Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
prog21.dadgum.com
Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#2+100
This also applies to the 'entrepreneurs' who hang around, wanting to make it big but lacking any ideas about anything useful they could do.
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#3I think we've all had a shiny new tool that we are just dying to use, but don't really have a use for it. That's what these posts are.
The advice is correct, but could be summed up better:
Go work on something.
It doesn't matter what, just pick something. Don't ask someone else to give you work to do. That -never- works out without external pressure, like a paycheck.
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#4This is excellent advice.
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#5My advice would have been to reinvent the wheel. Yeah it might not add to anything useful but there is an off chance it could. The reason why reinventing the wheel is good is that you have direction as to what you should implement. Trying to do something new all the time isn't possible.
I used to build tic tac toe games It was never complete or useful but it helped me learn the tech I was using. Now days creating a blog engine is my new tic tac toe.
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#6It's funny because some of us have the opposite problem. Too many ideas, but not that much interest in learning new languages for their own sake. So when it comes down to implementing a new idea, we want it done quickly. We don't want to take the time to try to figure out how to make it in Haskell, and just revert back to Python.
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#7It's funny because some of us have the opposite problem. Too many ideas, but not that much interest in learning new languages for their own sake. So when it comes down to implementing a new idea, we want it done quickly. We don't want to take the time to try to figure out how to make it in Haskell, and just revert back to Python.
I agree, that is the one the (relative) dangers when you are proficient in a language; it is so much easier and faster to write something in the language you already know, rather than having to learn everything from scratch. Of course, it also depends on how much difference there is between old and new languages; a Python expert could probably pick up Ruby in no time, and vice versa; but Python vs Haskell is a different story.
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#8It's funny because some of us have the opposite problem. Too many ideas, but not that much interest in learning new languages for their own sake. So when it comes down to implementing a new idea, we want it done quickly. We don't want to take the time to try to figure out how to make it in Haskell, and just revert back to Python.
I don't see the problem here.
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#9+100 This also applies to the 'entrepreneurs' who hang around, wanting to make it big but lacking any ideas about anything useful they could do.
There is a surprising number of these. Although I would wager that the ones who hang around wanting to make it big and having lots of ideas as to how, just no useful ones are on the right track. They just have to improve their ideas so they can be useful.
The real problem are those who don't even have useless ideas.
Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
#10It's funny because some of us have the opposite problem. Too many ideas, but not that much interest in learning new languages for their own sake. So when it comes down to implementing a new idea, we want it done quickly. We don't want to take the time to try to figure out how to make it in Haskell, and just revert back to Python.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.