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Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

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Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#81

Post by DeathArrow »

xupybd wrote: post #54
ojnabieoot wrote: post #38

20 years is a long time in anything. My first piece of advice is that nobody here knows who you are, nobody here knew you as a teenager, and nobody is going to understand what "love programming" and "don't enjoy it" actually means for you. The point is: anybody who claims that they got de-burned-out with this one trick isn't necessarily dishonest or naive, and if something in the comments here resonates, then by all…

Sorry to change topics, but are you able to expand a little on what made F# miserable. I ask as I was looking at learning it in the hopes that it would provide a positive developer experience. I would be very interested in finding out why it didn't work for someone else.

I think that depends on the particular job and the person.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#82

Post by diehunde »

floathub wrote: post #28

Learn LISP/Scheme and lots of fundamental concepts you probably have a feel for, but in a far more profound way: 1. First watch the SICP series ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB... ) 2. Then work through the book ( https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/... ) If you really do the exercises (an hour here and an hour there), you can feel you brain getting wrapped around…

First time watching those videos! What year is that? They looked way older than 2005

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#83

Post by DeathArrow »

Take a short break if you can. Use it to meditate.

Try to understand what makes programming unpleasant for you. Is it the language? Is it the framework which you are using? Is it the tools? Is it a particular ecosystem? It's about what you are tasked to do? It's about how the development process at your organization is set up?

Try to change what bothers you. Try to identify what you would like and make a goal reaching that point.

If you end up discovering that you don't like anything about programming, so be it. Maybe it's time for a caree change.

In my previous job I was a game developer and I began to dislike what I did. Now I am a web developer and I enjoy it.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#84

Post by jerzyt »

oreally wrote: post #70

Have you ever considered what's making you not enjoy programming anymore? Journalling your day-to-day might help. Here's one example that I found that really screws with people not enjoying programming. If you have a career, chances are you're going through rules/bullshit(ie. code standards, needlessly large codebases) made up by other programmers within your organization and that's making you not enjoy programming a…

Are you stuck in the rut of doing corporate cruft? I'm there, and it's unbearably boring. I'm finding inspiration in personal projects. Currently I'm investigating the effect of gerrymandering in the House elections. While I have strong personal political views, I'm doing this purely as a pet project. At the same time, I have to experiment with datasets and data sources outside of my day-to-day area of expertise. I don't have a deadline, but it's interesting. And I'm doing it in a Python, which is a new language for me. Bottom line, it's a challenging problem, and a language challenge, so at the same time I'm expanding my skills.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#86

Post by n_t »

If it is a consistent feeling then may be you are ripe for change. However, if it comes in phases, then following works for me in exact order. Frankly, following is more for "developer's block" but may be that's what you are going through.

1. Try something different, new. However, it should not be complex, at least not to start with.

1. If that doesn't hooks you, pick a small trivial, meaningless utility to write in whatever framework you are comfortable with. It is important not to overshoot - really just pick a "meaningless" and simple task.

1. If that doesn't work, pick some small utility from a blog/video where full code is available (many examples here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591918). Write whole code again, copying line by line. As you start getting involved, stop copying and start thinking how you would write the next function, or what optimization you'd do for current function, etc.

1. If that also doesn't work, take a break. Don't think about programming at all in that break, that's important.

1. If that doesn't work either, start looking into other roles/domains and what might suit your background and strengths. As I mentioned earlier, may be you are ready for the change :)

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#87

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

yellowapple wrote: post #50
reitzensteinm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they're using an alternate exact representation for floats by default, that's just rounding them when printing.

That's a fair point about the Perl example, but Scheme and Common Lisp (including both Chicken and SBCL, last I checked) support (if not outright require) full numeric towers with rational number types, so these are indeed exact representations (unless you explicitly request binary floats for e.g. performance reasons) and not just rounding during printing. There are lots of other examples of doing it "right" (using m…

Yeah, in CL the 0.1 is read syntax for a float (IEEE-754ish on most modern implementations.) If you want exactly 0.1, you’d have to say 1/10. The printer is probably cheating and rounding to the output you expect (I think Python 3 may do this now?)

Aside from financial applications, there’s very little reason to care about the trailing remainder.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#89

Post by oreally »

jerzyt wrote: post #84
oreally wrote: post #70

Have you ever considered what's making you not enjoy programming anymore? Journalling your day-to-day might help. Here's one example that I found that really screws with people not enjoying programming. If you have a career, chances are you're going through rules/bullshit(ie. code standards, needlessly large codebases) made up by other programmers within your organization and that's making you not enjoy programming a…

Are you stuck in the rut of doing corporate cruft? I'm there, and it's unbearably boring. I'm finding inspiration in personal projects. Currently I'm investigating the effect of gerrymandering in the House elections. While I have strong personal political views, I'm doing this purely as a pet project. At the same time, I have to experiment with datasets and data sources outside of my day-to-day area of expertise. I d…

I made games, didnt earn enough to keep it going, and went to corporate. Fortunately this job is a little lax on deadlines/schedules (though not so much on the cruft). Other than that, working on my games or related keeps me alive and looking forward. Spending time reading books helps a lot too.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#90

Post by onion2k »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #68

Simple programs! I find I get burned out by commercial code. So many hands have touched it, millions of lines, scant docs, hard to make sense of it, but ... deadlines, get this task done and that. Create a simple program outside of work and connect with the joy again! I am having fun writing a simple nodejs app which is using AWS service. Nothing groundbreaking but its fun to learn and tinker with. I have no expectat…

Create a simple program outside of work and connect with the joy again!

I found the opposite was useful. My day job was writing quite trivial code (crud apps, forms, etc) so I started writing far more complex apps in my spare time. Things that were truly challenging. It turns out they're a lot of fun to build.

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