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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

#121

Post by cameronbrown »

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned spreadsheets - specifically Google Sheets or something scriptable and hosted. Recently I've built up a small system which sucks in data from a few places (fitness, task management, calendar,..) and analyses it against several goals I've set. This means I can see how I'm progressing towards what I want without even touching it anymore.

They're a really nice UI for bootstraping projects, and even some small databases. A current project of mine for a client uses sheets as a backing store for an email collection list. Since there's only a few hundred rows, it makes sense at this scale and works really well for non-technical users.

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

#122

Post by 333c »

btilly wrote: post #118
333c wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three most important basic git operations to know (in my opinion) git checkout -b git log git rebase -i

I strongly prefer git merge over git rebase. Using rebase results in a cleaner history and simplified workflow in many cases. However it also means that when you have a disaster, it can be truly unrecoverable. I hope you have an old backup because you told your source control system to scramble its history, and you don't have any good way to back it out later. For those who don't know what I mean, the funny commit id…

I work on a small open source project. Our master branch is protected from force pushes, and I only use rebase on personal branches for features or bug fixes. It's very nice if I'm planning to merge several commits but I need to fix something in one or more of them.

I agree that rebasing should not happen in the main branch(es) of a repo.

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

#123

Post by jimpudar »

neilv wrote: post #60

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 o…

Racket is a very good Lisp for beginners, DrRacket makes it easy to get up and running with little effort.

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

#124

Post by jimpudar »

paulgb wrote: post #34

State machines. They can be a helpful abstraction for UI or business logic, and they also make regular expressions make a lot more sense.

Yeah, far too often people create horrific spaghetti code of if/else statements which could be neatly coded as a state machine. This is a very important concept to grasp.

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

#125

Post by mirekrusin »

redisman wrote: post #21
m_fayer wrote: post #16

https://dataintensive.net/ I can't recommend this book enough. I have a CS background, and still had quite a few "I can't believe this thing has been hiding in plain sight!" moments while reading it.

It's great. Incredibly dense with useful information and it just blows my mind how much knowledge Martin has about the topic. I recommend watching this talk from him to give a little glimpse of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZjhNTM8XU8 This is just about a little part of one of the chapters.

Oh man, this is good, thank you.

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

#126

Post by jimpudar »

sesser wrote: post #3
mosalarynolife wrote: post #2

Design Patterns

What are some resources outside of gang of four?

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Enterprise Integration Patterns

Just start reading some Martin Fowler books, you will be up to your ears in patterns in no time :)

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

#127

Post by theonemind »

* Parser generator tools like ANTLR https://www.antlr.org/, or even lex and yacc, useful for parsing languages/config files and probably generating a better/more robust parser than you'd cobble together by hand

* Dynamic programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ -- great for relatively-quickly (in computation time) coming up with good-enough solutions to some hard (like NP hard) recursive problem that would take forever (almost literally) to technically find the absolute best solution to, but not something you'll use every day.

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

#128

Post by neilv »

jimpudar wrote: post #123
neilv wrote: post #60

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 o…

Racket is a very good Lisp for beginners, DrRacket makes it easy to get up and running with little effort.

Agreed. Racket is from a particular school of thought, and you won't get all Lisp family ideas from it, but it's great.

You can start up DrRacket (a simple IDE for students that can also be used for professional work, and has some powerful features in it), or just use your favorite editor and the `racket` command-line program and REPL. There's way too much documentation at: https://docs.racket-lang.org/

You can also do the old MIT introductory CS textbook, SICP, using Racket.

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

#129

Post by Forge36 »

cameronbrown wrote: post #121

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned spreadsheets - specifically Google Sheets or something scriptable and hosted. Recently I've built up a small system which sucks in data from a few places (fitness, task management, calendar,..) and analyses it against several goals I've set. This means I can see how I'm progressing towards what I want without even touching it anymore. They're a really nice UI for bootstraping projects…

Similarly Microsoft Access. I learned Access for my first job (100% of my job was moving tasks into Access, 3 years later I helped some interns transition to a SQL server+web application). 10 years later I'm still using Access for some aspects of my new job. The ability to quickly prototype something and receive almost immediate value is vastly underestimated (I know of one company which runs all of their tasks out of Access).

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

#130

Post by logicallee »

shavenwarthog2 wrote: post #68
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…

In 2019 Makefiles are a useful tool for automating project-level things. Too often webapps will require you to install X to install Y to run producing artifact Z. Since Make is old and baked and everywhere, specifying "make Z" is a useful project-level development process. It's not tied to a language (e.g. Tox) nor a huge runtime (Docker). Make is small enough in scope to be easy, and large enough to be capable witho…

>The big downside of Make, alas, is Windows compatibility.

Isn't the big problem that you have no idea what it's doing to your system? Also that you aren't expected to be able to undo it. You can read the makefiles, of course, but it seems simpler not to have to. (Just update the necessary packages yourself, to the latest version.)

Forgive me if this is naive of me.

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