241–250 of 323 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had my dad buy me a copy of Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours at a CompUSA and wouldn't you know, it was true! I had https://web.archive.org/web/19970415190140/http://www2.rpa.n... up and running in no time!
Looks great! Reminds me of some of my early classics!
> Why is everyone in such a rush? Because we live under an economic system that says you must produce value for capital or die. This is all very good advice. AND, I think we would have many fewer bad programmers and many more good ones if fewer Knuths were spending eight to ten hours a day mopping floors at fast food restaurants for $7.25 an hour, or writing garbage JavaScript for fly-by-night startups for $65,000 a…
> you must produce value for capital or die. Can you name any social structure in which this is not true? Even medieval monks who are participating in a completely different society have to do the chores. > Knuths were spending eight to ten hours a day mopping floors I don't believe this happens and I know quite a few eccentric and unsocial smart people. Much more likely is them to spend the next 10 years at a relati…
That's a rather disingenuous framing; I think we could probably do quite a lot to reduce the extent to which it's true without any particularly radical changes to our society. When we do start talking about radical changes, there are a lot that are not just likely to work but actually pretty well proven, like a UBI, improved labor rights, well-regulated and well-supported unions, wealth taxes, and so forth.
The possible alternatives are not "if you don't have a job you starve on the street" and "fully automated luxury gay space communism".
> Much more likely is them to spend the next 10 years at a relatives house speed running Mario.
Despite the disdain which you seem to hold for speedrunners (why?), a lot of really interesting hacking comes out of the speedrunning community. Some very interesting applications of deep learning had their start in the TAS community.
I'd rather ten people "waste" my tax dollars on speedrunning or art I don't like than one person be prevented from making art that's important to me (or doing some cool math, or whatever) because their boss's boss wanted a percent of a percent towards another yacht.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I bought a copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" at a CompUSA Some of those books were laughably bad. But thing I miss from back then, was the feeling that the book was going to be the key to getting you started writing whatever crazy idea you had for a program in your head. I think the last time I had that feeling was walking out of Microcenter with a new MacBook and an iPod Touch, ready to make the next…
I actually didn't think that the Sams books were so bad, albeit a bit misleading if you think you're really gonna grok C or C++ in 24 hours. I learned C first in high school because I found a pirated copy of "Learn C in 24 Hours" online, and I actually felt that they did a reasonably good job getting me started, though if I recall correctly some of their examples with pointers and memory management were actually inco…
I think the “in 24 hours” thing was more a case of “I’m going to tell you everything I know about XYZ in 24 hours”. Still, I have so many fond memories from the late 80s and 90s spending countless lunchtimes at McGills or the Technical Bookshop in Melbourne (now since long gone), flipping through tech magazines and wondering which of the many weighty tech tomes I’d spend my precious hard-earned on.
Thanks Peter Norvig.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I bought a copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" at a CompUSA Some of those books were laughably bad. But thing I miss from back then, was the feeling that the book was going to be the key to getting you started writing whatever crazy idea you had for a program in your head. I think the last time I had that feeling was walking out of Microcenter with a new MacBook and an iPod Touch, ready to make the next…
> But thing I miss from back then, was the feeling that the book was going to be the key to getting you started writing whatever crazy idea you had for a program in your head. Yes! I miss it too. For me, that book was Head First PHP & MySQL[0] - Late 2000's, I was living and working in Thailand for a family friends small logistics company in the capacity of a BA, trying to move them into this century. We were trying…
This essay holds a special place in my heart, since I first read it as a teenager when I was just starting to learn to code. Re-reading it now, I was surprised to see references to Malcom Gladwell, since I didn’t remember Outliers becoming a thing until much later. Then when I saw the reference to Ratatouille, I realized the article had been updated since its posting in 1998. The original is still available on archiv…
I resent Gladwell to this day, possibly because I was assigned to read him in high school. He is quoted too much -- the 10,000 hours thing is just a meme at this point, for me anyway.
I’m giving Norvig a pass here because I don’t remember it being such a cliché in 2008, and because I appreciate the point he’s making about the importance of practice. (Early in my programming education I often felt that I might just not be cut out for programming, and I wish more articles at the time had emphasized that it takes a lot of practice to become a good programmer).
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…
I started learning to code this year, and I keep thinking that I would have thrown in the towel if not for ChatGPT. For better or for worse. The big difference for me is being able to struggle right up until I'm ready to give up, and then ask ChatGPT for insight. Usually my issue is a syntax one, and I have the concepts down (i.e. I was right to solve it using nested if statements, but I forgot I need to put a variab…
Without ChatGPT I'd just ensure I got an exercise right, and move on, half cloudy and uncertain in my understanding. The static content on Codecademy obviously doesn't explain that when first teaching you, but ChatGPT allows you to do ANY such comparison, and explains things exactly as you asked them, complete with demonstration code blocks and said fringe/examples where, in the above example, one method or the other would break or be suboptimal.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I bought a copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" at a CompUSA Some of those books were laughably bad. But thing I miss from back then, was the feeling that the book was going to be the key to getting you started writing whatever crazy idea you had for a program in your head. I think the last time I had that feeling was walking out of Microcenter with a new MacBook and an iPod Touch, ready to make the next…
I know exactly what you mean. Felt like the world was opening up. I don't know who it was, it might have been one of the guys my dad worked with, be they said "You won't be able to write a game with a book like that, but you might be able to write a phone directory." Didn't phase me. I remember someone asking me later on if I was going to write a game. I just looked at them blankly and said: "I'm going to write a pho…