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Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

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Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#91

Post by roel_v »

mikekchar wrote: post #47

I wasn't 20 years into my career when I did this (more like 10), but at one point I had a serious "lapse of faith" with regard to my career. I was working for a terrible company with an even worse manager and I was miserable. I didn't know if I wanted to be a programmer any more. I quit my job and didn't look for another one. Instead, I wrote free software -- initially just for a month. I got up in the morning, had a…

OT, but as someone who worked on it, what in your opinion was the reason for the failure of ORBit and Bonobo? I very frequently find myself wishing we (as an industry) had stuck with CORBA and (D)COM, instead of finding ourselves now writing shitty 'microservices' with JSON serialization or ad hoc crappy binary protocols when we get 'fancy'.

So many things were developed in the late 1990's and early 2000's that indeed were hairy and tricky to use; and as a fresh developer I too hated much of it and tried to avoid them. So in that sense I was part of the problem. But now that I have some years of experience, I can't help but feel that we do so much things in ways that were solved 20 years ago, just because the newcomers in the field don't understand or can't be bothered to learn the history and why things are the way they are - and the whole 'simple framework of the months' cycle keeps going.

I guess this topic is relevant to the discussion after all - I think much (at least some) of our burnout is because of this never ending cycle of 'new' for the sake of new, yet seldom really better than what we had before. But maybe it's just rose colored glasses, and things now really are better...

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#92

Post by markc »

beders wrote: post #18

I had the same issue. Then I went back to the roots: Lisp And learned Clojure. You will feel like you know nothing. You will feel handicapped. You will be confused. Then, one day, you will understand what simplicity means and how Clojure's design embraces that more than in any other language I know. By then you will have embraced the flying-by-your-pants-exploratory style of programming at the REPL. And don't want to…

Me too. I was bored with 2 decades of C/C++/Java and didn’t like programming any more. Dabbled with Ruby, Python, Groovy and enjoyed them. Discovered Scheme, SICP, and Clojure and never looked back. Beat my head against not having my old problem solving paradigms, but it was fascinating rewiring my brain. It finally clicked and coding has been a joy ever since. The Clojure REPL rocks.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#96

Post by DeathArrow »

tomg wrote: post #42
tfleming wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was it about JavaScript that wanted you to leave programming? I'm just curious.

As someone considering leaving the web development industry after 12 years: JavaScript is a never ending grind. Callbacks, then Bluebird, then Promises, then a sync await. a new testing framework every six months. a new web framework every couple of years. aimless, massive changes to the language (classes in a prototyped language? Why not). JavaScript then coffeescript then three versions of typescript. too many UI l…

I was a game developer and I pretty much grew to dislike what I had to do at my former job. Doing same kind of mindless games, over, and over and over and pretty much repeating things.

I got into web development, but for me that means mostly back end. I pretty much dislike big opinionated JS frameworks like Angular, although I have to learn it and I will since I took over a project which uses Angular on front-end. Sometimes I generate HTML on the server side, when I can, using a bit of old fashioned JS and jQuery where is needed. Sometimes I write a REST API for backend and write the frontend using good old fashioned HTML, CSS, JS and jQuery. I like this two approaches the most.

Now I'm planning to learn Blazor and Vue for SPA development.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#97

Post by markc »

crispinb wrote: post #36
beders wrote: post #18

I had the same issue. Then I went back to the roots: Lisp And learned Clojure. You will feel like you know nothing. You will feel handicapped. You will be confused. Then, one day, you will understand what simplicity means and how Clojure's design embraces that more than in any other language I know. By then you will have embraced the flying-by-your-pants-exploratory style of programming at the REPL. And don't want to…

I've been learning it for a couple of weeks. It is humbling as an experienced dev to find something quite straightforward (parens-whining aside, Clojure is a small & simple language), yet not have a clue how to approach problem-solving with it.

Use 4Clojure for practice. Talk about humbling! You’ll struggle to write a 20 line abomination and then see some wizard’s beautiful 2 liner that does the same thing. You might spend a long while grokking it, but when you do you’ve added one or more new tools to your Clojure problem solving repertoire.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#98

Post by DeathArrow »

jeremy_k wrote: post #59
tomg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone considering leaving the web development industry after 12 years: JavaScript is a never ending grind. Callbacks, then Bluebird, then Promises, then a sync await. a new testing framework every six months. a new web framework every couple of years. aimless, massive changes to the language (classes in a prototyped language? Why not). JavaScript then coffeescript then three versions of typescript. too many UI l…

'JavaScript is a never ending grind' - Wow no better way to summarize it than that. The funny thing is that I've always felt that Javascript the language is pretty straight forward and easy to comprehend. As someone who primarily writes Ruby and really appreciates the functional style of writing code, Javascript lends itself to that style very easily. But the ecosystem around is just that never ending grind. At my la…

>I've always felt that Javascript the language is pretty straight forward and easy to comprehend

While that's true, the completely opposite is true for Javascript the ecosystem.

I don't have much time for this cr*p, nor do I like it, so I tend to use olde fashioned JS + libraries like jQuery for old fashioned multi page web apps. I want to learn Blazor and Vue for SPAs to keep it more simple.

Re: Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

#100

Post by csallen »

tomg wrote: post #42
tfleming wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was it about JavaScript that wanted you to leave programming? I'm just curious.

As someone considering leaving the web development industry after 12 years: JavaScript is a never ending grind. Callbacks, then Bluebird, then Promises, then a sync await. a new testing framework every six months. a new web framework every couple of years. aimless, massive changes to the language (classes in a prototyped language? Why not). JavaScript then coffeescript then three versions of typescript. too many UI l…

A lot of this is a direct result of feeling that one always needs to be on the bleeding edge, which is both unnecessary and also a recipe for wasting time on fads.

As an analogy, consider fiction. Imagine reading as many new novels as possible as they're released. Well, most of these novels will be completely irrelevant 5 years from now. The good ones stand the test of time. So you might as well only read novels that are 5+ years old, yet are still relevant and receive acclaim.

If you worry that taking this approach with JavaScript will make you fall behind, my question is: Behind whom, exactly?

There's no way many in the industry can keep up with all the changes you listed as fast as they're coming out. Therefore, it follows that a great many of your JS developer peers are "behind." Therefore, it's okay for you to be, too.

What happens to me, personally, is I start on some new project or company using a pretty recent stack at the time. Over the course of the next few years, that stack becomes "outdated" as new things are released. However, it also matures as its documentation improves and its community grows. Eventually, after 2-5 years, I move on to another project, and just take that time to catch up on the latest. The result is that I end up skipping a lot of the fads that die on the vine. For example, I largely missed CoffeeScript.

I think a lot of pain from JS comes from the expectation that one can and should keep up, when you probably can't, and definitely shouldn't.

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