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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

#181

Post by aequitas »

theon144 wrote: post #147
logicallee wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

With Docker at least everything is contained in the container. Which makes isolating and resetting environments a breeze. Something I worry about often is contaminating my system's 'state'. Which always leads to broken builds or incomplete build systems because a missing dependency is not spotted on your system because it was installed by some other tool some other time.

I tend to write my Makefiles to create as much of a local dev environment as possible for every project. Using Python virtualenv/Pipenv/Poetry, Ruby vendored dirs, custom Gopath per project (using direnv), etc. Most tools support some sort of isolation/localisation, but it's often just not on by default.

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

#182

Post by i_feel_great »

Tools you can use to recover from the loss or destruction of your laptop/desktop as fast as possible. Or having to hand over your password to the authorities. This involves compressing all of the state and data and removing and/or sending it somewhere, and then being able to recover it quickly. And it must be simple, robust and automated.

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

#183

Post by glangdale »

Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT) and a nice friendly implementation like Z3. When you have a difficult algorithmic problem and can't be bothered to dream up a good solution, why not try chucking it into a solver and see if a computer can solve it for you? Surprising what it can find - not just Sudoku puzzles and "Mr Green lives next door to Mr Black, the baker lives across the street to the butcher, ... " type stuff either.

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

#185

Post by new4thaccount »

SQL (even if just SQLite) as databases open up a lot of power.

Vim or Emacs for powerful text editing.

A low level language. Sometimes Python doesn't cut it, or it is pretty suboptimal. If you're writing a trading bot, is speed of execution not important?

Operating System knowledge can be helpful at times. I bought one of the No Starch books "How Linux Works" and it is very helpful.

The command line and by that I guess you should know the common Linux commands (cat, grep, sort, uniq, head, tail, ls, top) if you use Linux and how to chain them together via pipes. To give some context, I can write one command which would require 8 lines of Python (saves you valuable time). If you use Windows, learn enough Powershell to be comfortable with it. On occasion I'll use Powershell over Python even though it is dirt slow for reading files.

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

#186

Post by OJFord »

ChristianGeek wrote: post #83
pickdenis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big downside of Make, alas, is Windows compatibility. You'd have to give me a _very_ compelling reason to support developers who use Windows, when Windows lacks these essential tools. Besides, don't people who develop on Windows live in WSL?

Nope. I develop in Python, Java, and Kotlin on Windows and never touch WSL. Make is available natively through Chocolatey (a Windows package installer), but I prefer Gradle. (I also write code to run on Linux, but still prefer Gradle.)

Why don't you use WSL?

I can barely understand why you'd want to develop on Windows (ok, for non-Windows-only products) with it, but without it...

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by noobermin »

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…

Makefiles are so old and quaint, why not use "{flavorofthemonth}".format(flavorofthemonth=np.random.choice(frameworks)) ?

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

#190

Post by reificator »

bradford wrote: post #169

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…

You touched on it briefly but I'd like to highlight regular expressions in day to day editing and log delving. It's a massive time saver in my experience at least.

Coworkers often come to me to help them write a quick regex for something, or to have me double check their work.

If you need a playground to get comfortable, https://regex101.com/ is a great resource. Dump some examples you'd like to match and some you don't in the bottom section, and try to write a regex that matches in the top. It will dynamically match as you type, and the right side shows a token by token breakdown of what your regex does.

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