic disagreement we're having here, but most of all I'm upset ( really upset this morning) about the tone he/she and others here have toward someone who is exploring new CS ideas and techniques and learning things, for God's sake. And also, taking the time to write up what they learn, which is a step farther than I get on most weeks. It just makes me sad to think that "Hacker News" is so down…

>I'm upset (really upset this morning) about the tone he/she and others here have toward someone who is exploring new CS idea [...] It just makes me sad to think that "Hacker News" is so down on someone who seems to be the prototypical curious hacker

I totally understand your frustration.

This 17 or 18-year-old[1] didn't meet mmjaa's standards[2] to write about programming and apparently, many HN'ers feel the same way.

Maybe that's how the majority of HN community wants it to be. I honestly don't know.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116484

[2] a common "get off my lawn!" type of sentiment[1]: "To me, the "Full Stack" developer is simply someone who cares about whats happening under the hood. The "millennial developers" simply don't." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14990097

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#106

Post by fnl »

MrBingley wrote: post #97
jnbiche wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> such a response is not exactly encouraging those "kids" to learn complex programming concepts/languages in the first place, I think, and instead seems a bit offensive, to be honest. Yes, exactly. I mean, this dev is someone who clearly is working toward a deeper level of understanding of CS concepts, and here some people seem to be criticizing him for that. It's frustrating.

Ah, but you forget, then we can't browbeat the JavaScript-kiddies with our own seasoned superiority. (adjusts monocle)

Hmm; I guess that means a solution would be to personalize HN rankings on the similarity of voters' earlier votes on other articles with your own voting behavior (as a proxy for article preference...) :-)

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#107

Post by [deleted] »

baybal2 wrote: post #27
alacombe wrote: post #19

It is not surprising that C gets that much of a bad reputation when devoloper show such poor capacity at managing errors; malloc(3) return values are never checked and everything is expected to always succeed, throughout the source tree.

Competent C devs are rare these days. Just too many did retire. At the very start of my professional career I thought of becoming embedded dev, but I was disheartened by the job market. The very few jobs I found were like "Senior C dev, minimum 7 years subject matter experience, $65k" at the time when web dev roles were paying 85k+ and were so easy and dumb... What distinguishes a good C developer? A high self discip…

[deleted]

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#108

Post by 1_player »

eecc wrote: post #103
taneq wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandad used to say if you learn to sail a small boat properly, you can then learn to sail a big boat, but if you learn to sail a big boat first, you'll never really learn to sail a small boat properly. I think the analogy holds here.

Well, what counts as big and small in this case? C or Js?

I suppose small == low level (C), big == high level (JS)

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#109

Post by jnbiche »

arximboldi wrote: post #86
jnbiche wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome project, you're inspiring me to pick back up a text editor project I had started to learn Rust a while back. Yours is much more featureful, however! By the way, if anyone else is thinking about doing the same, HN had a great discussion on an article (also very useful) on the various data structures one can use for text editors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11244103

Thanks for the link and the encouragement! You have your Rust project somewhere online? I'd love to take a look at it. I sometimes fantasize about rewriting Ewig in Rust, as a learning project (have been reading about it but didn't dare to write code in it yet). But I'd like to use RRB-Vector there too. Sadly, this data-structure is not really trivial to implement... (the concat algorithm in particular). Maybe one da…

It's not on a public repo, and I abandoned it half-done a couple of years ago while using Rust Nightly, so it will need some work I think to run on current Rust. I stopped because I got frustrated and confused with Rust's lifetimes, and just quit Rust for over a year.

Fortunately, a few months ago, after another attempt at Rust writing a simple ML-like language, something clicked and now I'm enjoying writing Rust. If you do attempt Rust, just expect to be frustrated for a while with Rust's ownership system, it's a new concept for almost everyone. I think it's kind of like monads in Haskell, you struggle with it until suddenly it "clicks" and then it doesn't seem very hard, but it then becomes hard to convey your understanding to someone else.

Rewriting Ewig in Rust, including the persistent tree-based immutable vector, would be an excellent exercise. Indeed, just starting with the RRB-Vector would be a great project. By the way, your immutable data structures library is quite impressive, it would be nice to have such a library in Rust. As far as I know, there is no such maintained library of functional data structures in Rust.

Re: Lessons learned from implementing a text editor related to front-end development

#110

Post by oblio »

olddevanon wrote: post #100
jasode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd expect anyone working as a developer in IT to have learned this much before calling themselves a professional. According to author's webpage[1], he's a "student at the University of Waterloo, class of 2021" . So probably age 17 or 18. He's not passing himself off as a "professional". If majority of HN readers feel this article was beneath their skill level and a waste of time, that's more on the submitter (mxstb…

> According to author's webpage[1], he's a "student at the University of Waterloo, class of 2021". > So probably age 17 or 18. He's not passing himself off as a "professional". Fair enough, though I am still surprised he hadn't learned that in formal education already. I was taught about event driven programming before I got to university. The schools I went to weren't particularly good either so it's not like I had…

Assumption is...
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