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

How I Learned to Program

rdegges.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 78 posts

Re: How I Learned to Program

#21

Post by bellbind »

Well, all this is a bit of a fairy tale to me. Sure programming on my free time with friends, always wanting to know more, to go further, that's true it is fun and I'd say it's a way of life. Now consider: process, deadlines, the annoying management guys.. All this is exhausting and boring, it takes away creativity and fun. Not everything is bright and shinny like that article seems to state. The guy actually designing apps is not necessarily the guy who will code them, etc. There's a lot of frustrating realities out there that are better to be known and accepted than ignored.

Also, see http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/05/11/0358233/is-pro...

Re: How I Learned to Program

#22

Post by parbo »

voodoochilo wrote: post #2

i agree, but how can one write passionately about being a programmer and programming without giving due respect to one of the most influental and dedicated programmers of all time - richard matthew stallman - by speaking an entire article only of "Linux" and not of "GNU/Linux"?

How can you write a comment without giving due respect to one of the most influential and dedicated programmers of all time - Dennis Ritchie, without his C language neither GNU nor Linux would exist. We should call it C/GNU/Linux. Or perhaps von Neumann/C/GNU/Linux.

Disclaimer: this is sarcasm.

Re: How I Learned to Program

#23

Post by boofar »

bellbind wrote: post #21

Well, all this is a bit of a fairy tale to me. Sure programming on my free time with friends, always wanting to know more, to go further, that's true it is fun and I'd say it's a way of life. Now consider: process, deadlines, the annoying management guys.. All this is exhausting and boring, it takes away creativity and fun. Not everything is bright and shinny like that article seems to state. The guy actually designi…

So it's not the fault of programming or any other activity per se, but that of the stressful (work) environment.

Re: How I Learned to Program

#24

Post by nazar »

I've been using linux for quite a time, and I personally love it. But I'm afraid average person(non-programmer)reading this blogpost will think that linux is something so fundamentally broken, you need to accomplish such trivial tasks as copy/paste throug hours of pain and suffering. Its not like that. Linux provides both normal and advanced modes of accomplishing stuff, which is an advantage over other OSs like for example windows, which only gives you one way to do stuff (which is almost always rudemtary for a power user).

Re: How I Learned to Program

#25

Post by bellbind »

boofar wrote: post #23
bellbind wrote: post #21

Well, all this is a bit of a fairy tale to me. Sure programming on my free time with friends, always wanting to know more, to go further, that's true it is fun and I'd say it's a way of life. Now consider: process, deadlines, the annoying management guys.. All this is exhausting and boring, it takes away creativity and fun. Not everything is bright and shinny like that article seems to state. The guy actually designi…

So it's not the fault of programming or any other activity per se, but that of the stressful (work) environment.

What I'm saying is that programming for fun on your free time is absolutely not the same as programming to pay the rent, and this is not straightforward when you start learning computer science (and that's what this article is about, right?). You have to respect a lot of things that stops you in the creation process, because the goal here is not to do cool things but do as you're told, to take decisions not for your entertainment but for your boss. Sure there are people that do whatever they want at work, but it's relatively rare. And this, my friends, is just my humble opinion.

Re: How I Learned to Program

#26

Post by jacquesm »

bellbind wrote: post #21

Well, all this is a bit of a fairy tale to me. Sure programming on my free time with friends, always wanting to know more, to go further, that's true it is fun and I'd say it's a way of life. Now consider: process, deadlines, the annoying management guys.. All this is exhausting and boring, it takes away creativity and fun. Not everything is bright and shinny like that article seems to state. The guy actually designi…

Sounds like you need a change of environment.

Re: How I Learned to Program

#27

Post by cletus »

The one point I really disagree on is Linux.

Sure learning Linux will most likely teach you something about the platform on which anything you write will probably be deployed but that's really marginal (IMHO).

You get things done (programming included) by getting all the roadblocks out of your way. Linux is (IMHO) a roadblock. The OP claims it teaches you researching skills by giving you problems everyday you need to find solutions for. This is true in the same way that refusing to buy food of any kind teaches self-sufficiency.

To get things done you need to get in the zone. This means eliminating distractions. Trying to figure out why copy and paste doesn't work (and it turns out that it's because you're using OpenJDK instead of the Sun JDK) very much takes you out of that zone and then wastes time to boot.

This might be more useful later on (maybe) but learning to programming? No way.

To me, the best development platform is OSX. Why? Because it's (BSD) UNIX that is a pleasure to use that (mostly) doesn't have the aforementioned problems. My only real beef is that if you're used to using a program on Linux or Windows the keyboard shortcuts will generally be different on OSX (due to following the OSX conventions).

And as much as people (myself included) like to rag on Windows (in my case: the complexity), the fact is that modern Windows (Win7) is actually a pretty pleasant experience. Some things (eg git) suck but Cygwin can ameliorate a lot of those problems.

Re: How I Learned to Program

#29

Post by Estragon »

hackermom wrote: post #19

I learned by typing in BASIC program listings from computer magazines on my VIC-20 in the mid 80s. That slowly transitioned to modifying programs to see what would happen. At some blurry point the trial and error shifted to me actually understanding the language - and more importantly, the realization of programming logics - and starting to use it intuitively to write my own programs.

Similar story for me, except after BASIC it was Forth and 6809 assembly (and I had a TRS-80 Color Computer) and after a while I grew obsessed with data compression algorithms. Man, I used to love browsing old copies of Byte.

Re: How I Learned to Program

#30

Post by PeterWhittaker »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #5

Completely off-topic: Shouldn't the title be 'How I Learnt to Program'? It's a serious question (I don't live in an English-speaking country and my English is not great).

You may be interested in http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071010132314.ht...

tl;dr - infrequently-used irregular verbs get "regularized", frequently-used irregular verbs, e.g., "be", "think", will likely stay irregular forever.

(I remember reading about changes to the English language that happened to be underway about the time the printing press arrived, and how the press "froze" that process, leaving us with the mess of pronunciation, spelling, and verb endings we have today, but I've been unable to find an appropriate reference, so I offer the article about the Lieberman study in its place.)

Post reply on HN