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Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

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Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#51

Post by enkiv2 »

I highly recommend learning PROLOG & understanding how to write your own simple planner system. The hairiest real problems are hairy because they're best suited to a declarative style (and programs written declaratively can be made much more efficient through more clever solvers -- given naive code, a clever solver has a much bigger efficiency boost over a dumb solver than an optimizing compiler does over a non-optimizing one -- although PROLOG itself leaks too much abstraction for many of these techniques to be viable in it).

I also recommend understanding message routing systems used in file sharing, like CHORD.

If you don't have a strong background in the math behind theoretical computer science, you might benefit a lot from an understanding of the formal rules around boolean logic, symbolic logic, & state machines -- especially, rules about when certain kinds of things are equivalent (since stuff like demorgan's law are used for simplifying and optimizing expressions a lot, and rules for state machines are used to prove upper limits on resource usage).

If you don't already, learn to use awk. It's a much more powerful language than it seems, and fits extremely well into the gap between command-line prototyping in shell one-liners & porting a prototyped tool to python or perl, and so it's a huge time saver: it is faster to write many kinds of tools in a mix of shell and awk and then rewrite them in python than it is to write them in python in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#53

Post by narag »

A few decades ago, a new programming environment exploded: the web. Looking for a ridiculously useful tech stack? Look no further: HTML, HTTP architecture, SQL backend... a guide written at the time:

http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

Paul Graham also wrote about why the web was such a deal, IIRC in the Beating the Averages essay. In particular: you can use whatever tools you want and avoid deploying to client machines.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#54

Post by bdamm »

enkiv2 wrote: post #51

I highly recommend learning PROLOG & understanding how to write your own simple planner system. The hairiest real problems are hairy because they're best suited to a declarative style (and programs written declaratively can be made much more efficient through more clever solvers -- given naive code, a clever solver has a much bigger efficiency boost over a dumb solver than an optimizing compiler does over a non-optim…

I've never used Prolog in the 15 years since I learned it in college. It's an interesting take on programming, for sure, and I appreciated the mind-expanding exercise, but hasn't helped me in my career at all.

Totally agree on awk. I use it almost every day for quick little one-liners. Big time saver.

Also agree on state machines, because from there it is a short hop to understanding formal grammars and the foundation of compilers and languages, which has been immensely useful in my career.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#55

Post by aequitas »

pletnes wrote: post #40
aequitas wrote: post #20

Makefiles. I always dismissed them as a C compiler thing. Something that could never be useful for Python programming. But nowadays every project I create has a Makefile to bind together all task involved on that project. From bootstrapping the dev environment, running checks/test, starting a devserver, building releases and container images. Makefiles are just such a nice place to put scripts for these common tasks…

One of the worst problems with using windows (in my opinion) is that there’s no native GNU make.

Isn't non-native development on Windows a solved problem nowadays with WSL(2)?

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#56

Post by jrockway »

brianpgordon wrote: post #29

Don't go too overboard with message queues. There's nonzero development and operational overhead incurred when part of your application takes its input in a weird binary format, and when the data in your queue is thrown away after processing, and when you need to think about scaling of workers and concurrency. If you're not working with real "big data" – and, let's be honest, almost nobody is – I would advise using a…

ZeroMQ is not really a message queue, it's more of a networking library. It takes TCP sockets and adds other concepts on top, like request/reply or publish/subscribe.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#57

Post by wainstead »

lostphilosopher wrote: post #12
gaze wrote: post #9

Get good at math. It'll serve you well and never go out of style.

I'd recommend statistics specifically. Comes up everywhere and it's easy to be wrong about if you don't dig into it.

Second this, if you only work through the Khan Academy stuff on the various things like scatter plots, standard deviation, the normal distribution, etc. you'll be much better off for it.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#58

Post by jimpudar »

Learning how to use dtrace / bpftrace [0] is very valuable if you ever need to get into serious systems profiling.

There are some really cool data structures out there you might not know about. One of my favorite basic ones that I get a lot of use out of is the trie [1] (a.k.a. prefix tree). Very useful for IP calculations.

Also look into probabilistic data structures [2], very amazing things can be done with them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Probabilistic_data_st...

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#59

Post by malvosenior »

If you're coming from Python you should start looking into how other languages handle concurrency. Python has a GIL (global interpreter lock) that only allows for single threaded execution under normal circumstances. Learn about threads, locking, mutexes, semaphores, green threads, race conditions...

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#60

Post by neilv »

At some point, it helps to broaden your programming language exposure, even if you stick to mostly one language for most of your work. You'll find ways to apply ideas from other languages/communities to your work.

Try to spend some time learning idiomatic programming from one of the Lisp family (Scheme, Racket, CL, Emacs Lisp, and Clojure all have different thinking, but a lot of overlap). Play a bit with Smalltalk or a similar descendant, even if you're already doing OOP elsewhere. At some point you should learn a textual expansion language, like one of the Unix shell scripting ones, or Tcl (and learning basic Bash scripting will probably be useful in tech work). Try a logic programming language, like Prolog, or one that's a minilanguage within another, like Mini-Kanren. Maybe buckle down for hardcore functional programming (e.g., Haskell, OCaml, or discipline yourself to do it in a Lisp?). You should also get comfortable with C or at least an assembly language at some point, to have a better idea of what other languages are and aren't giving you, and also C is just a really useful thing to know when you need to write a little fast code, FFI to a native library, or get into languages/IRs for newer target architectures.

(Disclosure: I've been especially involved with Racket, an energetic close descendant of Scheme, and have some interest in promoting it, but I'd list a Lisp as one of the first in any case.)

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