Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 416 posts

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

#161

Post by epiphanitus »

gwbas1c wrote: post #48

Unit testing, mocking, and various other testing techniques. Why? Any project of sufficient complexity is very hard to test. If all you're doing is code -> build -> run to debug your code, you can very easily break something that's not in your immediate attention. The problem is that good unit testing is hard, and time consuming. It can be so time consuming, that unless you can really plan in advance how you test, yo…

Are there any resources out there you would recommend for learning testing techniques in a Python context?

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

#162

Post by Khelavaster »

It's absolutely critical to learn object-oriented programming in a mature language like C#. (Java's OO model is slightly broken, as well as fundamentally underdeveloped; it's better tackled after learning a correct, functional object0oriented language like C#.)

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

#165

Post by deng »

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.

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

GNU Make even comes with a vcproj file for building a native binary with Visual Studio. Worked fine for me. Building it with Guile support though is difficult, but fortunately Eli Zaretskii provides native binaries through his ezwinports, and they worked pretty much flawlessly for me. Of course you will usually need a shell to execute recipes, but Make itself runs natively. For more information, see README.W32 in the sources.

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

#167

Post by antipaul »

trendoid wrote: post #103
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…

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

https://github.com/pavopax/gists/blob/master/makefile-quick-...

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

#168

Post by deng »

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.

GNU Make works fine on Windows. The sources come with a vcproj to build it natively, or you get it from ezwinports. At my dayjob, we have a pretty complicated build with GNU Make for cross-compiling our application to Arm and PowerPC, and it works on Windows, even with special Guile scripts to reduce the number of shell calls which are extremely slow on Windows.

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

#169

Post by bradford »

I've extensively used Diff tools as an analytical aid across many different domains. It has uses far beyond code change tracking!

Specifically, I like vim's interactive diff'ing capabilities (although any interactive diff tool with sufficiently powerful text-editing capabilities should suffice).

So much of the troubleshooting that we do in programming is asking "this thing used to work, what changed?". Don't rely on your eyes to find the changes, let the computer do the work for you. The ability to load up two different log files in a diff session, regex-substitute the noisy portions away (dates, process/thread id), and view the key functional changes really helps me go from noise to signal in an optimal way.

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

#170

Post by ashton314 »

trendoid wrote: post #103
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…

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

This video helped me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkEz_oVh0B4

Post reply on HN