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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

#141

Post by snazz »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #99
gamegod wrote: post #87

IDEs - A proper work-grade IDE like Visual Studio will have some tools built into it that will save you tons of time. Features like "Edit & Continue" have saved my bacon many times by making intractably difficult bugs in algorithms much easier to understand because you can experiment with your code on the fly. There's also some more common features in most IDEs like being able to jump between symbols that saves a lot…

I find that it is usually the opposite. Devs who don't use big IDEs like visual studio are much more likely to know why things fail in a build pipeline etc. If you can only build a project by bumbling through menus and pressing a big green button at the end, that is worrying. If you can only debug by immediately jumping into the debugger and single stepping that is also worrying. Devs who reach for the tools appropri…

IDEs aren’t useless, you just don’t want them to be a crutch. For this reason, I usually recommend new developers use Nano or a notepad-esque editor until they understand why they might want vi keybindings, then use Vim until they understand why they might want an IDE or something like Emacs. Starting with the IDE hides layers and layers of both junk and useful tools, while experienced developers know which layer of the stack to work on at which time.

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

#142

Post by nickjj »

Shell scripting for processing text. You can often get so much done with so little code and effort.

Also on a semi-related note, I think as a self taught programmer, it's easy to get stuck on things that seem cool but are just procrastination enablers (I know, I've been guilty of it for 20 years). Like, if you're about to start a new project and you want to flesh out what it's about, you really don't need to spend 5 hours researching which mind map tool to use. Just open a text document and start writing, or get a piece of paper and a pen. It won't even take that long.

I spent about 1.5 hours the other day planning a substantially sized web app. All I did was open a text file and type what came into my head. For fun I decided to record the whole process too[0]. I wish more people recorded their process for things like that because I find the journey more interesting than the destination most of the time. Like your journey of eventually finding message queues must have been quite fun and you probably learned a ton (after all, it lead you to message queues, so it was certainly time well spent).

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/live-demo-of-planning-a-real-...

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

#143

Post by messe »

gilmi wrote: post #109
trendoid wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good resources for learning about make files that you can recommend?

Matt Might's article is really good: http://matt.might.net/articles/intro-to-make/

Worth noting that that's an introduction to GNU make, which, while the most common implementation, isn't the only one out there.

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

#144

Post by sgillen »

theonemind wrote: post #127

* 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 fo…

I was under the impression DP was usually used for getting the exact answer to certain classes of problems faster than exhaustive search. I usually see approximations compared to the ground truth dynamic programming answer.

Do you see the reverse in your work?

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

#145

Post by clarry »

gamegod wrote: post #87

IDEs - A proper work-grade IDE like Visual Studio will have some tools built into it that will save you tons of time. Features like "Edit & Continue" have saved my bacon many times by making intractably difficult bugs in algorithms much easier to understand because you can experiment with your code on the fly. There's also some more common features in most IDEs like being able to jump between symbols that saves a lot…

> If I'm interviewing you and you say you don't like using an IDE or a debugger, that speaks to your work experience, your productivity, your self awareness about your productivity, and really puts an upper limit on the difficulty of the problems you've had to solve.

Or you have surpassed the limit on the difficulty of the problems your debugger & IDE can help with.

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

#146

Post by RangerScience »

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…

We're doing this, and I mostly love it. I haven't found a great way to do code re-use across projects yet, and I'm not super happy with the Make function syntax (but, maybe if it needs a function, I should turn it into a shell script that itself is called by the Make command...).

All in all tho, it's a fantastic place to write down long CLI commands (ex: launching a dev docker container with the right networking and volume configurations) that you use a lot when working on the project.

Our Jenkins pipeline also relies on the Makefiles, literally just invoking `make release`, which is also pretty awesome.

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

#147

Post by theon144 »

logicallee wrote: post #130
shavenwarthog2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Isn't the big problem that you have no idea what it's doing to your system?

As opposed to what exactly? Any other alternative, e.g. separate shell scripts, "npm run" scripts in package.json, running a Docker image, hell even cmake or other make-like tools - does stuff you don't know about without reading the files either.

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

#148

Post by crimsonalucard »

Zealotux wrote: post #119
crimsonalucard wrote: post #86

Nobody mentions what self taught programmers miss the most. Theory. And not just algorithm theory.

Could you expand on that if you don't mind? I'm a self-taught programmer currently in the process of realising just how much I miss from theory, my list so far on theory fundamentals includes: • Mathematics and probabilities, and their applications to CS (e.g. formal methods) • Design patterns (OOP, functional programming) • Data structures • Algorithms, time complexity • System architectures • Software strategies: C…

None of what you mentioned is theory expect for Mathematics, probability, formal methods and algorithms.

Stuff like design patterns, system architectures and software strategies are like flavor of the week stuff. Opinions basically. Patterns like microservices are bad or good depending on opinion, but theory is always correct. Theory gets less bang for the buck but it's always what many programmers especially self taught ones are missing.

Theory is so hard that it will be hard to see applicability until you're a more seasoned programmer. Many seasoned programmers get by without ever knowing theory. But you will be a better programmer if you know it.

If I were to recommend one theory to study it would be category theory. If there was any true axiomatic theory for design patterns or how to design programs... categories are it. The study of morphisms is the study of the simplest form of a compose-able module. Knowing this theory you will begin to understand why Some design patterns don't work and why it's sometimes hard to reuse patterns in code that was that not properly designed. Theory doesn't answer all questions but for the questions it does answer you will get a definitive answer and not an opinionated one.

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

#149

Post by jonahx »

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…

Linus on rebase:

https://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net...

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

#150

Post by Draiken »

nickjj wrote: post #142

Shell scripting for processing text. You can often get so much done with so little code and effort. Also on a semi-related note, I think as a self taught programmer, it's easy to get stuck on things that seem cool but are just procrastination enablers (I know, I've been guilty of it for 20 years). Like, if you're about to start a new project and you want to flesh out what it's about, you really don't need to spend 5…

This 1000x. I put of just getting by with shell script for some years and when I finally decided to get deeper into it, it's magical.

A good series of piped commands with tools available basically everywhere can solve problems you had no idea could be so simple to solve.

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