Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#431

Post by jerzyt » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 7:47 AM UTC

dwagnerkc wrote: post #385

jerzyt wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using vim for 20+ years and have never been into extensive customizations. That was part of the attraction, because I had to deal with a lot of remote servers, often off-shore. With out-of-the box vi/vim I could get the most done with the least number of keystrokes. Someone made a comment above about IDE editors with vim emulation. Wish every IDE would do that. RStudio for example is not exactly vim, but I…

I've used these plugins to get vim bindings in Juypter Notebook / Lab. Jupyter Notebook: https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding Jupyter Lab: https://github.com/jwkvam/jupyterlab-vim

Thank you sooo much!!!

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#432

Post by bmn__ » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

torb-xyz wrote: post #429

braindongle wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An excellent list. Regarding functional programming, I recommend starting with a gentle approach that doesn't require picking up a new language: 1. Stop creating counters/loops and become facile with map, reduce, and the like. This will shift your thinking away from blocks and toward functions. 2. Take the time to really understand what side effects are, and start avoiding them everywhere they are not necessary. Keep…

This! What is funny that is that I started doing this before I knew anything at all about functional programming, I just started to avoid stuff that I had painful experiences with. Later I read a couple of chapter of SICP and then I really changed and my programming hasn't been the same since. The language I use at work is JavaScript and while SICP isn't for JavaScript, nothing else has changed my JavaScript for the…

> while SICP isn't for JavaScript

There's a port. https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#433

Post by bibelo » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 7:54 AM UTC

ufo wrote: post #106

Jefro118 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask if you've tried using one with Linux (Ubuntu or Mint)? I'm thinking of getting a ThinkPad next but I would prefer to use Linux over Windows and I'm wondering how well it runs Linux.

Thinkpads are very popular among the Linux crowd. The only thing that doesn't work in mine is the fingerprint reader.

Yes same here. It works 1 time out of 10. Really annoying

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#434

Post by mxschumacher » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 8:03 AM UTC

alasdair_ wrote: post #427

Jeaye wrote: post #22

- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…

> Vim; modal editing and vi-like navigation can blow open your mind. Explore the existing plugins to accomplish everything you want to be able to do. It's all there. The reason I end up ditching Vim after a few weeks every time I try it (4 serious attempts now) and go back to IntelliJ (which I’ve used for two decades) is that I never found a solution to the following trivial issue: Imagine you have a large Java codeb…

You don't need to choose between Intellj and Vim, because you can use Vim keybindings within Intellj.

So you get all the powerful IDE commands and the high speed of Vim commands at the same time.

It's easy to set up !

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#435

Post by dotdi » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

jamespullar wrote: post #271

tkainrad wrote: post #89

For me, the transition from Bash to Zsh has been a huge efficiency boost. Mainly because of some great plugins for Zsh, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting. My blog post about setting up a Linux workstation describes this in detail: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#swi... . The best thing is, there is no initial productivity hit…

I would highly recommend checking out fzf for better history search. Found the recommendation on another similar thread here and from coworkers. It's surprisingly fast and very intuitive. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

+1 to this. I've never been a fan of how works in bash, and fzf makes it soooo much better.

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#436

Post by 3131s » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 8:18 AM UTC

siddboots wrote: post #213

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: i3wm I installed it a couple years ago, went whole hog, down the rabbit hole, but realized a couple of things. 1. I rarely ever use anything more than a simple L/R split. 2. When I do use something more complex, it's almost always in the terminal, in which case why not use tmux? These days I'm back to using gnome because ubuntu switched to it over unity (which had a weird multitouch bug that drove me crazy). What…

I depart from that L/R split pretty regularly, especially when coding. I frequently have a single large window taking up half of my screen, and several smaller windows stacked vertically on the other half. The big window is usually the editor, but sometimes the browser if doing web development, or possibly a pdf or something like that. The little windows might be the editor, or a browser, or general command line work…

I always have at least 4 windows open in a project workspace, those being a text editor, a file browser, a terminal, and a web browser.

Currently I use i3 with packages pulled in from XFCE to handle sessions and power management, plus xfce4-appfinder and xfce4-panel (started and killed with MOD keys of course) because I wanted something beyond d-menu / b-menu.

It all works very well and was easy to configure.

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#437

Post by mxschumacher » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

dvdt wrote: post #87

dgb23 wrote: post #13

That would easily be using an integrated REPL. The more integrated it is (with your IDE/editor) the better the experience and productivity boost. And the difference is quite large. When you are working with a language that has first class REPL support you start to - 'get' why Emacs exists - become faster at writing code in general - write much more experimental and open - become more motivated in testing smaller assu…

I completely agree with the point about integrated REPL/IDE, and wanted to share some of the combinations I have used in the past, since it can be a concrete getting started point for those who are curious. Some of these are not literally repls, but IMO give a similar experience. - ClojureScript with Figwheel and the web browser - Clojure with Emacs Cider, Clojure with Cursive - R and Rstudio - Matlab - ipython jupyt…

What I really love about R/Rstudio is that you can highlight a few lines of code and execute them in isolation

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#438

Post by patrec » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

stonogo wrote: post #398

patrec wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not use strace. Use sysdig which is superior in just about every way.

sysdig is useless without installing nontrivial performance-impacting instrumentation, cannot handle non-IP networking, does not fully report all syscalls, has a license with patent crap in it, has gated features behind a paywall, and cannot inject syscall faults. It's not even in the same class of tool as strace at this point.

> sysdig is useless without installing nontrivial performance-impacting instrumentation

Most reasonable people reading this sentence would come away with the conclusion that strace is fast, whereas sysdig has some inherent overheads. In reality it is strace that has performance and other problems which make it completely unsuitable for production use (strace will slow syscall heavy code down by a factor of over 100; sysdig won't). Sysdig, on the other than can definitely be used in production and I always found the performance overhead minor. Can you point to something showing otherwise? BTW, newer versions of sysdig do not require a kernel module, thanks to eBPF (but I have not used this).

> , cannot handle non-IP networking,

What is an example of a networking related query you can do with strace but not with sysdig?

> does not fully report all syscalls

Can you expand? Are you referring to the fact that sysdig will drop traces if the userland client cannot keep up (which is a feature and not a bug, and something that all production grade tracing tools do)?

> , has a license with patent crap in it,

As far as I'm aware sysdig's core is Apache licensed and the user scripts are MIT and GPL licensed. Apache has a patent grant, which seems better than not having one. What is your specific beef?

> has gated features behind a paywall,

What features that strace offers are behind a paywall in sysdig? What's wrong with a company that provides a tool that massively advanced the (linux, pre-eBPF) state of the art as open source for free to all also provide some paid offerings on top?

> and cannot inject syscall faults.

This is indeed a useful recent-ish feature I did not know about so thank you! But there are other ways to do it, and something that's orthogonal to the core tracing functionality.

> It's not even in the same class of tool as strace at this point.

Indeed -- the only reason to use strace at this point is because you already know it and it is likely available. This may change if strace switches away from ptrace, but for now it is a joke. If you want something that just does strace, but much better (minimal overhead, powerful and intuitive query language with CLI autocompletion) use sysdig. If you want to use the most general and powerful tool that can tell you lots of other stuff besides syscall usage (but has a much worse UX) look at eBPF and perf. If you want to be a serious performance engineer or similar you will have to learn it, but I suspect for most people sysdig has the best ROI. Perf and dtrace are both (far) more versatile but, IMO, (far) less pleasant to use.

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#439

Post by artemisart » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:06 AM UTC

aryc19 wrote: post #424

auslegung wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today I switched from zsh to fish and I'm already much happier. Was using zsh for 4+ years, too

What benefits do you see in fish when compared to zsh?

I would say fish is to zsh like what zsh is to bash.

More seriously, for a start: good defaults, highlighting and autosuggestion built-in, parameters search with help and completion... (but it's not Posix).

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#440

Post by mxschumacher » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

throw1234651234 wrote: post #169

antirez wrote: post #74

Writing the overall design in plain English before writing the implementation. Not super detailed, but the main data structures and invariants and mechanisms that will make the implementation working. Then start the implementation refining such document as I discover new things.

This is the most useful post so far. I take it a step further and make a diagram in draw.io to understand exactly the data that is coming in and out. This is especially important for working with legacy code where you might get random crap like a name instead of an id and that could throw off your design.

here is another useful tool to draw graphs/flowcharts: https://whimsical.com/