271–280 of 323 posts
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Really? It hasn't killed Costco yet.
Is family ever in the store next to Costco (which is a null pointer exception), such that meeting on foot with clear bags holding presents is no longer secret? I think that’s the challenge he described.
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 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. Th…
I wonder who's going to write the "Teach yourself Rust from scratch in 21 days" book. If C and even C++ can be learnt effectively as a first programming language, there's little reason why Rust couldn't be. And if not Rust, maybe Golang could play that role.
Let beginners cut their teeth on stuff like Python and Go. Rust can wait.
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. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? It hasn't killed Costco yet.
Is family ever in the store next to Costco (which is a null pointer exception), such that meeting on foot with clear bags holding presents is no longer secret? I think that’s the challenge he described.
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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've worked with a fair number of less experienced, ChatGPT focused engineers and they aren't all that different from the Java engineers of yore that were completely helpless outside of an IDE and could only work extending existing code. These latter engineers where the exemplar "blub" programmers from PG's famous essay [0]. But clearly using an IDE does not make one a bad programmer any more than using ChatGPT will…
But programming will remain domain of CS, which requires a deeper understanding and proper studying to perform it well. So, while I agree with you, I don't think all of this is that bad. It must be a positive think that more and more people at least try to pick up coding, can solve some basic problems with it, and if anything, will maybe motivate their kids to learn it properly.
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Unfortunately "The C Programming Language" has enough typographical errors in it to seriously undermine it's utility as a book with which to learn programming.
What are the typographical errors? I didn't think it had any. It does use features of C89 that may not compile after C99, but those aren't weird. But, as someone who actually did try to use K&R to teach themselves to program, I agree it's not ideal for that. It's definitely not the best programming book ever, which some people say. The exercises are pretty good, though.
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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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_mathematical_functions#compl... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/comp... https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/arithmetic_types#Co...
Dear ProbablyRealPersonGPT, please provide the necessary code in C with a short explanation
I am quite impressed that the ancient Amazon.com link [0] on the page (with quite a few non-trivial query params) still returns relevant results today. A good case of Cool URIs don't change [1]. [0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=s... [1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI