Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 337 posts

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

#321

Post by tomxor »

apotheon wrote: post #289
tomxor wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not really sure what you mean by "constantly impending obsolescence", but as one anecdote in the face of that: I have plenty of core JS code in production that was written 3-4 years ago. I've gradually improved or changed parts of this codebase but that had absolutely nothing to do with external libraries of which I use very few... this feels very unchanging to me, my code is not about to implode due to any external reasons.

I write my own UI/MVC type code from scratch just because that's the way I roll and my requirements there are a combination of minimal, extremely performance sensitive and in many cases esoteric where I have to write the UI anway so it's not much work compared to forcing existing libraries to do what i want... but if had to I could replace it with some hip and upcoming UI + MVC library and still keep 95% of my core code completely independent and intact.

I think JS world feels like massive churn if 90% of what you are doing is UI UX etc, because that's the interface that can never sit still in the name of progress... either that or you (not you necessarily) are doing it wrong and not separating UI code from your application code (I've seen this happen quite a bit in ye olden angular days where everything becomes attached to angular for no apparent reason, and angular itself is the worst of OOP + MVC where everything is convoluted and difficult to follow).

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

#322

Post by ojnabieoot »

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.

(sorry for the late response, I try to avoid social media of any form...)

I love F#. F# is by far my favorite programming language when it comes to writing enterprise software.

The problem with the F# job was that many on the sales team, and in upper management overall, were just bad people. They were a bad influence on my boss, the CTO and an otherwise good person. I ended up resigning over an ethics dispute.

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

#323

Post by ojnabieoot »

chuck3201 wrote: post #213
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…

I'm also not trying to sound dismissive or condescending, but it really seems weird to me that if somebody says they are have been doing something for 20 years and now they are bored of it, then they should consider seeing a therapist? I mean, there are plenty of things I used to like that I don't anymore, should I go see a therapist every time my interests change?

It's true this kind of stress and feelings are universal, but doesn't mean it's not a potentially serious psychological concern. Parents who feel extremely overwhelmed with lots of young children in the house are understandably stressed out - and yes, should be encouraged to consider therapy to help them manage.

I would recommend reading munificent's comment above about therapists as "mental trainers." I think everyone should consider seeing a therapist at least at some point in their lives. The idea that therapy is only when something is medically wrong is at best misguided and at worst dangerous.

When I suggested OP considers therapy, I didn't mean "uh oh, sounds like you're clinically depressed, DSM-V states that a loss of interest..." And the word "consider" is doing a lot of work there. OP's brain is clearly trying to tell them something, and having a knowledgeable certified professional to talk things through with is simply prudent when it comes to something as profound (and risky) as reconsidering your career.

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

#324

Post by yellowapple »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #310
yellowapple wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The printer is probably cheating and rounding to the output you expect northrup@Topaz:~$ sbcl This is SBCL 1.5.8, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp. More information about SBCL is available at . SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty. It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the distribution for more…

This just means that 0.3 has the same internal representation as the result of (0.1 + 0.2). Internally, they're probably both 0.30000000000000004 (depending on precision), so an equality check returns true. It could also be that they're both 3/10 rational numbers, but given other tests in this thread that's likely not the case out the box.

    northrup@Topaz:~$ sbcl
    This is SBCL 1.5.8, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
    More information about SBCL is available at .
    
    SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
    It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
    BSD-style licenses.  See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
    distribution for more information.
    * (- 0.3 3/10)
    0.0
    * (= (- 0.3 3/10) 0)
    T
    * (= (- 3/10 0.3) 0)
    T
    * (= 0.3 3/10)
    NIL
So yeah, 0.3 and 3/10 are definitely distinct, but still apparently net out to exactly 0 nonetheless.

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

#325

Post by reinkaos »

simongray wrote: post #118
reinkaos wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reconcile this with your day job? Or did you go on to work with Clojure full-time?

I'm not the one you asked, but personally after I learned Clojure I completely joined the Rich Hickey cult and only sought out Clojure/ClojureScript jobs or jobs where I could decide what language to use myself. I'm now on my third one. It obviously limits your pool of available jobs significantly, but I try to keep up with which companies and organisations are using Clojure in my city and so far it hasn't been an is…

Thanks for sharing your story. At some point I might embark on a similar journey but with Elixir.

Side projects are always an option, I guess.

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

#326

Post by vlasev »

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.

If 90% of the work is this repetitive, perhaps you could create methods and tools to make the process quicker?

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

#327

Post by will-in-wi »

vfinn wrote: post #114
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…

I'd say write manageable programs. The uglier the codebase gets, the more I hate coding it. If the codebase is well-thought and easily extendable, coding is mostly fun and you get pleasure out of beautiful execution.

This got me thinking. I find that being repeatedly told not to clean up a system burns me out. To the extent that our programming is creative and enjoyable in its creativity, one must feel some sort of pride in the result in order to have any interest in its continuation. If you are being told to not clean things up or leave things in a messy state, you are left devoid of this sense of pride and joy in your work.

Best case, you can find pride and joy in something about your programming other than the technical excellence. However, that depends on you personally caring about the purpose of your code's existence.

Of course, left to their own devices, a bunch of engineers could be very happy and ship nothing useful. So you have to impose some sort of balance in a business environment. However, it's an interesting management problem to allow people enough time and autonomy to be proud of their work, while still accomplishing what needs doing. Ideally, with happy engineers, more gets done, and it pays off.

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

#328

Post by kleiba »

iLemming wrote: post #301
kleiba wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the best way to get started with Clojure these days? So much has changed since the early days.

The language itself is very stable. There were no breaking changes. You can pick up just any Clojure book (even old one), and probably 98% of it still be very relevant.

Good to know. I was also interested in the full environment, e.g., IDE's, package management, build chain, etc.

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

#329

Post by apotheon »

tomxor wrote: post #321
apotheon wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not really sure what you mean by "constantly impending obsolescence", but as one anecdote in the face of that: I have plenty of core JS code in production that was written 3-4 years ago. I've gradually improved or changed parts of this codebase but that had absolutely nothing to do with external libraries of which I use very few... this feels very unchanging to me, my code is not about to implode due to any exter…

If you're basically building everything from scratch, of course you aren't going to see the churn as much.

If you build on others' frameworks, and those frameworks drop out of maintenance because the maintainers moved on to shiny new things, any security vulnerabilities or emerging incompatibilities with browsers can quickly prove ruinous for people who used those frameworks.

I wrote a SPA while working at a consultancy. It was actually pretty churn-proof the way I wrote it, but during one vacation day and the following weekend a couple people (including the boss) just rewrote the whole thing to use more faddish framework stuff. I don't work there any longer, but since then (about 2016) they've probably had to effectively rewrite it twice if they kept up with that approach.

That's what I mean by "constantly impending obsolescence".

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

#330

Post by apotheon »

cutler wrote: post #292
apotheon wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know about that. Search angel.co and you'll find 36 hits for Ruby on Rails/London and 50 for Django/London. Same ratio on Indeed.co.uk/London.

There's an iceberg of Ruby jobs that don't exist in the most obvious places to search, and because other languages have gained more spotlight (including anything that even smells of ECMAScript) there are fewer people searching for Rails jobs so the number of Rails jobs is pretty well matched to the number of job-seeking Rails devs. Also, early stage startups tend to hire from people they know, not from job search sites. Finally, there are many "full stack" jobs where work on the backend means Rails.

A simplistic metric like "job listings on angel.co" (especially if you're specifically looking for Rails in the job posting title) don't tell the whole story.

Post reply on HN