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Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

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201–210 of 337 posts

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

#201
Not sure if it will work for you but for me the joy in programming now lies in it helping me in my other hobbies.

I'm not following mail.python or any dedicated python-related blogs in the same way or with the same passion I was doing 10 or 15 years ago, but I still do enjoy using Python daily (and some JS) for implementing some of my hobbies (many of them relying on collecting, manipulating and presenting data).

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

#202
My new paradigm is to talk about what I've done, not what I'm doing. I noticed a trend that I'd talk about things, and people would start chiming in with the own ideas before I was done. I was only sharing because I was excited about something, and for whatever reason, sharing with other people before it was ready made things less fun for me. So now I build for myself, and I work on whatever I damn well please.

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

#203
My two cents: change career and move to another place. I moved every four years, from countries to countries, continent to continent, never worked more than 3-4 years in one job. Career change can be from your current employer to another one or from your current favorite language to something different. It is a radical mindset change, being a slow moving individual. but the wealth of learning from different places and cultures is fantastic.

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

#204
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rushed half-finished edge case riddled language with awful tooling. Some of the issues are outlined here: https://blogtitle.github.io/lets-talk-about-javascript/ Of the many programming languages I have used over the last 20 years, there are several I prefer, several I would rather not use, but PHP and Javascript are the only two I refuse to ever touch again because they are so utterly unpleasant to write anythi…

I find it ok for it's intended original use, which is browser scripting. It's totally fine to write small JS scripts to make the pages a bit more interactive. People got it wrong when they started writing huge applications in JS. Just because a language is Turing complete, it doesn't mean it's fitted for everything. It's like you did your job fine as a carpenter using carpenter's tools and you get a dentist job, but…

Yeah, I've recently started using Stimulus JS for the odd enhancement to web pages on a personal project. That's far enough.

Interestingly I believe the sendmail config file syntax is Turing complete. You could theoretically create a web app using SMTP as the backend API.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Go for it! Forget about setting a DB at first. Django will default to a “pseudo database as a single file” called SQLite and for all intents and purpose it’ll function as if it was MySQL or Postgres.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am aware of numeric towers and actually checked whether that was going on. sbcl 1.4.16 uses single floats: https://ideone.com/ruw5qi I don't know enough about Scheme to dig under the covers to see how it's being represented internally.

Scheme is the same. If you type a number with a dot in it, you'll get an "inexact" number, which is floating point. If you prefix it with #e, you'll get an exact representation of the entered number (so, e.g. #e0.1 gives you 1/10)

The output of inexact numbers is typically truncated. In CHICKEN, you can use flonum-print-precision to tweak that. In an example, straight from the manual:

    > (flonum-print-precision 17)
    > 0.1
    0.10000000000000001

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

#207
post #18

I had the same issue. Then I went back to the roots: Lisp And learned Clojure. You will feel like you know nothing. You will feel handicapped. You will be confused. Then, one day, you will understand what simplicity means and how Clojure's design embraces that more than in any other language I know. By then you will have embraced the flying-by-your-pants-exploratory style of programming at the REPL. And don't want to…

I came here to say this, the REPL feedback loop is amazing, I think we can do more with LSP in Clojure with spec so I'm trying to build that out to attract people used to advanced type systems that would otherwise be put off

The problem is I don't have a good track record for completing projects so competitors or collaborators would be greatly appreciated

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

#208

My two cents: change career and move to another place. I moved every four years, from countries to countries, continent to continent, never worked more than 3-4 years in one job. Career change can be from your current employer to another one or from your current favorite language to something different. It is a radical mindset change, being a slow moving individual. but the wealth of learning from different places an…

There are pros and cons to this lifestyle. I quite agree that experiencing different cultures is fantastic and will radically change a person for the better. However, I've moved around quite a bit, different countries, different US states, different companies and IMO it gets extremely exhausting after awhile (judging by the OP's question, we are probably about the same age). Not to mention, having your friends and family in all parts of the world is tough. Throw in a partner (and even kids) and the only thing you start to desire is stability.

Plus, changing jobs every few years means that you are constantly in interview churn mode and as you age, you have less and less desire to deal with the moronic ways in which interviewing is conducted. Personally, I still enjoy programming and would still write programs even if I hit the jackpot in the lottery, but the way the industry behaves these days is a big part of why people get burned out.

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

#210
The thing I love the most about programming is that it cannot be boring (at least in principle). If it is becoming boring (usually due to grind), there usually is some meta-process that you think of automating, and by devising how to automate the grind, it ceases to be boring.
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