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Actually, you're right, but I wouldn't say "bad", I would say, you're ready to learn programming. Kind of like this gets you your programming brown belt.
by zedshaw 17y ago
Actually, you're right, but I wouldn't say "bad", I would say, you're ready to learn programming. Kind of like this gets you your programming brown belt.
- gcheong 17y agoCurious to know what other profession you might be considering going into where you can use your programming skills as your secret weapon.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoAlmost every profession, actually.
- starkfist 17y agoLike running a fast food restaurant? Or being a surgeon? Or a lawyer?
- inerte 17y agoDefinitively being a lawyer. Last week ago I hired a lawyer to look for some documentation for a house I was planning to buy, and about its owner. He showed me I think more than 20 prints of web apps that he had visited, and on each one he sometimes typed his login, sometimes searched for a number, other times the name of the person, other with his state of residence. He could have reduced his typing to just one. Also, if you don't believe this particular anecdote, I have dozens more. I've built web apps for law offices during 4 years. And when I left the company the TODO list for what I was working on was still huge. Absurdly huge. Software is never done. Programming manages information and reduces repetitive computer tasks, and lots of professionals have this problem. Now, should the owner of a fast food restaurant learn to code? Maybe not. Should he hire someone that knows how to code? Maybe not. Should he buy somekind of software to manage his operations? For sure. But it's the same necessity: There's a problem, you can either solve it yourself or pay someone else to do it. And the problem is managing information and time.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- zedshaw 17y agoPorn?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- nailer 17y agoI can attest that programmers in porn can do incredibly well - Red Hat has a customer who purchased about 30K of Linux architecture training just to keep his brain active while he sat on the beach and occasionally reconfigured a server.
- jrockway 17y agoFinance, though it's obviously not a secret weapon anymore.
- dagw 17y agoI'm having a hard time thinking of a profession (outside of menial physical labour) where you couldn't use programming skills to either make your job easier or to do it better.
- jerf 17y agoI was deliberately matching the way I thought jrockway was using "bad". The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step; this is in no way intended as criticism of your guide for the first step.
- jrockway 17y ago"Bad" is more of an attitude than anything you learn. You can be a good programmer before you ever know what Python is. And you can be a bad programmer even after writing 84 monad tutorials.
- zedshaw 17y agoWell of course you'd be a bad programmer after just 84 monad tutorials. You need at least like 300, maybe 385 just to finally get it. Sheesh, don't you know anything?
- ynniv 17y agoI still don't fully grok monads, but I think this is due to not having programmed in Haskell. Thus I conceptualize monads as a hole in an infinite plane. People (Haskell programmers) who deal with this infinite plane understand the hole to be an essential feature to move things from side to side. People who don't live with this plane wonder why the hell people think that a hole is so damn useful.
- steveklabnik 17y agoYou don't need to really grok Haskell to grok monads. It's just that that's where they're most useful... If you cared to hear my explanation, I'd tell you. (it involves a burrito...)
- yummyfajitas 17y agoTo grok monads, don't read a monad tutorial. Just write some code in haskell and monads will become clear very quickly.