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Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

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Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#31

Post by drblast »

nkassis wrote: post #5

My advice would have been to reinvent the wheel. Yeah it might not add to anything useful but there is an off chance it could. The reason why reinventing the wheel is good is that you have direction as to what you should implement. Trying to do something new all the time isn't possible. I used to build tic tac toe games It was never complete or useful but it helped me learn the tech I was using. Now days creating a b…

One of the coolest programs I ever made was a tic-tac-toe with an AI that learned the optimal strategy by playing itself over and over. I wrote that in the process of learning Lisp, which made writing the program easy, and I got to exercise a lot of the language features.

What was so cool about it was watching it learn, and realizing that unless I programmed it to make random mistakes, it would settle for sub-optimal strategies.

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#32

Post by mortenjorck »

Elite wrote: post #8
orblivion wrote: post #6

It's funny because some of us have the opposite problem. Too many ideas, but not that much interest in learning new languages for their own sake. So when it comes down to implementing a new idea, we want it done quickly. We don't want to take the time to try to figure out how to make it in Haskell, and just revert back to Python.

I don't see the problem here.

I'm a designer. My most fluent language is Actionscript.

I probably don't need to say anything more.

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#33

Post by serverdude »

orblivion wrote: post #6

It's funny because some of us have the opposite problem. Too many ideas, but not that much interest in learning new languages for their own sake. So when it comes down to implementing a new idea, we want it done quickly. We don't want to take the time to try to figure out how to make it in Haskell, and just revert back to Python.

I recently ran into this. Thought of implementing a new project in clojure and quickly defaulted to the language i am used to. One way to mitigate this is to re implement a small project that you have already implemented in your older language. At least you can focus on the language instead of the project nuances.

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#34

Post by frossie »

Elite wrote: post #8
orblivion wrote: post #6

It's funny because some of us have the opposite problem. Too many ideas, but not that much interest in learning new languages for their own sake. So when it comes down to implementing a new idea, we want it done quickly. We don't want to take the time to try to figure out how to make it in Haskell, and just revert back to Python.

I don't see the problem here.

I don't see the problem here.

It can be a problem because you use your favourite language/tools over and over to be productive, but then you look up and ten years have passed and your skills are no longer marketable.

This is easier to see in the older generation - I have the pleasure of knowing some totally top-class programmers who have happened to spend their whole career writing FORTRAN. Would any of you guys hire them? No, you want the RoR kids, not surprisingly.

Like everything else in in life, there is a Middle Way. Don't have new-shiny ADHD, but try and tick over a new language or technology every few years.

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#35

Post by orblivion »

serverdude wrote: post #33
orblivion wrote: post #6

It's funny because some of us have the opposite problem. Too many ideas, but not that much interest in learning new languages for their own sake. So when it comes down to implementing a new idea, we want it done quickly. We don't want to take the time to try to figure out how to make it in Haskell, and just revert back to Python.

I recently ran into this. Thought of implementing a new project in clojure and quickly defaulted to the language i am used to. One way to mitigate this is to re implement a small project that you have already implemented in your older language. At least you can focus on the language instead of the project nuances.

Yeah that's one thing I plan to try when I get around to it.

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#36

Post by spicyj »

bmelton wrote: post #29
bmelton wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says you need graphics? o | o | o ---------- x | x | x ---------- o | o | o That (if HN doesn't mangle it) should be a fully working Tic-Tac-Toe board. You can store it as a string, hashtable, whatever you want. You could label the squares 1-9 for the prompt asking the user where to move. This is all doable with perl and a command line. Try it out, see what you learn.

HN mangled it, but I think you can see where the line breaks ought to go.

    o | o | o
    ---------
    x | x | x
    ---------
    o | o | o

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#37

Post by nkassis »

bmelton wrote: post #27
billswift wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never done any graphics at all. All I know is bash and some awk and perl, mostly for text processing. I keep planning to learn more, which is why I read about it a bit, and browse HN, but I have too many other things I want to do too.

Who says you need graphics? o | o | o ---------- x | x | x ---------- o | o | o That (if HN doesn't mangle it) should be a fully working Tic-Tac-Toe board. You can store it as a string, hashtable, whatever you want. You could label the squares 1-9 for the prompt asking the user where to move. This is all doable with perl and a command line. Try it out, see what you learn.

My first implementation (in c++) was exactly like that. A 3x3 array that printed out like that. You had to enter 1,1 for the left upper corner (that's how I learned that arrays start at 0 in almost all languages ;p)

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#38

Post by djhworld »

I think I suffer from this problem, I like to compare it to writers block or something like that, my problem is that I want to develop something but I don't know what and get frustrated at having a lack of ideas.

This frustration then gets interspersed with furious bouts of development on personal projects that can last 4-6 weeks, and then I go back to another 3 months of doing nothing and hitting my head against a brick wall.

Help?

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#39

Post by terra_t »

Swizec wrote: post #9
terra_t wrote: post #2

+100 This also applies to the 'entrepreneurs' who hang around, wanting to make it big but lacking any ideas about anything useful they could do.

There is a surprising number of these. Although I would wager that the ones who hang around wanting to make it big and having lots of ideas as to how, just no useful ones are on the right track. They just have to improve their ideas so they can be useful. The real problem are those who don't even have useless ideas.

I'm coming at it from a technical background, but something that excites me from a business perspective is developing a business system that is able to efficiently execute plans in a certain space. However, just as I'm about to do that, I find there's one particular plan that's got the potential to make it bigger than all the others, and I make an "all in" bet...

Re: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

#40

Post by shadowfox »

nostrademons wrote: post #26

For most of the people looking to program something in Haskell or Erlang, programming is their outside interest. Perhaps that's why we get so many compilers written in exotic languages...

Though truth be said, some of these languages are very well suited for the sort of tree manipulation that a compiler requires.
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