111–120 of 230 posts
This sounds a lot like my journey. I was overwhelmed with the details of ~20 programming languages and data formats. Eventually it actually got rather frustrating to work with all of them. Then I discovered Lisp.
"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect." O RLY? http://blogs.forbes.com/nicoleperlroth/2011/06/07/winners-an...
I got bored with programming so I started to break out into more mathy things like machine learning and computational linguistics. It's the best of both worlds.
> People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. Totally
I disagree. People who code in the world of technology companies get respect, and quite a lot of it. Getting paid for your work is a form of respect.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre progra…
> programming for biology and medical research ... is just like any other mediocre programming job, but your office is a folding table under a decommissioned fume hood. That is sooo spot on (left my bioinformatics job a month ago for the exact same reason). What the author additionally misses is that when you have never programmed/developed as your primary means of making a living, you likely have never worked with p…
I just think it's disingenuous to imply that the only programmers who are better than you (or I) do it as a 9-5 job. Some do it just for fun.
Some good points buried among juvenile posturing, I guess the "old" part must be irony. Would you take programming language advice from someone who has learned the language in "a day or a week"? I realize the point is the language doesn't really matter but statements like that and the general tenor of the post don't inspire me.
1. It's not a "post", it's a single chapter in a whole book http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ which I'm guessing you won't read because you clearly can't read. 2. I am old compared to a lot of programmers, but yes it was kind of a joke. There's several exercises where people know my age. 3. It's a good thing you're not my target audience. It's a lot harder for me to write in 2nd person passive voice like you're…
By the way, I enjoyed track 2 of week 2 of your "random improv".
Please stop telling me what I think + feel about my craft - you feel that way, you want to do it down, fine, but don't act as if it is some sort of immutable truth, especially when you are talking to people new to the craft which I think is quite unethical, frankly. Why assume your own experience/opinion is somehow necessarily correct and ought to be dictated as hard-won truths, when your entire schtick is 'dissecting others' logic'?
No matter how many times I read these sorts of things, nothing changes the fact that I find programming a joy, the whole thing of being able to render machines of such incredible power + complexity to do stuff at all a miracle and know it is something I want to spend as much time doing as I can for the rest of my life - no jaded naysayer, not even an 'internet famous' one can change my personal experience of the thing, and I am absolutely nowhere, a nobody in a CRUD job, and not even that good of a programmer, but my passion and love for it remains.
A funny thing about this is that no matter what pursuit you can think of, there are always those in it who say 'actually the reality of this is horrible', people who take that attitude exist everywhere in every field, no matter how wonderful and joyous it seems and often actually is. I think that's something to contemplate - if it were all true then nothing would be worth pursuing.
There is a lot of bullshit spoken about programming, lots of crap aspects to the reality of it, lots of crap aspects of dealing with other people in trying to get things done, but people seriously - this thing is amazing, let's be grateful and celebrate it for once, please.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
when everybody is trained with at least a basic ability to program, then your super advantage is gone Yes, but like Math, not everybody can be trained in it. People either get math or they don't. Everybody has to take calculus to become a scientist or a doctor but most people never really get it and forget it shortly after taking the classes. I imagine the same will happen with programming: there will be a few requir…
I think you're overestimating the difficulty of programming. Let's face it, there's a hell of a lot of moderately bright twelve-year-olds who know how to program adequately well.
But: that's still incredibly rare.
And: a top-.5% twelve year old being able to do something hardly means it's usual or unimpressive for an adult.
If he thinks he can learn any programming language in a week, he's still ignorant about programming languages. I challenge his knowledge of/about Haskell, Agda, etc. Also, I am sure there are plenty of "old programmers" who are still excited about programming languages, and think they matter.
I've gone through http://learnyouahaskell.com/ and it wasn't too hard. About the only difficulty is the pointless and contradictory jargon like "point free" or the hand-waving about Monads and how they violate their purely functional execution model. Never heard of Agda, but then I sort of don't care. Obviously, there are old programmers who are into programming languages, but they usually sit around writing crappy p…
While I'm yet a young programmer, the primary paid experiences/internships/jobs I've had with programming have been in the biomedical/bioinformatics field. My first day on the job? Did probably all the work they'd expected of me the entire summer (all using a simple "programming" trick with Excel) then proceeded to write them a few program to make their data-entry/processing jobs a lot easier and more precise. I was…