Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

norvig.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 142 posts

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#101

Post by skydhash »

teiferer wrote: post #94
superb_dev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python, Go, Rust, Lua, Racket, and of course Pony. Python and Lua being probably the most similar of the bunch. The point is not that you would use any of these production (although you could), the point is to get your feet wet in a new setting. You see what's different and what's the same. I think it's a very important part of maturing as a programmer.

> Python, Go, Rust, Lua, Racket, and of course Pony. I was asking about paradigms. These are 6 languages and the distinct paradigms they cover are hardly 6. Unless we have different notions of what a paradigm is. I see imperative and functional paradigms covered in your list. Am I missing anything else? Object orientation could be counted as a separate paradigm but how much different that is from basic imperative pro…

> Object orientation could be counted as a separate paradigm but how much different that is from basic imperative programming is already somewhat debatable.

There’s OOP with message passing (Smalltalk, Objective C) and there’s OOP with functional flavor (CLOS in Common Lisp).

I do agree that collecting paradigms is more interesting than collecting languages. Like logic programming (prolog), array and stack programming (uuia).

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#102

Post by skydhash »

sublinear wrote: post #41
yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

I'm curious how many years you were into your career before LLMs took off. Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all. I've been a developer for just over a decade and my usage of LLMs is minimal. It takes a similar amount of time to review as it does to just write it myself. How much time do you have for your tasks? I rarely have deadlines quicker than a few day…

> Even back in the 2010s, my need for stackoverflow and google had become minimal.

Web search engines are mostly for quick navigation this day as a lot of sites don’t bother with a good navigation menu. It’s faster to search the title of the page than to deal with the offered navigation widget.

> Reading and writing code is just another form of literacy, so I don't get this perspective at all.

Same here. I read and write code just like I read and write English (which is not even my second language). Coding is trivial. Most of the time is spent on communication (with the team and the stakeholder) and on reading documentation (so that you know the implications of using a function or what’s inside an object at a point of time). And even the latter is shortened as you got more familiar with the libraries.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#103

Post by pelasaco »

brokegrammer wrote: post #99
pelasaco wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but now we have managers pushing code to production, people that never coded but are "IT versed"..so you get PR/MR not just with code, but with PR/MR comment written by Claude, Commit Message written by Claude.. all super verbose, and you know the people operating Claude, have no clue. Super dangerous combination. But part of the reality.

Managers are pushing non-trivial code that experienced engineers shouldn't be writing anyway. If you're worried about not being able to write git commit messages anymore, then you might have been in the wrong career in the first place. The whole point of AI is to reproduce things that used to be mass produced. AI isn't generating high quality compilers or OS kernels, for example, because we haven't found a way to mas…

Your comment makes 0 sense..

> Managers are pushing non-trivial code that experienced engineers shouldn't be writing anyway.

non-trivial code shouldn't be written by experienced engineers? Please explain

> If you're worried about not being able to write git commit messages anymore, then you might have been in the wrong career in the first place.

How did you come to this conclusion? I am concerned about verbose AI documentation, 10 lines of commit message, MR comments with 50+ lines, the typical AI workflow that we all love: One huge commit with 10000+ changes.

> The whole point of AI is to reproduce things that used to be mass produced.

In your opinion, you mean? Because AI is doing everything which involves thinking. Art, Code, Music.. not "mass producted" things..

> I suggest you stop listening to clowns like Elon Musk and Super Mario.

Sounds like you are not really reading, thinking, writing.. only writing i guess?

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#104

Post by hdivider »

I think what doesn't get surfaced enough is that the cost of AI tokens is likely to decrease as new computing hardware gets scaled, such as neuromorphic (or later, photonic) computing.

To assume the current cost of Claude Code and the like is largely fixed is not likely to be accurate. The economic incentive to lower the cost of ML compute at both training and inference is very strong -- and likely even stronger once the bubble bursts.

Once the compute cost is much lower, and the systems more advanced as well, then the future of programming changes. The role of the human in this may be more like: we need one senior experienced full-stack, and like 1-3 others, to build and maintain large complex apps reliably.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#105

Post by dzonga »

good thing - these articles keep getting shared so often.

yeah people's attention might be shot. but it's still a blessing to those who read it the first time, and the ones that re-read it.

the unfortunate thing in the 'llm' era - we seem hell bent on destroying the foundations of knowledge.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#106

Post by dzonga »

drudolph914 wrote: post #33
yoyohello13 wrote: post #16

One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be a…

I used to have this feeling, and I just got over this hurdle. I now continue coding by hand with zero AI usage. It's amazing how much better you feel when you get to use your brain. What really helped me was many perspective shifts perspective shift 1: the people that never cared about programming/engineering finally left the room. the people chasing the trends, trying to grift, or just after money are finally gone.…

thank you for this - needed it.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#107

Post by DavidPiper »

When I was 11, I pulled a book off the shelf at the nearby library called "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days". I remember thinking the title was clearly nonsense, but if I could even learn a fraction of it, that would be pretty cool. We didn't have a computer at home yet, so I wrote out the exercises by hand.

I think I got about a third of the way through. I knew (debatably) what inheritance was, that a Dog is an Animal, etc.

School, university, and 10 years of career later across multiple stacks and companies, there's still a heap I don't know, but you can drop me in a lot of codebases and I'll figure it out.

> So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days.

True, but it DID change my life.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#108

Post by bigfishrunning »

moffkalast wrote: post #91
wolfi1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the other hand you spend time and tokens using the AI approach

It's like hiring someone to do part of your job for you, which is a rather proven approach to getting more done in less time. A proud tradition going back hundreds of thousands of years.

Except when you buy tokens instead of hiring someone, you buy Sam Altman a yacht instead of buying somebody dinner.
Post reply on HN