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Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

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Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#201

Post by exDM69 »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #174
skeeterbug wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this serious? I started programming around 9 or 10 on a Commodore 64. I would go to the local library to get programming books for it. Now you can hit F12 in your browser and get a powerful console into JS. JS is fine, encourage the thirst for knowledge.

JS is an objectively bad programming language. It is not fine, it is just annoyingly common and convenient. The main advances in its ecosystem are related to transpiling it from other, saner, languages. If he has fun writing JS, then great for him. He's 12, he'll do it if he wants. But it'd be doing him a disservice not to open his eyes to much wider, greener pastures of the programming world.

JS is a bad language but it's the easiest environment to set up.

Back in the day we started with Qbasic not because it is a good language but because that was easy to set up, we all had it and our friends had it and our school computers had it.

And JS is less bad a language than Qbasic.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#202

Post by eitally »

godelmachine wrote: post #45
gilesvangruisen wrote: post #14

This is awesome! Keep up the good work. As a fellow developer who began writing software around your age, I have some advice that is definitely subjective and biased, but which you may indeed find helpful. 1. Keep practicing. Practice makes perfect. Explore different languages, frameworks, and problem spaces (interfaces, servers, distributed systems, statistics, etc.) to see what you find most interesting. You will m…

Would you please provide an example on how one proceed with T shaped learning and expertise?

I work in cloud, and one of the things I look for when recruiting solution architects -- another role where broad is a pre-requisite and some narrow depth is expected -- is systems design skills. Besides whatever you study and learn how to do as a programmer. these days it's not often commercially applicable unless you know how to make it run well in the cloud, with all the caveats that apply.

Among the things that aren't common knowledge among basement programmers: network configuration (VPCs, load balancing, CDNs, security), security/IAM, non-relational datastores, ML model development & training, and the list goes on and on and on (microservices & containers, devops, serverless, advanced logging/monitoring & problem solving, high availability, HPC/grid, blockchain, and oh so much more.

The point I'm trying to make is that you can become a T shaped programmer by continuing to study and learn various programming skills, but you may want to alternatively consider becoming broad in ways that expand your value beyond just coding.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#203

Post by dang »

noobermin wrote: post #163
dang wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment violates HN's rules. Please assume good faith and don't attack people. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html Consider the ridiculous downside of someone being 12, posting their program to HN, and meeting with this as a first comment. How awful.

Going to be honest, when I was 14 and learning to program, I quickly learned how shitty and harsh the internet can be, especially the types that frequented forums.

I'm sorry that happened. But it's a good reason not to inflict it on others.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#204

Post by noobermin »

dang wrote: post #203
noobermin wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to be honest, when I was 14 and learning to program, I quickly learned how shitty and harsh the internet can be, especially the types that frequented forums.

I'm sorry that happened. But it's a good reason not to inflict it on others.

Full heartedly. Ever since, I've always tried to be better to young people online especially when they are looking help or advice.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#205

Post by da_murvel »

Excuse my portion of scepticism, it's not the fact that a "12 year old" built this, sure anyone can learn how to code and we can't know how much help this person got along the way. But it's rather the person's language when writing plain text, here in the comments for example. It doesn't feel adolescent but more grownup to me ... But maybe it's just me realising my own shortcommings as a 12 year old, as I only was playing with my friends and the odd computer and video game.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#209

Post by kristopolous »

da_murvel wrote: post #205

Excuse my portion of scepticism, it's not the fact that a "12 year old" built this, sure anyone can learn how to code and we can't know how much help this person got along the way. But it's rather the person's language when writing plain text, here in the comments for example. It doesn't feel adolescent but more grownup to me ... But maybe it's just me realising my own shortcommings as a 12 year old, as I only was pl…

Do kids really do their own science fair projects? We have different rules of ownership for age-appropriate levels of mentorship.

Also, I and likely you come from a different generation (I'm aged late 30s) where my parents knew nothing about coding and I genuinely had to learn everything on my own reading books at a library when my parents would drop me off.

I only had access to a very expensive family computer where my parents would freak out if I changed something on the fancy appliance they poorly understood and essentially every language other than qbasic needed a pricey proprietary compiler costing hundreds of dollars.

These days with the accessibility of the internet, explosion of open source, craigslist laptops perfect for learning going for under $75 and the commonality of programming as a stable career, it wouldn't surprise me to find children living in say, the silicon valley with programmer parents who successfully get their child excited about programming early.

It's a different set of circumstances and a 12 year old able to write graphics demos doesn't sound that implausible.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#210

Post by ghoshbishakh »

hashbig wrote: post #176
sgk284 wrote: post #167

Liam, this is incredible ! I thought it might be useful for you to incrementally see how someone in industry would review or change this code, so here's a little code review via video: https://youtu.be/UkVOrcS--04 We very incrementally build up to the final code, which can be found here: https://gist.github.com/stevekrenzel/b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c8... Hope you find it helpful!

If you would start a channel where you review code of random public repos I would definitely subscribe. Well done.

+1
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