Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming? • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by eitland » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:23 AM UTC

issa wrote: post #116

riantogo wrote: post #107

I'm in a bit of a reverse situation. I left programming some 12 yrs and want to get back into it. But I find it so hard with all the commandline installs, config files etc. The barrier to just getting to "hello world" seems so high now. Pasting my recent ask HN here in case I have better luck: What is the easiest way to launch a simple PHP website these days? -A simple CRUD web app -No new sytax to learn (just good o…

I can't think of anything that doesn't have a steep learning curve, aside from just not using any frameworks and writing PHP code. If you're building something solo and it's not too complicated, that's a decent option if you don't want to spend time learning things that won't get you to hello world. But, depending on what you're doing, something like WordPress might do what you want out of the box.

FWIW and IMO Java and .Net has gone in the opposite direction of many others and I find myself reaching for them now (I used to prefer PHP, later PHP/Symfony, smaller PHP frameworks and then Python with Flask but the last 5 years Java and .Net has become so simple and fast (in dev, prod has been fast for a long time) that I see no reason to go with anything else.

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

#132

Post by crispinb » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

markc wrote: post #97

crispinb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been learning it for a couple of weeks. It is humbling as an experienced dev to find something quite straightforward (parens-whining aside, Clojure is a small & simple language), yet not have a clue how to approach problem-solving with it.

Use 4Clojure for practice. Talk about humbling! You’ll struggle to write a 20 line abomination and then see some wizard’s beautiful 2 liner that does the same thing. You might spend a long while grokking it, but when you do you’ve added one or more new tools to your Clojure problem solving repertoire.

Exactly my experience. I've dipped into 4Clojure (thanks for the suggestion), and also Exercism as the mentoring is handy. I really enjoy the way you can reach solutions that are pithy without being obscure or artificially terse.

It does take me a long time to get there though. It's kicking my arse to be honest. Which is fine, as it means I'm learning - far more enlightening than frustrating.

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

#133

Post by a-saleh » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

For me, learning a new language in a confined setting helps.

I.e. some time ago I discovered https://github.com/janestreet/learn-ocaml-workshop and I blasted through the exercises and it was fun :-)

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

#134

Post by eitland » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

riantogo wrote: post #130

issa wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of anything that doesn't have a steep learning curve, aside from just not using any frameworks and writing PHP code. If you're building something solo and it's not too complicated, that's a decent option if you don't want to spend time learning things that won't get you to hello world. But, depending on what you're doing, something like WordPress might do what you want out of the box.

Im looking to build something similar to HN

FWIW news.ycombinator.com codebase is partially open I think but written in a small Lisp dialect.

I think lobste.rs is open source.

Edit: it is. Also I thought it was written in PHP but it turns out to be Rails.

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

#135

Post by secretsatan » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:28 AM UTC

I feel like I got stuck in a rut a few years ago, was working in an obscure language, job was well paid but pretty dull, then I got made redundant and to carry on working in the same field would likely mean a move to another country, and I really didn't want to.

So, I had a Mac and iPhone, some hobby projects I'd dabbled in, and just went all out to learn Macos and iOS development, starting with Objective-c and later swift. I know many here will balk at MacOs, and it is a bit niche, but iOS was really interesting and led to a new job. I think iOS can still offer some challenges that older programmers might enjoy, there's still room for optimising and tweaking perfomance, memory and file size, and it's fun to find out how powerful modern mobiles really are. It's really easy to get started, and you can quickly get to building something really powerful, play around with the AR tools, look at the machine learning. There's good frameworks to get started and powerful stuff like using Metal once you feel like really tweaking things.

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

#136

Post by matesz » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:30 AM UTC

Great write-up on that subject is in the first chapter of "Mythical Man-Month". Here is small excerpt.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder ''for Daddy's office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly re- moved from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

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

#137

Post by jerzyt » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:30 AM UTC

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…

>>> In my current job I write Python, which I really don't like very much and I get burned out on Python-specific things. I've used Ruby for several years, and I love the language. I wish I could use it today, in my daily stack, but unfortunately, Python won in the marketplace. Syntactically, Ruby and Python are pretty much equivalent, with Ruby appealing more to me. However, Python won - no arguments. Got to go with the winner.

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

#138

Post by riantogo » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:35 AM UTC

holografix wrote: post #121

riantogo wrote: post #107

I'm in a bit of a reverse situation. I left programming some 12 yrs and want to get back into it. But I find it so hard with all the commandline installs, config files etc. The barrier to just getting to "hello world" seems so high now. Pasting my recent ask HN here in case I have better luck: What is the easiest way to launch a simple PHP website these days? -A simple CRUD web app -No new sytax to learn (just good o…

Does it have to be PHP? No offence but you’d get so much more from learning Python and the barrier to entry really isn’t that high. The hardest hurdle initially is to set up a “virtual environment” which means you have a project by project collection of all the packages you need instead of installing everything globally. Setting up virtual environments used to be a pain. Today it’s so easy: 1. Make sure you have Pyth…

It need not be PHP. Just that I'm most familiar with PHP and ASP.net from back in the day. I'm confident that I can pick up most languages. I will look into Python and Django. But honestly the setup steps already scare me a bit :)

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

#139

Post by stopachka » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:36 AM UTC

A few ideas:

1. Stop programming when you don't feel like you want too. Forcing yourself to do anything turns it into a chore. Let yourself relax 2. Stop programming what you don't like. If you hate java, stop programming in Java.

[Note, I realize the above two are difficult if you have a demanding job. I hope you really consider it though in any case, because long term it will help you]

3. Try building small things that you're actually interested in, in languages you love -- i.e playing in lisp or python, on a problem you're curious about, for a short time, can be very fun.

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

#140

Post by lez » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:37 AM UTC

mrwnmonm wrote: post #33

sys_64738 wrote: post #6

Take a 6 months break and don't use a computer during that time. Then see how you feel.

Not everyone can do that.

I would argue most programmers can do that, if the desire is strong enough. You might have to lower your standard of living drastically, but it's possible for most of us.