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Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

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Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#41

Post by debuggingnoob »

hirundo wrote: post #37

When I learned about the repl. For me 90% of debugging is about figuring out how to break at the crucial line and then shining the repl light on it. 75% of writing new code is about trying stuff in the repl and then stepping through the code in the repl and testing everything. For me that quick feedback loop makes coding as fun as gaming.

Would love to see a video of what this actually means. I'm not sure I've ever written code for which I can use a REPL in any meaningful way so I must be doing it wrong. Videos of actual real world coding/debugging (not examples that are too simple and therefore not real world) would probably be very enlightening.

I mostly do graphics stuff and there are 70 lines of setup until I get to the 1 line that executes something based on the 70 lines of setup. But even in non graphs code my program 1000s of lines, all of which have to execute where as a REPL is one line at a time so yea, a video would really help see how to apply this.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#42

Post by jariel »

1) Complexity is very expensive

2) Written code can take a long time to stabilize and is thus expensive to change and maintain

3) Ostensibly orthodox legacy systems are full of anti-patterns.

4) How easily a small problem can turn into an infinite number of other, small problems, and the intuition required for where to 'draw the line'.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#43

Post by searchableguy »

darkhorse13 wrote: post #35
manjana wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bootstrap - my one and only experience with a CSS framework. Love it, but can't compare to anything yet. I'll properly give Bulma, Tailwind or another popular framework a go for my next project - let me know if you can recommend any other.

You can give Halfmoon a try: https://www.gethalfmoon.com Disclaimer: I built it.

Were you inspired by tailwind?

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#44

Post by temporallobe »

When I finally understood that browsers only understand HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Yes that’s a simplification, but it’s essentially true. Early on in my career when I started more front-end development, I was under the impression that there was somehow much more going on under the hood, i.e., more languages, executables, ways of setting styles and layouts. When this finally clicked with me, it was all so much clearer and immediately less intimidating. I’m still surprised to this day that even many experienced developers think that browsers can natively interpret SCSS, TypeScript, or whatever templating language they’re using — heck, some people even used to call jQuery a “language”.

As a relatively new Clojure developer, the meaning of the parentheses was the ah-ha moment. I imagine it’s the same for other Lisp-y languages.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#47

Post by vincent-manis »

- when I read Clark Weissman's `LISP 1.5 Primer' in 1968

- when I finished a student programming assignment a year later and realised that a well-chosen set of procedures constituted what we'd now call a DSL

- when I ported Martin Richards' very clean BCPL compiler and realized that you could write efficient code in something that wasn't Fortran

- when I read the Thompson/Ritchie paper on Unix

- when I completed my first reading of SICP

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#48

Post by temporallobe »

baron816 wrote: post #40

I went from Ruby to JavaScript development. First, I’d like to say I think starting with Ruby/Rails is a bad idea. Ruby uses a lot of higher order functions, but it isn’t super clear from the syntax how that all works. Higher order functions in JS are much more clear, IMO, on account of having to use parens to call the function (in Ruby, you don’t need parens to call function, you can just name the function and delin…

I agree on your sentiments about Ruby/Rails. Rails also applies the philosophy of convention over configuration, so newcomers can’t usually just intuit what’s going on — you have to know their specific conventions, which also seem to change with each major release. And one of my pet peeves about Ruby as a language is the optional use of parentheses for function definitions and calls, making it harder to read through code quickly. In C-style syntax languages, it’s very obvious at a glance where functions are being called. Not so with Ruby.
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