181–190 of 196 posts
I’ve been in a rut lately. Missing obvious things, shipping less than my best code. It’s come to my attention that I’m not as good at programming as I am at crafting database queries and tuning them but that’s such a small niche given how easy it is to pick up SQL that I’m having an existential crisis. So I’m working on getting better and getting more confident.
I wonder if the author has considered the idea that it's not a lack of effort or some inherent cognitive gap that keeps them from being "good" programmers, but perhaps these beliefs instead?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may be. However, the number of times I see people hit a bug because they fenceposted or flat out overflowed a fixed size array VASTLY outnumbers the times I have seen people have to redo their underlying data structure because it just wasn't fast enough.
We're just in different fields. The OP of the post was a graphics engineer, as am I. We drink to celebrate when we shave off a millisecond haha.
I wonder if the author has considered the idea that it's not a lack of effort or some inherent cognitive gap that keeps them from being "good" programmers, but perhaps these beliefs instead?
I think it’s time. Peter Shirley decided to specialize in computer graphics, leaving the programming to people who would implement his ideas in libraries, and the production developers who use those libraries.
I wonder if the author has considered the idea that it's not a lack of effort or some inherent cognitive gap that keeps them from being "good" programmers, but perhaps these beliefs instead?
I think it’s time. Peter Shirley decided to specialize in computer graphics, leaving the programming to people who would implement his ideas in libraries, and the production developers who use those libraries.
I had a famous cryptographer professor. He refused to learn anything past Pascal. He freely admitted he was no longer a programmer and that he shouldn't be doing it.
That seems like a different message from the messages presented here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're just in different fields. The OP of the post was a graphics engineer, as am I. We drink to celebrate when we shave off a millisecond haha.
I've shaved 10 microseconds in large refactors and been told that's great ship it. Other fields might say that wasn't nearly enough to justify the code churn (performance vs. "programmer productivity" argument). A millisecond is a lifetime and can mean the difference between shipping and not shipping in some products.
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…
ALAN is probably a very good heuristic for precisely the type of person who reads HN. I would be most of us err too far in the direction of learning new stuff, while letting the projects we've started stagnate.
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's a C++ programmer, so I assume he can also code in C. So do I. When you go so low-level, then everything else just translates to "overhead" and it's always a trade-off (for example exchanging performance with "fast coding" or "easy of use"). At that point, you know there is nothing better, if better is understood in terms as "performance" (I develop firmware), so there is little room for improvement. Maybe rust?…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the article he says he learned C++ in 1995, so he probably knows C.
He says he learned C++ in 1990, and never says anything about C, so it's still likely that he only has a distant memory of something like C. I have a distant memory of something like Ada, but I might struggle for a while if asked to program in Ada professionally.