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

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

#511

Post by caseymarquis »

nickbauman wrote: post #506
caseymarquis wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning to touch type took roughly 10 hours over 2 weeks, and it made my life immeasurably better. Your (dad's?) mileage may vary.

What exactly improved?

Imagine having to look at your mouse every time you clicked on something. Now imagine you no longer have to do that.

If you're really curious, just learn to touch type and find out. It doesn't take all that long if you're already a solid typist. I'd be fascinated to read an article from someone who learned how to touch type and thought it was a waste of time.

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

#512

Post by tchaffee »

shostack wrote: post #276
tchaffee wrote: post #111

Lately, using Jupyter notebooks. It's a paradigm change, and pretty close to what I would imagine Donald Knuth had in mind with literate programming. Just for example, being able to see the shape of variables and having that output stay there between coding sessions is a huge time saver. Add being able to plot data and using other visual tools right inside your code and well, I could go on and on. Just try it. It's l…

How do you integrate it into your workflow? Is your program scattered across blocks in a notebook or is it easy to pull everything together once it works the way you want? Also, thoughts on jupyter vs co ok colaboratory?

Late response, but in case you are still looking I don't think I have enough experience just yet to talk about my workflow. For the moment, I'm mostly fine with just running my entire notebook. And yes, my program is "scattered" across cells in a notebook. And that's useful. The blocks are the small units I would want to debug, or to document with markdown above the block.

However, you might look to Jeremy Howard of fastai [1] fame for some direction. He apparently built the entire fastai library using notebooks and nbdev [2] which allows you to "add #export flags to the cells that define the functions you want to include in your python modules."

I have tried out nbdev in my free time, and it's pretty cool.

[1] https://www.fast.ai/ [2] https://github.com/fastai/nbdev

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

#514

Post by benhurmarcel »

nickbauman wrote: post #506
caseymarquis wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning to touch type took roughly 10 hours over 2 weeks, and it made my life immeasurably better. Your (dad's?) mileage may vary.

What exactly improved?

For me it improved my physical comfort significantly. In particular it solved my back pain because I didn't spend so much time with my head looking down.

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

#515

Post by nivethan »

jordanlewis wrote: post #239
nivethan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a very long time I didn't use anything besides just plain vim, 2 biggest things to add to your vim use is undodir and YouCompleteMe. Crazy that I didn't have either of these for so long, undodir I wish was part of the default.

I made persistent_undo as part of Google Summer of Code in 2011. Very grateful I got to do that (and for the mentorship of Bram Moolenaar), and I'm so glad that this became part of your essential workflow. I also can't live without it at this point.

Thank you so much! It is very much appreciated and I don’t think I have any cases where I wish it was better. It works exactly like I expect and does what it says on the box.

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

#516

Post by nickbauman »

caseymarquis wrote: post #511
nickbauman wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly improved?

Imagine having to look at your mouse every time you clicked on something. Now imagine you no longer have to do that. If you're really curious, just learn to touch type and find out. It doesn't take all that long if you're already a solid typist. I'd be fascinated to read an article from someone who learned how to touch type and thought it was a waste of time.

OK so terminology: touchtype to me means that you learn the fingering the keyboard in a specific way. Not just that you can type by not looking at the keyboard. I can do that. I just never bothered with the "correct fingering".

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

#518

Post by mxschumacher »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #419
mxschumacher wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've installed rg and aliased it to to grep, so the muscle memory stays the same but underneath the tool is changed. Also works for ls -> exa cat -> bat

exa completely breaks ls arguments/switches and as such is a hard pass for me.

I have since switched to lsd: https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd

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

#519

Post by karamazov »

nojito wrote: post #118

So much useless information in this thread. The best way to become a better programmer is to read more code and understand what it does and think about different ways to implement the same feature. Programming is problem solving at its core. Everything your mentioning is secondary to achieving that goal.

You're right, let's go back to punchcards.
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