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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?

#281

Post by _kwmj »

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…

I have been coding for almost a decade and I don't think I have come home any day and felt like, "oh, today I will code this!". Nope. I always leave work at work - coding, studying, learning about work. It's not really a discipline, or an attempt to keep work and life separate. I just don't feel like it.

After work it's just reading, films, walks, sports etc for me. I used to get bothered by it seeing other people code and learn tricks, tools, and paradigms at home. Thinking whether I am in the wrong profession, or I am doing it wrong. But now I have accepted it as this is who I am.

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

#282

Post by sli »

My current problem is that I write Javascript/TypeScript at work and have come to absolutely loathe every aspect of it because I've been working with much, much better languages at home for hobby projects (Elm, PureScript, stuff like that).

While I have not really lost the love for programming, I've discovered the sheer amount of work one has to do in JS/TS for the smallest payoff. Sure, the languages I'm using for fun might require a lot of study before they can be used effectively (PureScript especially, since it's practically Haskell), the productivity gained is phenomenal.

At work now, I feel like I've got the pedal to the metal but the wheels are spinning the the movement forward is measured in inches per hour, or sometimes per day.

But that's just what every frontend dev job is going to be. There are a few here and there using something better than JS/TS, but not in my area, and they are so few and far between that I probably cannot compete with their other candidates (who, for example, likely have a degree while I do not). So instead of burning out on programming, I've burnt out on the stagnation of the whole market. I'm certainly not the first and of course I will not be the last, but it's really killed my motivation to go further in my career despite still enjoying what I actually do.

I don't want to be a manager, I don't want to run a business, I want to be a programmer.

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

#283

Post by pezo1919 »

sli wrote: post #282

My current problem is that I write Javascript/TypeScript at work and have come to absolutely loathe every aspect of it because I've been working with much, much better languages at home for hobby projects (Elm, PureScript, stuff like that). While I have not really lost the love for programming, I've discovered the sheer amount of work one has to do in JS/TS for the smallest payoff. Sure, the languages I'm using for f…

That's interesting I feel something very similar.

My main interest is FRP - especially Cycle.js (typescript) RxJS, and GunDB - a js graph database. Also Idris for a couple of years from now. To me these are the tools worth to learn and use but can't find any job with them. :(

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

#284

Post by airstrike »

dkulchenko wrote: post #15
airstrike wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.1 + 0.2 → 0.30000000000000004

That's not unique to JS. $ irb irb(main):001:0> 0.1 + 0.2 => 0.30000000000000004 irb(main):002:0> $ iex Erlang/OTP 22 [erts-10.6.2] [source] [64-bit] [smp:16:16] [ds:16:16:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe] Interactive Elixir (1.10.2) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help) iex(1)> 0.1 + 0.2 0.30000000000000004 iex(2)> $ python Python 2.7.17 (default, Dec 2 2019, 13:23:33) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 11.0.0 (…

I know, it was just a tongue-in-cheek comment but oh well

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

#285

Post by agumonkey »

I found joy by 3 factors:

    - fear free: I worked a min wage gig and coded on the side
    - due to the previous I could extend my code by small chunks, pleasure often comes from small and regular victories
    - work for somebody else (makes you less tempted to postpone stuff)
ps: I repeat this often because it's one of the rare time I found balance, progress, real output

pps: also question your motives, if they're subconsciously neurotic (some deep fear or anxiety) it will lead to parasitic short term actions rather than fulfilling mid-term experiences

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

#286

Post by apotheon »

jerzyt wrote: post #137
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…

That doesn't make any sense.

Use the right tool for the job. If "the winner" was all that mattered, we'd all be using Java now, and it would remain the top language forever, as long as it makes any sense at all to use -- not even requiring it to make more sense than other options.

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

#287

Post by apotheon »

cutler wrote: post #168
jerzyt wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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…

I've been stuck on the horns of this dilemma for a while, at least for choice of a scripting language. Ruby and Python adoption is pretty similar if you're working in web devlopment rather than data science. In London the number of Rails and Django jobs is fairly equal. Agree, though, Python is racing adhead of Ruby in general and that makes me sad.

From what I've seen, specifically-Ruby jobs tend to pay more than specifically-Python jobs (and more than specifically-Java jobs, for that matter), and while Rails and Django seem kinda balanced in some areas, in others Rails beats the tar out of Django for startup market share.

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

#288

Post by apotheon »

apotheon wrote: post #144
csallen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of this is a direct result of feeling that one always needs to be on the bleeding edge, which is both unnecessary and also a recipe for wasting time on fads. As an analogy, consider fiction. Imagine reading as many new novels as possible as they're released. Well, most of these novels will be completely irrelevant 5 years from now. The good ones stand the test of time. So you might as well only read novels that…

> A lot of this is a direct result of feeling that one always needs to be on the bleeding edge, which is both unnecessary and also a recipe for wasting time on fads. The problem with this is that everyone jumps on new fads so quickly that, if you don't, you're likely to endup with a bug-ridden, half-baked, vulnerability-riddled, unmaintained/abandoned, slowly collapsing, termite-infested framework as the basis of you…

Oh, yeah, and if I have to learn a whole new fucking sub-ecosystem and new version of the language itself with a bunch of breaking changes every two to five years, I don't have any time to spend learning fun things like a whole new language designed around a whole new paradigm.

ECMAScript and everything that touches it has become an actually focused bane for the joy of programming. It was fun just writing some clean plumbing for JavaScript applications in the past, but everything else about the process always ended up involving a bunch of scrambling to catch up with rapidly changing technology, planted on shifting sands even while I'm working with it, any time I start on a new project, where all I'm learning is a new set of persnickety conventions that will punish me if my approach is "wrong", force new work-arounds on me, and generally suck up all my time learning new rules to follow instead of interesting new ways of thinking about things that make me a better programmer and software designer.

Learning the interesting stuff, and figuring out new approaches to new problems based on the needs of those problems (and not the whims of the community), is a lot of what makes programming fun for many of us.

Linux exhausts me similarly.

* ALSA; esound; PulseAudio; etc. Just give me updated OSS or sndio on a BSD Unix system. That shit is stable, well-maintained, and not arbitrarily different every few years.

* SysV; upstart; systemd; etc. Just give me BSD RC. Maybe it's not ideal, but shit, it isn't swallowing 80% of userland with eventual ambitions of conquering the kernel and some of the worst defaults I've ever seen.

I'll just stop now, but I could go on for days in this vein. Maybe some of these tools are great, but I don't expect any of them to remain ascendant for more than five years in a form that is effectively recognizable by any significant measure but its name. The churn drives me insane. One of the reasons I aimed for software development in my professional life, abandoning the system and network administration (aka "ops") side of thing, was to escape all that crap. I want to write quality code, build new things and improve existing things, not participate in a rat-race to remain relevant just to have acquired nothing enduring from decades of effort other than stock options and a nice car.

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

#289

Post by apotheon »

tomxor wrote: post #214
tomg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone considering leaving the web development industry after 12 years: JavaScript is a never ending grind. Callbacks, then Bluebird, then Promises, then a sync await. a new testing framework every six months. a new web framework every couple of years. aimless, massive changes to the language (classes in a prototyped language? Why not). JavaScript then coffeescript then three versions of typescript. too many UI l…

I'm one of those "weirdos" who loves writing JS, and yet I agree with everything you just said being horrible. But I enjoy writing plain JS, that doesn't mean react, angular... i've run out of examples because I honestly don't care about those things. However, I'm in a position where I have enough autonomy to avoid all that crap and just use the bits I like. When you get minimal and ignore all of the noise about the…

I enjoyed the hell out of writing application plumbing, but the moment it started turning into an actual application that interacted with the outside world I was dealing with the hell of the Node ecosystem of "compiling" and packing for the browser, framework crap, buggy testing libraries, and all the rest of that nonsense, with an acutely clear understanding that all of it would change in five years and I would have almost zero useful knowledge from the tooling and ecosystem experience of the preceding half-decade.

In the mainstream professional JavaScript world, my advice is to escape as quickly as you can, and pursue things where the learning focus is on more interesting things than the arbitrary whims of the authors of half-baked (because they never have time to mature before they die) frameworks. If you can just live on the fringes and write JavaScript your way and not worry about constantly impending obsolescence of your entire technology stack (from Linux all the way up to your JavaScripty CSS framework), though, I'm sure you can have a great time doing it.

I'm writing a lot of C and Ruby these days, and I love it. I get to learn more about myself as a programmer, instead of more about other programmers as fly-by-night framework developers.

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

#290

Post by apotheon »

emilecantin wrote: post #233
tomg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone considering leaving the web development industry after 12 years: JavaScript is a never ending grind. Callbacks, then Bluebird, then Promises, then a sync await. a new testing framework every six months. a new web framework every couple of years. aimless, massive changes to the language (classes in a prototyped language? Why not). JavaScript then coffeescript then three versions of typescript. too many UI l…

Maybe I haven't been doing this for long enough (~8 years), but I think we're starting to see a plateau in JS-land. I jumped into React early-on (5 years ago), and it's still going strong, and has been for way longer than Angular / Backbone / ExtJs ever did. I wouldn't say Express is abandoned, I feel it's more that it's "matured". I mean what else can you add / improve? State management is still an un-settled area;…

Let me know when it's done settling in ECMAScript Land, then. In the meantime, I'm doing interesting stuff Somewhere Else.
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