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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

#221

Post by travisjungroth »

glangdale wrote: post #183

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 stuf…

Here’s a great talk by Raymond Hettinger on those things and more: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_GP9OpZPUYc

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

#222

Post by ww520 »

Learn Emacs. Stick with it to get comfortable. Text editing is one transferable skill that you can reuse again and reuse in different projects and on different languages.

Org-mode in Emacs. My poor man's project management for a number of projects consists of a todo-.org file listing all the planned features, the pending TODO items, the DONE items for the current working release, and release notes describing features and changes for each of the released version. In one place, I have the future features, immediate todo items, current completed item, and the history of all past releases in an org file, making things simple to access and manage.

For theoretical stuff, learn about transaction.

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

#223

Post by lenticular »

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…

This is the gospel truth. It does take discipline though, because writing tests sucks. I like to have a policy of never committing a non-trivial function without a test. That way, I can never put it off and wind up with a huge chunk of untested code.

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

#224

Post by hackerc »

Robin_Message wrote: post #14

Read the curriculum of an undergraduate computer science course and read up on the things you haven't heard of. Some courses will even have lecture notes available. E.g. these four pages are the university of Cambridge masters in computer science: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part1a-75.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part1b-75.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part2-75.html https://www…

Does an offline copy of this exist? Do you think it will go down when the term probably ends soon?

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

#225

Post by lenticular »

btown wrote: post #219
AaronFriel wrote: post #208

Value/message/actor/event oriented programming like you mentioned is useful for building distributed systems. I am a huge fan of going a step further and learning this model: Imperative shell, functional core. The external shell of code in a project is responsible for network connections, console IO, etc. But the internal guts of a program should be largely functional, that is, instead of mutating (changing) values,…

I'm also a fan of "imperative shell, functional core, imperative implementation of that core," where within a function that you promise to have no side effects or very specific side effects (say, a component's render function, or a transformation from one complex data representation to another), you should still feel free to use loops, imperative-style control flow, even network requests, etc. I find this puts folks…

It's really easy to do this with pure functional programming in impure languages like Scala. You can use arbitrary impure code within lazy IO values. Outside, the functional purity makes reasoning easy. If, as recommended, there is only a single point in your program where the IO values are actually executed, then the execution order can be reasoned about statically.

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

#226

Post by ptasci67 »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #206
m463 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate makefiles. That said, I wholeheartedly agree with the comment. It's sad that something so central to a project and so useful and important to so many people seems like it hasn't advanced ... ever. Developers generally do the minimum with Makefiles and get out. They are similar to 1040 forms in popularity. I've always had a dream of a redesigned "make" system... with import statements, object oriented rules, cl…

Bazel is pretty nice.

I will +1 that. I like Bazel a lot because it really forces you into a singular way of building a project which is clean and nice.

That said, mileage may vary. It was originally built by Google so it has quirks. I find it is best suited for projects with compiled dependencies and large repos.

Otherwise, I was going to add that Gradle as a build system is very advanced and improves upon make in many ways.

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

#227

Post by baroffoos »

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…

Does make files ever actually work that way? In my experience they always require you to install a bunch of packages for libraries which usually only tells you the package names for ubuntu so you have to hunt down what the package is called on your distro or if that version of the package is even in the repos.

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

#228

Post by james_s_tayler »

RangerScience wrote: post #153
augbog wrote: post #93

Honestly I still find a lot of engineers don't know git properly. Like they know enough to commit and push but that's about it. It really helps to understand everything git has to offer.

Absolutely. When I get people into learning Git, I start with the obvious (checkout, commit) move to the essential (branches, forks) and then usually say "When you're comfortable with that, start playing around with rebase. When you get into trouble with that, come talk to me again, because that's the key learning moment." I've learned more messing up when using fancy git rebase stuff than any tutorial.

O'Reilly have a free book on Git that is amazing. I find this to be the perfect level of detail. Easy to enough to read in a short enough time, detailed enough to grasp the magic under the hood.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/git-pocket-guide/978144...

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

#229

Post by dnautics »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #206
m463 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate makefiles. That said, I wholeheartedly agree with the comment. It's sad that something so central to a project and so useful and important to so many people seems like it hasn't advanced ... ever. Developers generally do the minimum with Makefiles and get out. They are similar to 1040 forms in popularity. I've always had a dream of a redesigned "make" system... with import statements, object oriented rules, cl…

Bazel is pretty nice.

Bazel is great until you have to install tensorflow from source into a container and are sitting wondering why you have to put and configure a JVM inside a container-destined-to-be-static-binary, temporarily to get a python program with no Java bindings installed.

As I'm not the most intelligent developer, I'm sure there's a better, more sophisticated way to do this but I got really frustrated and gave up.

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

#230

Post by nickjj »

bunderbunder wrote: post #196
OJFord wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If you're already using a Vagrant or Docker-based development workflow, WSL doesn't really add much, and takes some things away. I/O performance, for example.

> If you're already using a Vagrant or Docker-based development workflow, WSL doesn't really add much, and takes some things away. I/O performance, for example.

I've been actively using WSL for over a year along with Docker and set up the Docker CLI in WSL to talk to the Docker for Windows daemon.

Performance in that scenario is no different than running the Docker CLI in PowerShell, or do you just mean I/O performance in general in WSL? In which case once you turn off Windows defender it's very usable. WSL v2 will also apparently make I/O performance 2-20x faster depending on what you're doing.

WSL adds a lot if you're using Docker IMO. Suddenly if you want, you can run tmux and terminal Vim along with ranger while your apps run nice and efficiently in Docker. Before you know it, you're spending almost all of your time on the command line but can still reach into the Windows cookie jar for gaming and other GUI apps that aren't available on Linux and can't be run in a Windows VM.

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