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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?

#271

Post by slifin »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #249
beders wrote: 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…

And then you get so good at clojure that repl is "just another style" and it's not much different from Python in terms of effort or thought. After all, Python has a repl too, they just call it a shell. I have gotten burned out of my personal clojure projects same as anything. It's just a language people. Whether speaking Japanese or English, it's just a language. Yes culture is a part of it, but it doesn't imbue the…

Well Clojure is a language designed to be evaluated form by form if for example I wanted to evaluate an if statement in PHP's "REPL" then working out where that statement begins and ends is annoying compared to just sending an if expression in Clojure

In PHP once a function is defined I can't redefine it and then call it again to iteratively build that function

Just because your language has a repl doesn't mean you can get a quick feedback loop from it, in fact the more compile time constructs you have like classes and interfaces the harder it is, particularly if they're sticky with dependencies everywhere

Bret Victor's work I think really illustrates how little respect and investigation we do into feedback loops

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

#272

Post by awayfrommypc »

tfleming wrote: post #7
elviejo wrote: post #2

Programming is 1,000 room hotel of which we live in only one. I recommend you study different programming paradigms because in them we can find really interesting approaches to solve problems. For me those have been: - functional programming (with Haskell) - logic programming (prolog) - Constraint Programming with the excellent Coursera class on minizinc. Those paradigms made programming fun again for me . PS: I also…

What was it about JavaScript that wanted you to leave programming? I'm just curious.

12+ years PHP and simple JavaScript programmer here. I loved programming and building websites.

Then I got into modern JavaScript with Reactjs, Nodejs, TypeScript, and other mess. Initially, I was excited because that's what everyone was and still is talking about and I love learning new things.

But it is too ugly in JavaScript land. People make fun of PHP but with PSR standards it is easy to enforce coding standards. In JavaScript land, everyone has their own standards, no easy way to enforce them, but most people don't follow their own standards. It is ugly spaghetti code mostly. Debugging tool is browser which makes it nearly impossible to troubleshoot when you are dealing with tons of minimized libraries. And even when you are dealing with simplest tasks JS developers start looking for libraries instead of just writing 5 line function.

I was ready to leave programming for management or other jobs but changed my mind and learning embedded systems, game dev, and some other cool techs. Hoping to transition to robotics or something else soon.

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

#273

Post by vbezhenar »

avgDev wrote: post #266
konart wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Here is small excerpt. ...that has nothing to do with the problem in my opinion. Yes, programming is fun in general but then you come in touch with the reality of the job only to find out once again that 1. you are not making things, most of the time you maintain some old crap because nobody wants to spend time and money on building a new better version etc 2. The thing you are working on is useful but you can't rea…

I feel like this sums it up pretty good for me. Even today when I get challenged and have to come up with a clever solution, I'm enjoying it but 90% of work is fetch data, show on front end, user edits, save in database. I have been working on a large project for over 6 months now, 30k lines of code.....it still feels like I have not done much.

Work on small projects. I'm writing all projects myself and it's still fun, when you decide everything. I can write my own HTTP server implementation if I feel like it.

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

#274

Post by Chernobog »

quicklime wrote: post #231

I became a manager. This didn't, in and of itself, make me rediscover the joy of programming. But it did free up the mental energy I needed to program outside of work, for fun. As a 9-5 programmer, I often found myself too mentally exhausted to do any coding outside of work. This meant that over the years, programming became just a job, and nothing more. But once I changed career tracks, I found that I had the energy…

Wow, I'm have just started trying out the management track in my company, and your post is very motivating. As in, I thought I would lose out on the programming part, but if I end up with the same experience as you, I will make up for it by doing hobby projects again.

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

#275

Post by noisy_boy »

For me, the main difference between programming being joy or misery is deadlines. When I'm tinkering at home solving some problem without any timelines, I'm super happy. When I'm solving a problem at work that has relatively flexible timelines (which is rarely the case lately), I'm very much enjoying myself. But when there is timeline attached coupled with "where are we with this" every alternate day, it takes all the fun out of it. I do understand that this is real world and this is how we operate etc etc but that is how it is for me.

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

#276

Post by dkulchenko »

dbancajas wrote: post #65
dkulchenko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Cratejoy to handle the e-commerce backend, so the extent of it was some minor HTML/CSS work. There's existing solutions for Shopify that do the same as well, so no programming needed. Later on (still running 5 years later), when I got back into coding again, I got rid of Cratejoy and wrote the backend from scratch in Ruby.

how is your subscription box business now? is it stronger due to COVID?

Yeah, shockingly enough despite the economic situation. Business-wise, it's been the best quarter yet, outpacing even holiday gifting peaks.

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

#277

Post by floathub »

Err_Eek wrote: post #103
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…

I've been going through SICP for a year and a half now on and off. At this point I don't feel I've been getting back all the effort I put in it. I think it's mostly recommended by people who didn't do all the exercises, or casually browsed through it and all they were left with was the fact that you can write a programming book without mentioning assignments until halfway through or that it's more easy to write a sch…

Of course everyone comes at these things with different histories and different intrinsic interests. But I really enjoyed fundamental stuff like:

* the concept of assignment implying _time_ and messing with the substitution model.

* recursive functions that are iterative

* iterative structures that are recursive

* At the base of the base of the data abstraction in LISP is, well, nothing.

* Code as data, data as code, really strongly underlined.

* The whole LISP written in itself (as a sort of fixed point of a language that defines a language). That is really something.

* The idea of using a language to write a language that lets you express your problem.

That last one is probably obvious to most, but it was really novel to me (despite years of writing functions to compute answers).

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

#278

Post by avgDev »

vbezhenar wrote: post #273
avgDev wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this sums it up pretty good for me. Even today when I get challenged and have to come up with a clever solution, I'm enjoying it but 90% of work is fetch data, show on front end, user edits, save in database. I have been working on a large project for over 6 months now, 30k lines of code.....it still feels like I have not done much.

Work on small projects. I'm writing all projects myself and it's still fun, when you decide everything. I can write my own HTTP server implementation if I feel like it.

I do plan some side projects to do in vanilla JS, which should be more fun. However, at work I'm working on a significant project, and it can become a real drag.

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

#280

Post by palerdot »

quicklime wrote: post #231

I became a manager. This didn't, in and of itself, make me rediscover the joy of programming. But it did free up the mental energy I needed to program outside of work, for fun. As a 9-5 programmer, I often found myself too mentally exhausted to do any coding outside of work. This meant that over the years, programming became just a job, and nothing more. But once I changed career tracks, I found that I had the energy…

Interesting. Good for you.

One of the criticisms of management path is that it just blocks your mind with anxieties, since you are dealing with lot of unknowns and things which you don't control ...

If you are truly able to switch off after work (as a manager) and still devote your energy on programming pursuits, then I guess you really have a good team and a really good job.

I would be interested to hear your experiences after you work with good number of teams which you inherit (not build them from scratch), and still feel the same way.

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