111–117 of 117 posts
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More like linear algebra, real analysis, and probability for the areas you listed.
Statistics for sure. But i don't really find myself using analysis on a day to day basis
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> the number of jobs that require the mastery of the craft is not large The number of jobs that benefit from mastery of the craft is essentially equal to the number of jobs. I do not enjoy finding the work of a bunch of people that studied enough to get hired and no more.
> The number of jobs that benefit from mastery of the craft is essentially equal to the number of jobs. I think this is true. Nobody disputes that. Imagine you'd hire Torvalds to debug and fix why your Wordpress does not work. I truly think he'd do an excellent job figuring out that AWS has a firewall that's blocking the connection from your WP node to your MySQL node... Somehow, the example above feels bizarre and y…
The title is a bit misleading to me. 10 years is not to "teach yourself programming," it's to "become an expert in programming." Most people do not want to learn programming to become experts, most people want to learn programming to get a job. After getting a job, some will plateau right away, others will plateau after some time, and others still will keep learning even after years and years. The problem is "how lon…
Agreed. I can teach my 12 year old cousin how to program in half an hour. This isn't about simply knowing the basic starting point. It's about becoming an expert.
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> This mindset is how we end up with layers upon layers of badly designed and buggy software that underpins almost every aspect of modern life. No, it’s not. Changing requirements by adding features is by far the biggest cause of badly designed and buggy software. I’ve worked on multiple teams where everyone was fully committed and highly skilled, and it didn’t magically fix the problems of software. It wasn’t any be…
I would even say that good code is not always in a businesses best interests. The business needs to change quickly and cheaply. So they rack up technical debt. Often getting away with it for decades. The developers suffer through it but the CEOs walk away with more money in their pockets.
You nailed it exactly. High quality engineering requires costly business practices that most companies don’t need, so the tradeoff is easy to decide. This is why organizations that do high quality engineering are well funded and are very restrictive about what kinds of programming features are allowed. NASA published a famous essay about how to write safety critical code that disallows use of dynamic memory allocation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...
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MATLAB, if you can get a license would likely be better. Name literally means "matrix lab". Has excellent matrix manipulation features.
And Octave( https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index ) if you can't get a license. I actually had one hectic weekend porting our whole departments MATLAB code over to Octave due to a hardware failure of our licensing server and some stonewalling from Mathworks, Octave is pretty close to fully MATLAB compatible.
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I'd be curious to hear some examples where JS doesn't fit as a general purpose language. In my arrogance I suspect it would be hard to give examples that don't also disqualify other scripting langs like python and ruby. Perhaps you don't consider those to be general purpose either?
For example, without something like Node, you cannot even open a file. I consider this a very basic requirement for being "general purpose".
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I would say it is. It didn't start as one but over the decades it sure has become a general purpose language. I can't find a domain where JS wouldn't fit the description. While it may be a bad fit for certain problems, it can still be done.
Safety-critical controller for manned or unmanned aircraft, ground vehicles, etc. High frequency trading. Tiny embedded devices. System libraries. I’m sure I could come up with more. JavaScript is a tool, just like c, go, rust, python, lisps, etc. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and hope you just didn’t consider all of these other domains when you made this comment. Cheers!
For example: Espruino is a platform for embedded JavaScript.
I just think about it this way: Just because you wouldn't doesn't mean you couldn't