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The best programmers I know

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Re: The best programmers I know

#121

Post by WillAdams »

dilawar wrote: post #67

> "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written." It's a bit like math books. I dreaded reading formal math during my engineering -- always read accessible text. Got a little better in my master's and could read demse chapters which got to the point quickly. At least now I can appreciate why people write terse ref…

Powerful argument for Literate Programming:

http://literateprogramming.com/

The two best programmers I worked with had well-thumbed copies of Knuth's TAoCP....

Re: The best programmers I know

#122

Post by nhinck3 »

hk__2 wrote: post #89

I don’t get this one: > Don’t Guess If you work with anything but a very simple program, you often must guess what could be the cause(s) of your issue in order to know where to look. The more experienced you are, the more accurate your guesses will be.

I've worked with far too many people who, along with not "Reading the error message" do just guess at how to get rid of the error message. Like literal stab in the dark, what if I just change this and re-run it.

Re: The best programmers I know

#123

Post by asl2D »

kshri24 wrote: post #51

Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point: "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written." It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answerin…

I recently started drawing (my own little middle age crisis) and i am so out of depth, so far from even understanding what is possible, and the internet filled with so much junk tutorials, that sometimes ability of LLM to parse my intent and guide me towards the key words and names is a godsend, of course it probably would be better to ask a person who knows this stuff, but it's not always convenient. In my use case best part of LLMs is Soft input, and the soft output is not a problem.

Re: The best programmers I know

#124

Post by asl2D »

mattmanser wrote: post #77
kshri24 wrote: post #51

Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point: "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written." It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answerin…

I also agree with most of it, apart from that. I actually think this advice comes from the different ways people learn. And if you don't learn the way the author does, this advice feels wrong and jarring. I learn by doing, not reading. If I read something but don't actually use it I'm liable to forget it. My brain seems to classify it as "not practical, not needed". If I do actually use it, however, I tend to learn i…

Different way people learn, and different way they create. Other creative fields have that dichotomy too, but i guess we are closer to math, and always try to find "correct way" of doing things, while our field is actually really flexible and allowing for a lot of self expression.

Re: The best programmers I know

#125

Post by dielll »

guess your website got Hacker news Hug of death. Getting the error below:

Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited

You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.

If you are owner of this website, prevent this from happening again by upgrading your plan on the Cloudflare Workers dashboard.

Re: The best programmers I know

#126

Post by DeathArrow »

actionfromafar wrote: post #97
pmg101 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite agree. It's simply a slider isn't it, with "no time, no knowledge, pure guesswork" at one end and "infinite time, thorough analysis, perfect understanding" at the other end. Clearly the left end is dangerous but the right end can also be, due to opportunity costs. Making a judgment on where the slider should be for each decision/change is a key skill of the craft.

I also find that my "context windows" can only hold so much. I can't understand everything all at once. So if I do very deep dives, I tend to forget (temporarily) other parts of the problem/stack/task/whatever. The solution for me is to create as much as possible as self-contained testable units. Not always possible, but something to strive for. And I find that this skill of organising is the limit for how large/comp…

I think this is what the author meant by dividing complex problems in sub problems that are easier to tackle.

Re: The best programmers I know

#127

Post by animesh »

dockerd wrote: post #111

For those unable to open the link due to owner site being hit by Cloudflare limit, here's a link to web archive - https://web.archive.org/web/20250409082704/https://endler.de...

Off-topic: is the rate-limit because they host on a Cloudflare compute service? I ask because I would like to know if this feature would be available for just using the domain hosting.

Re: The best programmers I know

#128

Post by fideloper »

animesh wrote: post #127
dockerd wrote: post #111

For those unable to open the link due to owner site being hit by Cloudflare limit, here's a link to web archive - https://web.archive.org/web/20250409082704/https://endler.de...

Off-topic: is the rate-limit because they host on a Cloudflare compute service? I ask because I would like to know if this feature would be available for just using the domain hosting.

That feature exists on cloudflare outside of using CF workers or their own compute stuff. It's part of their WAF featureset.

Re: The best programmers I know

#129

Post by blackbrokkoli »

vinhcognito wrote: post #102
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Career plans aside, to me, making software is a means to an end. There is no inherent value to producing software, as there may be in producing car tires or bananas. The best software is no software. And then who is the better programmer, the one who knows more about how to make software, or the one who knows more about what software to make?

To me, cars are a means to an end. And I can imagine a world without cars more easily than a world without software. Do you imagine that we just somehow evolve capabilities beyond it? or do we eventually produce universally perfect software solutions and leave it at that?

It's not really about that.

If I hire you to make software for me, I don't really want software; I want a problem to go away, a money stream built, a client to be happy. Of course, that probably requires you to build software, unless you invent a magic wand. But if you had the magic wand, I'd choose it every single time over software.

Not so with food, furniture or a fancy hotels, where I actually want the thing.

Re: The best programmers I know

#130

Post by Hamuko »

hk__2 wrote: post #93
notrealyme123 wrote: post #58

https://web.archive.org/web/20250409082704/https://endler.de... Otherwise rate limited

The best programmers I know don’t use cheap hosting that rate-limit your static blog.

At least my free Cloudflare-hosted blog was able to withstand being on the HN front page once. I think they've over-engineered their "static" site hosting to the point where it can fail under heavy traffic.
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