1–10 of 15 posts
- a language you never thought you'd like but now you happily code in it. What won you over?
- a change of view regarding weakly typed languages vs strongly typed languages? Maybe you favoured one over the other but now your preference has changed (or opinion softened). What caused you to change your view?
- a different style of programming or problem solving after discovering a programming feature or pattern. How did that feature influence you?
I explained what we were doing, then wrote it out in English, and besides the line breaks, he was so surprised that he had already written his first function.
It's hard to remember what a barrier to entry a few extra semi-colons can be for a brand new programmer.
I didn't really like Ruby until I had to teach someone new to programming. I explained what we were doing, then wrote it out in English, and besides the line breaks, he was so surprised that he had already written his first function. It's hard to remember what a barrier to entry a few extra semi-colons can be for a brand new programmer.
1) "How to Design Programs" is the best book I have ever gone through for any language. http://www.htdp.org/
2) Went through "Realm of Racket" with my 11 year old daughter. http://www.realmofracket.com/
3) The documentation is the most consistent and well maintained. they created their own language 'pollen' just for this purpose. Best thing ever. https://docs.racket-lang.org/
4) I thought this was an academic playground and wasn't going to stick beside teaching me. Well, it is just awesome. I don't really touch Python much and my R code is light years better. I just went through a 1000 line program in R and It is now 40 lines.
Have been hobbyist programmer since 1978 and love Racket more than the other languages.
Then I learned about the GNU project and Emacs and stuff, and I noticed the peculiar sense of my aesthetic sense being recalibrated, so that after a little while I found the GNU style code to be pleasing, symmetrical, and well thought out.
That was a really interesting experience because I learned how aesthetic snap judgments can be retrained, and quite quickly.
I used a barebones atom install a few months ago for a livecoding presentation I did, and it drove me up the wall.
I used to think that exceptions were the best way to handle errors. What changed my mind was reading about the language Spec# that Microsoft made for the Singularity project. They actually REMOVED exceptions from C# and made many compelling reasons for why they did it. The one that I remembered most was that it was difficult to rely on a function's API, of only throwing certain kinds of exceptions, when it could change so easily. I also thought that boiler plate error handling code without exceptions was too much to handle. Go and Rust showed me that it doesn't have to be so bad.
Objective-C is really odd looking, super verbose and bracket heavy that makes most programmers wince when they see it.
Not sure when or why my mind changed. Maybe it is a case of Stockholm syndrome as we had to use it (before the times of Swift). But now I very much enjoy the verboseness of the code, makes it easy to read and most things are super clear just by reading the code.
I have been programming R for some work and enjoyed it but it wasn't very good code. So after digging a while to figure out how to get better with R I learned Racket. 1) "How to Design Programs" is the best book I have ever gone through for any language. http://www.htdp.org/ 2) Went through "Realm of Racket" with my 11 year old daughter. http://www.realmofracket.com/ 3) The documentation is the most consistent and we…