Brutally true :)
How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
111–120 of 196 posts
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#112The "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…
You're going to look back on this comment in a decade or so and chuckle at the hubristic immaturity of your youth. With any luck, you'll accomplish half as much as this poor programmer.
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#113The "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…
At risk of appealing to authority, I think you should look into exactly who Peter Shirley is before sounding off.
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#114The "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…
He is right though – new tech nearly always disappears. Example: Learning CoffeeScript was a total waste of time. Learning JQuery helped me for a few years, but now JQuery is basically useless to me. Based on past experience, I strongly suspect the same will happen with React, Rust and a bunch of other new exciting tech. There are countless examples besides the ones I mentioned. But on the other hand, the time I put…
I disagree that learning any new tech is useless in general because you found two cases where it was. Any old tech was new at a point. What matter is learning new ways of thinking (paradigms?).
Then you see that syntaxes and framework API changes but it’s not a big deal because you already know what you want to do, look it up in the docs, and can pick up new languages in a few days.
For example learning high level concepts like filter-map-reduce with the appropriate data structures is relatively language agnostic, so I have the same reasoning between languages and all I see is syntax choices. It greatly improves learning speed and then I am free to choose the best tool for practical considerations for each project.
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#115The "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…
Let me quote a friend that ranted about this very subject about a week ago:
I am of extremely average intelligence. On the absolute top of the bell curve, looking down at the rest of you. I am extremely tired of the whole attitude that _anything is possible if you just put your mind to it_. I put my mind to it. That is how I got through CS in university. I worked at least twice as hard as the people that said _just put your mind to it_ and then cruised through even the hardest course without ever studying more than an hour a day and then doing an all-nighter to get an essay in.
Working hard as hell to understand what some low-effort-high-intelligence "just put your mind to it" brat understood as soon as it left the professor's mouth is hard. It just shows me again and again that I drew the short straw in the gene lottery. I have to work a lot harder to do the same things.
Being told to just try harder by someone who's idea of intellectual work is "wherever my curiosity takes me" is really friggin taxing on my self esteem.
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Now, he was drunk and angry, but there is something to it. I think both him and I agree with you on a matter of principle, but it is more to it than that.
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#116The "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…
While not agreeing, as I rather advice people to focus on T-shape knowledge and being polyglot developers instead of siloing themselves as "X Developer". there is something that kind of relates to that advice.
Focus on platform languages and be a late adopter, it saves a lot of frustration advocating stuff that eventually never takes off, or happens to die and then one is stuck doing maintenance work.
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#117I was all curious to read about monetarily poor programmers. Instead, this. I agree with part of it. The goddamned arrays really trigger my Refactoring Legacy Code PTSD though. Any time you make an array, you need to make sure that damn thing is big enough. Do you even know in advance how big that bastard needs to be? You could make it just plenty big, I suppose, like an asshole. Just allocate 10,000 4-byte blocks like that shit just grows on trees. Then change it to 15,000 the first time someone has 10,001 things and crashes your shitty shit. Also any time you look at your shit you're gonna need a goddamned shitty index. A whole 'nuther variable! Get some generics ya dufus!
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#118The "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…
At risk of appealing to authority, I think you should look into exactly who Peter Shirley is before sounding off.
On the one hand I think it makes sense to put off learning anything new for a few years unless you really think whoa this is going to have staying power.
On the other hand I'll repeat an anecdote I've put out here before - I had a friend I was in a JavaScript course with in 1998 and one day I went over to his house and he showed me the really beautiful table-based demo site he had made to entice employers and I showed him how CSS worked at which point he thundered "That's the problem with this business, there's always something new to learn!"
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#119This is such a bizarre post. If you have the self-awareness to admit this about yourself, you are probably not a poor programmer. Poor programmers do things like allowing an incoming request to spin up unlimited concurrent threads. Poor programmers erroneously throw exceptions on any operational deviation - even it if can be handled without error. Most importantly - poor programmers do not learn from their mistakes a…
Why should being aware of how lacking you are as a programmer have much bearing on whether you're good or not? When I started programming seriously I had a mentor who gave me a long list of my shortcomings. It's taken years of hard, dedicated work to rectify most of those problems and I still have a huge distance to cover to be as good as I want to be. Being a good programmer is a skillet acquired with hard, concentr…
> Why should being aware of how lacking you are as a programmer have much bearing on whether you're good or not?
Being aware of what you are lacking allows you to improve on those things, work around those issues and accept when collegue is actually good at stuff you are not good at.
Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
#120The "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…
At risk of appealing to authority, I think you should look into exactly who Peter Shirley is before sounding off.
He is an authority in a field adjacent to software development, but not actually software development. He's a researcher who develops things that happen to be implemented in software (or hardware, given what nvidia does), and "avoid wasting time learning new programming languages" is probably excellent advice to someone in that position. Most HN readers are not.