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Advice From An Old Programmer

learnpythonthehardway.org

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Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#81

Post by kenrikm »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #38

Edw's comment aside, I can understand being bored with programming. After you learn your way around a dozen or so different platforms, if you're not getting bored you might want to check to see if you don't have a bit of Asperger's. But he nails it when he points out that all of this programming talk is bullshit. It's just stuff to chat mindlessly about while you're not helping people. Programming is making computers…

This parallels much of the photography community, there are people who know every technical aspect and could talk for days about what f-stop/shutter speed to use in certain circumstances etc.. And then there are people who go out and take beautiful photos of beautiful things.

The point is Photography is not about equipment "I can't take that photo without this lens" it's about photos you can take.

Programming is not about Languages and Code structure it's about making something useful using the knowledge you have (Twitter could have been made with PHP or Python or any number of other languages, it still would have been "Twitter") Heck look at PG and Viaweb, none of the users cared that it was made with Clisp just that it did what they needed it to do.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#82

Post by bicknergseng »

"You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession."

Exactly. So many students and young people see programming as an end, rather than a means. They might take a class in Java or Python or somethign, hoping to learn how to write code. What needs to be impressed on people is that you don't write code to write code, you write code as part of creating an online network connecting a billion people around the world or write code to create an immersive world that tells a unique story every time someone enters it. Despite the rise of DIY blogs and webpages, people still talk about programming as if they were an artist talking about learning how to paint in order to use a paintbrush.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#83

Post by BCM43 »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #46
edw519 wrote: post #28

Thoughts from an Older Programmer... I've been programming for a very long time. Me too. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. Actually, it's more interesting to me than ever. ...I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were. I have a cursory knowledge of quite a few myself. But I know one really, really well. Eventually though this just…

> I disagree. I've met a lot of non-programmers who knew a little programming. They were more dangerous than effective. I'm sure you're well aware of this, but there's a ton of opportunity for even very simple programming to help in cases where people have never thought of programming as a possible solution. (This is how I contributed roughly $3MM of value to one company as a kid who barely knew how to program). On t…

(This is how I contributed roughly $3MM of value to one company as a kid who barely knew how to program)

Care to tell this story?

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#84

Post by jberryman »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #57
zerostar07 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit-picking, but you could have just mentioned where you disagree without quoting the whole article.

It might be because he publishes his comments as ebooks and can't use a comment that's too out of context.

Heh, I thought you were joking:

http://edweissman.com/53640595

that's kind of fun

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#85

Post by samspot »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #42
michaelochurch wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was 21, I thought the fun part was learning new technologies and the hard, frustrating, somewhat boring part was writing the code. (I also only knew C++ and Java, so I thought the accidental complexity of these languages was an intrinsic fixture of programming.) Learning Python, then Ocaml, then Lisp, was a lot of fun. (The REPL makes a huge difference in the experience of programming. It makes the code real r…

I love programming and find it very relaxing. I would probably also like re-arranging chairs at a charity function. Or solving mathematical puzzles in books. I also love instrument flying, which is like real-time fluid dynamics where you die if you screw it up. But I've come to understand that these are just properties of the types of people who grok computers -- detail-oriented, able to spend many hours in the zone,…

"It just seems to me like we programmers as a whole like trivial things and can spend most of our time on them as long as they tickle our analytic bone."

This explains why some of us (Me) can spend so much time playing computer RPG's, when we could get the same progression and more real-world benefit by planting a garden. I guess I'm also too impatient for that :)

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#86

Post by SatvikBeri »

BCM43 wrote: post #83
SatvikBeri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree. I've met a lot of non-programmers who knew a little programming. They were more dangerous than effective. I'm sure you're well aware of this, but there's a ton of opportunity for even very simple programming to help in cases where people have never thought of programming as a possible solution. (This is how I contributed roughly $3MM of value to one company as a kid who barely knew how to program). On t…

(This is how I contributed roughly $3MM of value to one company as a kid who barely knew how to program) Care to tell this story?

When I joined I spent a lot of time asking people what they did, making mind maps, and finding lots of patterns. I quickly realized that there was a lot of repetition, and that in theory it should be possible to automate, though I had no idea how. So I hit the books, learning everything I could about SAS (the main repeated tasks involved reporting/analytics) and Windows Powershell. Eventually I figured out how to automate it all, and did so. This freed up time for a lot of people, let the company hire less, allowed them to meet government deadlines that would have brought the wrath of god upon them if they failed, cancel a $1.2MM consulting project that would have taken 2 years and accomplished half of what I did, made it massively faster to create new reports, drastically reduced our error rates...

So basically, the key was that I really put in the effort to learn the business processes and politics, and just assumed that it would be somehow possible to automate all this stuff without really knowing how.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#87

Post by ExpiredLink »

AznHisoka wrote: post #51
api wrote: post #48

"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." That is the best thing in his advice column. It's hard to pull off though. I started programming at 5 and am at a skill level comparable to this poster,…

With a degree in biology, even with no PhD, it's still vastly useful when paired with programming skills. You have a good high-level overview of the problems in the industry, and that's an important first step. But it seems like in today's competitive market (especially when it comes to doing a startup), you need 2 degrees. Computer Science is not enough. It's just a set of tools but if you don't have a domain where…

In the corporate world domain knowledge is more important for developers than technical knowledge. The complexity of real-wold domains (e.g. insurances, banking, ...) is amazing. For an experienced developer programming is the easy part of his job.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#88

Post by j45 »

j45 wrote: post #80

This is brilliant advice. "What I discovered after this journey of learning is that it's not the languages that matter but what you do with them." For those developers who have only discovered the nirvana with one, or two languages, and love their rails, djangos, closures to death, just know that if one exists, there's always the possibility that there's more. Just because you aren't aware of them doesn't mean it doe…

Wow, I can't believe saying something similar to edw519, and the OP, got downvoted.

At least, kind of explain, maybe why. I don't think there's anything inflammatory here.

Thanks!

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#89

Post by hackinthebochs »

michaelochurch wrote: post #64
wladimir wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, the fun part is learning the technology. The hard part is working with people -- which is why it's about a million times more important. That's very interesting, and indeed seems to mark a certain personality type. Most people would see that exactly the other way around, that working with people is fun and easy, but the technical stuff is hard and extremely frustrating. It depends completely on your skill…

That's very interesting, and indeed seems to mark a certain personality type. Most people would see that exactly the other way around, that working with people is fun and easy, but the technical stuff is hard and extremely frustrating. Learning technology is fun when it adds something new . For example, if you know functional programming, then Gang-of-Four "design patterns" are completely useless cruft and not especi…

The point is that different personality types enjoy different aspects of programming. For some people the technology itself is the fun part. For some its what you can accomplish with it. There is no right or wrong here.

Re: Advice From An Old Programmer

#90

Post by saraid216 »

oconnor0 wrote: post #78

This ("the language you use doesn't matter") has never made sense to me. I get that what we produce is of value to others while the tools we use isn't of value & doesn't - directly - matter. But, I know that certain languages are closer to how I want to think & how I want to be able to solve problems while other languages inhibit that or restrict the ways I think about & am able to express problems. I only have about…

Actually, your attitude is exactly the one that advice is trying to foster. Keep in mind that some pieces of advice are not meant to stand alone; they're reactive and meant to act as pushback against worse things.

There are religious wars between various languages, as I'm sure you're aware, and the driving force between a lot of the arguments is that the tool of choice is more important than solving the problem. If only they focused more on problem solutions rather than saying that Perl has too many sigils or Java is full of silly factory patterns, they'd be able to agree that Perl is useful for many things and Java is useful in many situations.

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