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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

#251

Post by quickthrower2 »

Tools that have changed how I think about things, and yes some are hyped things you have probably heard of. But the opposite effect of people ignoring it because it's too hyped might come into play:

Docker - figuring out what you really need to get something running and having a reproducible way of doing it. I did a blog post on it: https://stackabuse.com/how-docker-can-make-your-life-easier-...

Node JS - much derided, but nothing compares in terms of the speed you can quickly hack up a tool in Node JS and the ecosystem you have access to. I don't use it as production server, but just as a quick way to hack up tools.

Pandoc - being using this tool to convert markdown to PDF, and it does a nice job. Uses Latex & friends so you can find a nice template somewhere and base off that.

Markdown - I love using markdown formats. Especially with the tooling, things like Pandoc and Github are enough to justify learning a bit of MD.

Touchtyping - Makes typing a bit nicer and a bit faster. I could type without looking at the keyboard before, but now I don't lose my hands, just feel the bumps!

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

#252

Post by pinum »

Const-me wrote: post #247
deng wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Wind…

Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents", it has a space at least in some Windows versions. Make doesn't support such paths: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712 VBScript works better on Windows, IMO. Also works out of the box on all Windows versions since at least 2000 (on Win9x it was shipped with IE).

>Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents"

Not really... not since XP, anyway. Unless you have a space in your username (which is a terrible idea for many other reasons), your "Documents" path is C:\Users\JohnSmith\Documents. "Program Files" is pretty much the only important path which is likely to have spaces, and your makefiles (hopefully!) don't need to touch that.

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

#254

Post by bigiain »

samwyse wrote: post #240
hackerc wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you know about curl/wget? Each one does pretty much the same thing as the other, but you can start a religious war by suggesting that one is preferable. Anyway, either of them will let you mirror a website so you never have to worry about it going down.

And, since every Unix command line tool inevitably gets mined and turned into a web service, you could always submit those urls to archive.org instead of or as well as curl-ing/wget-ing them.

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

#255

Post by alphaoide »

This was recommended in a blog post I read. I haven't read it myself but the table of content looks promising

https://www.educative.io/collection/5668639101419520/5649050...

Designing a URL Shortening service like TinyURL

Designing Pastebin

Designing Instagram

Designing Dropbox

...

Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems

Load Balancing

Caching

Sharding or Data Partitioning

...

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

#256

Post by MHP47 »

hi41 wrote: post #243
m463 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, just get to know your shell. big timesaver: control-r basic but useful all over: for i in *.c; do cp "$i" "$i.bak"; done etc...

What does double quotes dollar do in the command?

$i is the variable i declared in the for loop. Quotes just wraps it, so that it's (somewhat) safe if the file has a space in the name

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

#257

Post by wtetzner »

logicallee wrote: post #209
theon144 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

(I was heavily downvoted). What I was thinking is: as opposed to just running your built-in package manager yourself, to upgrade your system to the latest version of all the packages it might require.

Makefiles are used for more than package management. In fact, it doesn't seem very common to use them for package management. Maybe I'm missing something?

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

#258

Post by akx »

hi41 wrote: post #243
m463 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, just get to know your shell. big timesaver: control-r basic but useful all over: for i in *.c; do cp "$i" "$i.bak"; done etc...

What does double quotes dollar do in the command?

Ensures filenames with spaces in them get passed as a single argument, instead of being inadvertently expanded into several.

Quoting and expansion issues are a pain in shell languages...

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

#259

Post by Const-me »

pinum wrote: post #252
Const-me wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents", it has a space at least in some Windows versions. Make doesn't support such paths: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712 VBScript works better on Windows, IMO. Also works out of the box on all Windows versions since at least 2000 (on Win9x it was shipped with IE).

>Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents" Not really... not since XP, anyway. Unless you have a space in your username (which is a terrible idea for many other reasons), your "Documents" path is C:\Users\JohnSmith\Documents. "Program Files" is pretty much the only important path which is likely to have spaces, and your makefiles (hopefully!) don't need to touch that.

On Windows, it's not up to me to decide where users will keep my stuff, and where it will work. Users decide.

For a software to work fine on Windows, it must support spaces in files and paths. Also Unicode in files and paths.

VBScript does, GNU Make doesn't.

> which is a terrible idea for many other reasons

If you use make to setup stuff, it's very possible you'll need to access "c:\Users\All Users" which does contain space in username. Also "c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files" which contain more than one.

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

#260

Post by a_bonobo »

0x262d wrote: post #155
Draiken wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

have any good resources for this?

There's a free O'Reilly book from last year: https://www.datascienceatthecommandline.com/

awk is pure magic.

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