Live data from Hacker News

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

norvig.com

151–160 of 323 posts

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#151
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 40 years of programming, 33 of that professionally, I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Syntax is something I never learned, I programmed with man pages and manuals open at all times. But every language and technology I learned taught me something useful about a fundamental problem in computing and systems. The way we address problems gets wrapped in different clothes but the p…

> I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Believe me, I have plenty of criticisms of that entire culture but it has a lot of good ideas. What in particular (besides the obvious overwrought ceremony) do you find not worthwhile?

It has no good ideas. All the ideas that appear good are taken from agile, which 20 years ago WAS good. But then the process managers came in, the management seeking clarity on delivery dates, and engineers who got into it for a good job seeking ways to avoid doing real work because they’re actually not into engineering. It’s a morass of everything awful about stupid management cargo cult bs meant to emulate but not understand excellent engineering culture, with roles meant to keep project managers employed, and overriding everything stupid “rituals” to try to measure velocity and delivery dates for leaderships need to control. It delivers none of what agile promises because it is satisfying the needs that makes waterfall so slow.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#152
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Believe me, I have plenty of criticisms of that entire culture but it has a lot of good ideas. What in particular (besides the obvious overwrought ceremony) do you find not worthwhile?

The more skilled I become over the decades the more I prefer either Hickey’s hammock-driven development or a simple kanban setup.

Yeah I think kanban is the right model for almost every development team. Teams embedded in a massive orchestrated project across many teams waterfall actually is pretty reasonable.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how people’s learning habits will change with AI tools like GitHub Copilot. I used it for several months but randomly got logged out and am now finding myself valuing the slight inconvenience of looking up official documentation (and surprised how much more sluggish I felt for the first week). Going through extra steps to learn something through primary sources and valuing being uncomfortable at times are im…

ChatGPT has been a blessing for learning C. How do you calculate the conjugate for a complex double when the compiler doesn't support complex numbers? ChatGPT will give you the correct answer together with math examples. One example out of many. Then I verify the result by looking at other people's code - and now I know what to look for. I wouldn't use Copilot. I've noticed how it distracts people in screen recording…

> ChatGPT will give you the correct answer together with math examples.

Actually, back in the days, google would have given you a tutorial with the correct answer together with examples too. You don't need LLMs for this, just honest search. But honest search is gone.

I wonder how long till ChatGPT gets entshitified too...

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> daily advertisement Not defending scrum but sounds more like you've been abused by bad culture disguised as scrum.

A place with daily standups? Their "sound biting" of a complex issue resonates. It can be difficult to even explain what I'm doing to several people in the bandwidth of 2 minutes sometimes. Most charitably, it's just a quick, lossy status report and forced request for help with blockers. I feel like something is wrong if you feel like you need to cut corners to perform a "good-looking" report in standup. You shouldn'…

I was referring to "advertisement" part not the "daily" part. Stand ups can be a way for people who know / want to game the system to prosper in the eyes of some idiot scrum master and managers, while our guy here gets smoked and made to look like he isn't productive.

You shouldn't cave, but if that's the culture around your in for an uphill battle.

> I feel like something is wrong ...

Yeah, bad culture.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#155
I bought a copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" at a CompUSA in 1999. The guy at the checkout looked at it, laughed, and told me about this article.

When I was 16 I was looking at programming books at Borders and a guy handed me a copy of "The C Programming Language"; changed my life.

So much of my career has been shaped by running into developers or just people interested in programming out in the world.

Thanks.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#156
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 40 years of programming, 33 of that professionally, I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Syntax is something I never learned, I programmed with man pages and manuals open at all times. But every language and technology I learned taught me something useful about a fundamental problem in computing and systems. The way we address problems gets wrapped in different clothes but the p…

I feel most of my time as a professional software engineer has been learning stuff that I didn't need to. And I would argue that the majority of debugging time goes into debugging external code from libraries, the language itself, company-provided platforms, code, libraries, DLLs, experimentally figuring out how to use a system or tool that isn't documented, and more. It's pretty miserable. It'd be like being a carpe…

I once bought whatever jamb saw they had available at one of the big box stores.

It was basically unusable. Fundamentally flawed design. There's no possible way anyone tried it and went "yes, this is fit for purpose". Worse, the complexity of its design which caused so much of the trouble (it had a single-sided blade that could be spun around—the locking mechanism was simply flawed, I didn't get a bad one, it just could not work well) could have been entirely avoided by spending barely more money on manufacturing. I mean it was also very dull but at least it would have been usable, if slow.

I managed one jamb with it, taking probably 10x as long as a version of the tool fit-for-purpose would have, busting up my knuckles plenty, and making an uglier cut besides, so I could move on, and ordered a different one for the rest, since the store didn't have any other models.

That's about the median quality of all tools and libraries I encounter in software, in my estimation. Size of vendor or how "smart" their employees allegedly are (LOL. LMFAO.) doesn't seem to much matter, either. And usually it's like that crappy jamb saw being the only jamb saw available at the store, except there's no option to skip the big box store and look for acceptable ones online, and if there are any other options they're somehow even worse.

Luckily 99% of the tools for "real" work I've bought haven't been anywhere near that bad. Even the cheap ones. Almost all of them are more-or-less sensibly designed and actually do what they're supposed to without causing a huge amount of trouble.

Most of an average day programming, for me, metaphorically, is swearing at this fucking piece of shit jamb saw while my knuckles bleed and I'm fucking around with its brokenness instead of getting anything done that I actually wanted to.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#158

I am at times more of a book learner, but find that attitude is often more helpful for non-CS disciplines that change slower (eg, math/physics). A recent negative book example for me is the Quantum Programming book from O'Reilly. I found that it did not discuss quantum circuits in a detail that helped me really understand what I was doing -- though I suppose that is a conceit of quantum computing. Perhaps I will retu…

Fundamentals don't change. Sure there's a new frontend framework every week but they're all just generating html.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> daily advertisement Not defending scrum but sounds more like you've been abused by bad culture disguised as scrum.

A place with daily standups? Their "sound biting" of a complex issue resonates. It can be difficult to even explain what I'm doing to several people in the bandwidth of 2 minutes sometimes. Most charitably, it's just a quick, lossy status report and forced request for help with blockers. I feel like something is wrong if you feel like you need to cut corners to perform a "good-looking" report in standup. You shouldn'…

[deleted]

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. I've been coding for a living for 41 years and have a feeling I'll get the hang of it real soon now.

Then there's C++. After ~30 years of it, I realized that I don't know how to initialize an object anymore. So I've given up.

I've been doing C++ since 93. What's changed that makes you feel this way?
Post reply on HN