81–90 of 196 posts
Moreover, I trust the advice of someone who rates themselves poorly more than someone proclaiming that they're a hotshot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Wait for technologies to mature" sounds like a great heuristic for people who need to build things that actually work.
And for people who have better things to do than relearn a new JS framework every 2 years.
If this is what we mean by, "being a bad programmer" I guess I get it now. A refusal to actually track the state of the industry, instead being told by employers what matters.
The "Avoid Learning Anything New" advice is insane. (Well, practically all of it is, but that one really stands out). I think the exact opposite advice is far better: never assume the way you know how to do something is best, and always be on the lookout for what others are doing that might be better. Here's the thing about learning: the more you learn, the easier learning the next thing becomes. You form links, insi…
> 4. Make arrays your goto data structure. The others are arguable. But, in 2019, this is flat out bad advice. Your "go to" data structures should be hash tables about 70% of the time and vectors about 30% of the time. In 2019, memory and CPU are so stupidly abundant that the abstraction costs nothing in 99.9% of all cases. The programmer gain for not having allocation, dereference, fencepost, and invalidation errors…
Depends on your program. In my world, it's vectors about 99% of the time when it's not a fixed-size array.
ALAN. Avoid Learning Anything New Terrible advice and mindset, It's good to learn for pleasure or curiosity. This way, you can enjoy reading SICP, effective java, code complete... Or you can use a new system, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS. Doing it you model your thoughts and mind, learn new ways, practices, or patterns, you don’t have to use then only for having learned, but even so, they will be useful to you.
It's not terrible advice. You mentioned SICP, funny thing is, years ago when I put someone on to SICP, next thing you know in our production code we started getting these weird ass recursive functions..... Also had similar issues with Design Patterns, all kinds of overly engineered class structures started popping up. On the side of ALAN, I used to work with guy who did a lot of machine vision research, he coded ever…
He's got one thing right. He's a poor programmer. "Success" must be mighty loosely defined here.
Two things jump out to me: > Only learn something new when forced I think there is a balance between always doing things in a new way, versus always doing things as you've done before. When engineers are pushed too hard on deadlines, some will avoid learning new things as a short term approach for quick delivery. If your in that environment, you aren't going to grow. > Avoid linking to other software unless forced. I…
Learning is pretty simple, the golden rule is "Don't learn new tech, learn how to solve new problems". Learning how to use something like Vue when you already know how to use React (or vice versa) is stupid because they both solve the exact same problem in a reasonably similar way with a reasonably different API. A better example might be something like Postgres and DynamoDB, since it can go either way. If your probl…
Settling on Mithril as my front-end library was a long journey from framework to framework. If I had stopped at Vue or React, I'd be much worse off for it.
Really, if I had stopped at the first front-end library/framework I used in web dev, I'd still be using PHP. Sometimes you need to move on, and if later asked about your technical choices in a professional environment, you need to have a professional answer that comes from wide experience.
ALAN. Avoid Learning Anything New Terrible advice and mindset, It's good to learn for pleasure or curiosity. This way, you can enjoy reading SICP, effective java, code complete... Or you can use a new system, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS. Doing it you model your thoughts and mind, learn new ways, practices, or patterns, you don’t have to use then only for having learned, but even so, they will be useful to you.
It depends. Some things are visibly awkward, unpleasant to learn and use, and clearly short-lived. It only pays to learn and work on them if you are paid a lot of money. My pet example from the 1990s is Win16, which I skipped entirely for Win32. Many 4GL languages from the 90s stayed there too. Every second of time dedicated to Javascript frameworks before React/Vue was probably a waste of time. (OTOH learning the ba…