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Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

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251–260 of 304 posts

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#251
post #167

Liam, this is incredible ! I thought it might be useful for you to incrementally see how someone in industry would review or change this code, so here's a little code review via video: https://youtu.be/UkVOrcS--04 We very incrementally build up to the final code, which can be found here: https://gist.github.com/stevekrenzel/b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c8... Hope you find it helpful!

If you would start a channel where you review code of random public repos I would definitely subscribe. Well done.

+1 count me in

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#253
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kid is practicing calculus at 12 years old. He will be able to handle a package manager.

It's still a waste of his time to deal with it. The brain has only so many ultra-neuroplastic years, why burn them on dicking around with npm when they could be leveraged to focus on more universal concepts?

because "full-stack"

JS is the New York of languages: dirty and gross and hella expensive, but if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#254

Excuse my portion of scepticism, it's not the fact that a "12 year old" built this, sure anyone can learn how to code and we can't know how much help this person got along the way. But it's rather the person's language when writing plain text, here in the comments for example. It doesn't feel adolescent but more grownup to me ... But maybe it's just me realising my own shortcommings as a 12 year old, as I only was pl…

it is incredibly to rare to produce a prodigy without a very involved parent or a close mentor.

Mozart, Tiger Woods, Terrence Tao all had parents helped them start extensively from a young age

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#255

Great job! One way to improve this code is to add comments. Use comments to describe what each function does and what the parameters are supposed to be. Then you can tell at a glance what the function does without having to analyze the code later on. Us old people tend to forget things.

Comments in a twelve-year-old's code? For whom? Seven-year-olds? (I'm serious.)

Perhaps for himself when he's thirteen or fourteen and wants to refactor

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#256
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is good he's learning to do the loops by hand first. It's good to have an understanding of algorithms first when learning to code.

In fact this "you should never code FizzBuzz yourself, just use util.FizzBuzz(n) to print the first n iterations" mentality probably contributes to the surprising number of software developers who can't code.

And yet, we also have nearly-infinite number of (reinvented) wheels...

Humans are the worst

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#257
post #110

I guess I'm the only one here doubting that the combination of both this project and the language used in the comment replies is coming from a 12 year old. Take it as a compliment if it's legitimate.

That makes two of us. My first thought was "Why would someone lie about being 12?", but then i remembered this is the internet. I would ask for proof, but it looks like everyone has already made up their mind or doesn't care.

OP is actually a dog

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or all the 42 year olds, ahem, who are currently learning JS/Node/React. :-/

Speaking of which, I'm also learning Spanish. Liam, I'm from the UK where we only speak one language. The one thing I really, really wish I'd done is to have learned another language. I'm doing it now, but it's so much easier when you're young. It doesn't even matter what it is – pick one you like the sound of. French, German, Italian, whatever. When you bump in to someone later in life and you hear them speaking ano…

It's almost like a programming language is a language...

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a guy that was doing cool things with a computer at age 12 but instead of starting to workout at age 12, started at age 18. Any age is good to start working out but sooner is better.

What bizarre advice for a programming thread. And what are those five days for?

Sick days. Health is the most important thing.
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