Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998) • Hacker News Board

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#111

Post by DarkTree » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

teiferer wrote: post #65

oneneptune wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing AI did take away; I love reading source code written by other people. Node modules, plugins, LUA, python scripts... whatever. I loved seeing how people organized their logic, named their variables, the flavor of their comments... all of it. I learned so much diving through the source code of all the major tools. Now it's all AI generated. You don't know if you're reading a novel human's take on a pattern or…

> Now it's all AI generated. I can assure you, it's not. You just need to avoid the areas where this is prevalent. > You don't know if you're reading a novel human's take on a pattern or an LLM's attempt to reproduce. In the end of the day, if it's an elegant solution why does it matter! If anything then it sharpens your senses to check whether it's great or trash. A sense that one should have had with human code alr…

It matters because some people view code as a human art. Sure, AI can also probably produce a good sounding song, but that doesn't mean I will view it in the same way as a song created by a human.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#112

Post by ecshafer » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

DavidPiper wrote: post #107

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,…

There was a webcomic abtruse goose that made fun of that book by humorously showing what you would have to do to get it done in 21 days.

https://gabrielcoarna.com/2010/11/05/how-to-teach-yourself-c...

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#113

Post by alt227 » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #105

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.

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

I disagreee with this. I personally have filled large gaps in my underlying concept knowledge through deep conversations with LLMs. Its so easy to learn huge amounts when you can pull on whatever thread that sparks your imagination. Just being able to keep drilling down into the core of a complex subject without having to stop and manually find the next piece of information is incredibly addictive to me. It gives me hope that LLMs can actually aid humanity instead of detracting from it.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#114

Post by alt227 » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

whateverboat wrote: post #70

teiferer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing is that not many can afford a power loom or similar and I don't think prices will go down, since it is already heavily subsidized?

It's just energy and chips, and both can be made cheaper.

Yet for some reason the price of both currently are going up and up.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#115

Post by raptdev » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

alt227 wrote: post #113

dzonga wrote: post #105

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.

> the unfortunate thing in the 'llm' era - we seem hell bent on destroying the foundations of knowledge. I disagreee with this. I personally have filled large gaps in my underlying concept knowledge through deep conversations with LLMs. Its so easy to learn huge amounts when you can pull on whatever thread that sparks your imagination. Just being able to keep drilling down into the core of a complex subject without h…

Agreed. Use of LLM with a true focus on learning, not allowing it to give you the answers but having it guide you through structured reasoning about new concepts, is very useful.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#116

Post by rrvsh » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:16 PM UTC

I went down a five hour rabbit hole learning about jwz as a result of this post. What an interesting guy - if I knew about the DNA lounge a week earlier, I would have visited when I was in the city

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#117

Post by pelasaco » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

teiferer wrote: post #95

pelasaco wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bonus if they are actually all relevant for production software. Why it should be relevant for production software?

Because I find that an interesting question. There are lots of experimental and somewhat esoteric things out there. And sure, it can be fun learning about them. But the proof is in the pudding, and if something is rarely useful for anything in production then it's more of an artisan entertainment factor and less of an actually useful programming language.

> But the proof is in the pudding, and if something is rarely useful for anything in production then it's more of an artisan entertainment factor and less of an actually useful programming language.

That's not true at all. In first place, what you can think is good for production, i can think otherwise.. Beside it there is a lot of things/paradigms/languages that we learn, to help us to either understand better the basics or because it is easier for beginners. There are a lot of Science and Research that you can just throw away, but that was super important for further development. Pascal, Smalltalk, Minix are example of technologies, that we learn(ed) and not necessary are widely used in production. Haskell helped me to understand is pure immutability is actually practical or not, and so on..

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#118

Post by kian » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

anon7725 wrote: post #47

drudolph914 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Thanks for this. Another perspective shift: do real things in the real world. Read physical books, make art with your own two hands, garden, go for a walk. I’m going to re-learn cursive handwriting. No real reason other than my handwriting is bad and I want to incorporate more writing into my life. The recent post here about Neal Stephenson was an inspiration.

link, please? :)

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#119

Post by brokegrammer » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

pelasaco wrote: post #103

brokegrammer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doc…

AI is creating Art, Code, and Music, but only boring stuff that nobody cares about anyway.

Sure, AI can generate your logo, or mix some music that you can play at a party, but at some point, people will call you out for feeding them garbage.

That's when you'll have to hire an experienced graphic designer to design a proper logo, and an experience DJ to create a proper mix based on your audience's mood.

To me AI is just like an IDE. It does stuff that I don't want to do so that I get to work on the fun stuff. Huge win.

Re: Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

#120

Post by FinnLobsien » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

I totally agree with this when it comes to skill acquisition and deep expertise, which I care about more with skills than whatever rewards I might get for that expertise.

It's just important not to conflate this deep expertise with the milestone you need to get a job or something. Especially when combined with expertise in other fields, even very little effort can let you advance a lot.