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How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

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Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#131

Post by azangru »

epx wrote: post #69
albertoCaroM wrote: post #4

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…

Ember is still alive and kicking ;-)

Also, having spent time on frameworks before React/Vue makes you really appreciate what React/Vue do for you.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#132

Post by keithnz »

overgard wrote: post #85
keithnz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You lost me at "next thing you know in our production code we started getting these weird ass recursive functions...". I don't mean to be mean, but recursion is pretty fundamental to a lot of algorithms, and it sounds like the SICP coder was just writing stuff more advanced than you were comfortable with.

think you kind of missed what I was saying, I was the one recommending, having already done a bunch of functional programming, and thought SICP was a nice intro ( at the time ) to functional programming. But they didn't quite get it and their code was a weird mish mash of OO and weird uses of recursion with badly thought out (stateful ) functions.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#133

Post by albertoCaroM »

overgard wrote: post #77

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…

Indeed, you always have to look for new ways to improve, but you don't have to change the way you work, Likely you are doing a lot of things well. I think better advice is, be curious to learn some way to improve, be conservative in applying it.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#135

Post by crashbunny »

geowwy wrote: post #95
overgard wrote: post #77

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…

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 have a different opinion. Anything learnt will improve your thinking and help you learn new things. A kid who goes on to become a truck driver might never directly use algebra on the job, but learning algebra has shaped their brain and will help in all areas of their life.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#136

Post by musiccog »

geowwy wrote: post #95
overgard wrote: post #77

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…

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…

Absolutely agree with mastering SQL.

Out of all of the languages I have learned over the years, only one has stayed important in every job and mostly static - SQL

There are many languages and libraries, but at this moment in time, all of them have to talk to a database at some stage, and in order to do that all of them convert the request to SQL.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#137

Post by threatofrain »

keithnz wrote: post #16
albertoCaroM wrote: post #4

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…

But doesn't putting somebody on SICP in the hopes of helping them learn functional programming (is that SICP's concern?) sound to you as... aspirational advice? The book is as famous as it is infamous.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#138

Post by bartread »

KirinDave wrote: post #82
macintux wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for people who have better things to do than relearn a new JS framework every 2 years.

I dont mean to be offensive, but usually those things take like a month to learn if you're bad at it. People talk about that grind like it's anything other than the most basic of gestures for tracking the rapidly moving target of browser technology. 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 mat…

> A refusal to actually track the state of the industry, instead being told by employers what matters.

Yeeees... so instead of being "told" by your employers, you're "told" by the hype-train? How exactly is this better?

Being fed up of the constant churn in JS frameworks is an entirely valid position.

Sure, maybe it only takes a month to learn the latest framework. Maybe it only takes a couple of weeks. But maybe I'd rather spend those 2 weeks doing something else that I consider to be more valuable (it's called opportunity cost).

And what about all the gotchas and quirks that every framework has? The pathological performance edge-cases, and suchlike? The ones you only discover after weeks and months of in-depth use? I'll have to learn a whole new set of those.

And what about my "legacy" codebase that used the last framework du jour. Do I just ignore it? Do I convert it? Hmm. Wonder how long that will take, and what else I could be doing with that time.

Maybe you enjoy the churn: endlessly learning useless knowledge that will be of no value to you in a few short years because it's no longer trendy. Lucky you. For me it got boring, because I've got stuff to build.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#139

Post by Ballas »

geowwy wrote: post #95
overgard wrote: post #77

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…

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…

> Avoid Learning Anything New – Learn Something Old

That is exactly how I understood it.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#140

Post by taneq »

KirinDave wrote: post #82
macintux wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for people who have better things to do than relearn a new JS framework every 2 years.

I dont mean to be offensive, but usually those things take like a month to learn if you're bad at it. People talk about that grind like it's anything other than the most basic of gestures for tracking the rapidly moving target of browser technology. 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 mat…

If you're unnecessarily spending a month a year on platform churn, that's nearly 10% loss of productivity right there. Doesn't seem like a good choice to me, unless you're genuinely gaining something important.
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