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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3205 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Ahh to be a programmer. You truly are the ubermensch of our times.

Everything he mentioned sounds less like programming and more like "slightly more advanced than average power-user/admin/console tools".

Also, "tools which aren't very good for taking notes". git is useful for programming but using it to save your notes is jamming a square peg into a round hole. And vim shouldn't be used for anything ever (yeah I said it, fight me vi fanboys).

Within the past hour I installed git on a new machine. I made sure to unselect the default editing choice of vim. It might as well have a default choice of getting a series of paper cuts.

As a fellow vim hater, you might like this talk. I don't agree with everything, but the general idea that "some things in programming are just relics of the past and we don't get rid of them because of inertia and sometimes machismo" is a good point to keep mind.

For me, vim squarely fits in that category. Yes I could learn how to do kung fu with my keyboard, but 90% of the time I am programming, I am googling or staring at the screen trying to figure out wtf to write, Real time savings could be achieved if I could come up with a solution faster, not type faster.

Is there anything stopping you? The closest thing I've ever had to a CS class was the "Matlab and Fortran for Dummies" they made all the engineering students take, but by that time I'd taught myself BASIC (which was easy; unteaching myself the bad habits it engendered was harder...) and C from books, plus Perl and C++ from websites. And that was back in the Bad Old Days, when BASIC still had an excuse for existing as an "intro language", even if it was unsuitable for large applications. Today if you ask "what's the best way for someone with zero experience to get started" the answer is "Python" and if you ask "what's this bleeding-edge research code being written in" the answer is often "Python", so the onramp has never been more gentle.

You still want a CS degree on the team for some types of work (I was able to help my niece with her homework, right up until she got to graph algorithms...), but most of my co-workers are engineering or math or both; lots of places need someone who thoroughly understands the application domain and can code a little more than they need someone who thoroughly understands programming and doesn't know what they're writing it for.

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