4 ms·

I've been doing this for 30 years. Why? Because I work in such a way to make it happen. What you call a problem, I embrace as a gift. Of all the things I've di

by edw519 10y ago

I've been doing this for 30 years. Why? Because I work in such a way to make it happen. What you call a problem, I embrace as a gift. Of all the things I've discussed here at Hacker News over the years, this is probably the #1 subject. Most programmers have the opposite problem of you: they have trouble turning their minds on. I always turn my computer off several hours before bed. The last thing I do every night is review hard copies of code with a red marker. Many nights I dream of my project/code. Sometimes I even jump up in the middle of the night and go to my computer, write down my thoughts, or lately, voice record them. Sometimes I am incredibly grateful for the "gift" I've received from "outside myself" in the middle of the night. Other times I'm annoyed. For every cool insight, there are many false positives: What was I thinking? But the positives far outweigh the negatives. I don't know why this works, but I can't imagine accomplishing all I do without it. Many programmers struggle for years to turn this "mind CRON" on. You already have the gift. I suggest you find a way to embrace it and turn your lemons into lemonade. You don't have a problem; you have a gift. Make it count! My original HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275 Also #49 here: http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf

smnscu 10y ago
A lot of programmers I respect like to work on printed out code, and it's something I enjoy as well. Furthermore I'd love if we could work completely offline, with pen and paper.
- g00gler 10y ago
  > Furthermore I'd love if we could work completely offline, with pen and paper. Why is that? I loathe writing code on paper, seems like it'd be a serious regression.
  - Lordarminius 10y ago
    Really? I have the exact opposite view. I love writing it my code on paper. It makes me feel like the creative part of the equation while I leave the 'mechanical' computation to the dumb machine. Debugging and understanding difficult code samples is easier too. I once read that Knuth(?) never used a computer and wrote everything on paper for his sectetary to type.
  - smnscu 10y ago
    No idea, I just enjoy paper and whiteboards more, I feel more creative as well. Also the fact that you're cutting out distractions.
  - wapz 10y ago
    I write tons of pseudo-code on paper and it helps me organize my thoughts far better than I can do on the computer (maybe I haven't found the right tools). I seem to solve more complex problems quicker too on paper (ymmv of course).
  - partisan 10y ago
    I personally don't write literal code on paper very often, but I draw workflows, interactions between pieces of code, thoughts and notes that I then refer to when coding. I spent about 4 hours the other day writing in my notebook working through a large refactor. I don't think I've written so much in such a short time since taking tests in school and I am sure the paperwork saved me a few days of stumbling around.
- jccc 10y ago
  More coders ought to try weaning themselves off of syntax highlighting and inverting their terminal colors to dark on light, document-writing style. If you don't need the training wheels and you're not a hacker in a movie, I think you'll discover over time that it is a sweet sweet liberation to be free from the ball and chain of syntax.
  - burkaman 10y ago
    I could not disagree more. I often have to write without syntax highlighting at work, and there are zero positives and many significant negatives. It's not there as "training wheels" or to look pretty, it's there to help you avoid trivial mistakes and easily navigate through the code. There was discussion here recently about why we still edit code as text rather than as a tree, and syntax highlighting helps bridge that gap slightly, so you can think of the code as a tree rather than a long series of meaningful letters. Seriously, have you tried this for more than a few minutes? I've been doing it for a year and a half and I've never seen any benefit. You're only "free from the ball and chain of syntax" until you try to run the code, when you realize the syntax is still there, and you're only "free" from being able to clearly see it.
    - jccc 10y ago
      Yes, I've been doing this for at least a couple years. I've been writing various kinds of code for money since 1995, and no change has ever been as helpful to me as this one. It's just a suggestion. Not everyone will like it or agree to seriously try it. I don't think it would necessarily work well for someone who's forced to use a certain editor or configuration at work, for example (and probably continues to rely on highlighting elsewhere outside of that job, preventing the mode shift from settling in). But I think a good many developers who haven't considered this might discover as I have that it helps them to be calm and focused on higher problem-solving at the levels that matter to them. It really is liberating to read and write code more broadly as a meaningful language rather than just fitting and stacking bits and pieces together. You might reasonably claim you can just ignore the highlighting at will, but I and others have discovered after making the move (and really giving it time to set in) that we didn't realize how much the highlighting anchored our thinking to syntax. I've had no more trouble at all preventing or finding bugs without highlighting than I did before. Also, while I've never used one I know that there are syntax-aware editors (or probably plugins for all the usual editors) that will show you broken syntax without drowning your code in syntax color.
- maxander 10y ago
  I've often thought about coding with a touchscreen and stylus- could be the best of both worlds. But though applicable hardware exists, such an IDE still doesn't, as far as I know.
hosh 10y ago
I suppose it is a gift. But you can turn this on by training in mindfulness and concentration exercises. The former increases lucidity. The latter increases clarity. Frankly though, the dreams you get are the dreams you need to see and experience, whether you like the contents or not. If someone is not dreaming about code but about those other things, those are the deeper stuff related to life that the person needs to deal with. If you are consistently dreaming about code, the gift is not that you are dreaming about code. The gift is that your daily life is aligned to a deeper sense of purpose and being. Your inner life and outer life is in better alignment than most people's. _That_ is rare.

by edw519 10y ago

smnscu 10y ago

A lot of programmers I respect like to work on printed out code, and it's something I enjoy as well. Furthermore I'd love if we could work completely offline, with pen and paper.

g00gler 10y ago
> Furthermore I'd love if we could work completely offline, with pen and paper. Why is that? I loathe writing code on paper, seems like it'd be a serious regression.
- Lordarminius 10y ago
  Really? I have the exact opposite view. I love writing it my code on paper. It makes me feel like the creative part of the equation while I leave the 'mechanical' computation to the dumb machine. Debugging and understanding difficult code samples is easier too. I once read that Knuth(?) never used a computer and wrote everything on paper for his sectetary to type.
- smnscu 10y ago
  No idea, I just enjoy paper and whiteboards more, I feel more creative as well. Also the fact that you're cutting out distractions.
- wapz 10y ago
  I write tons of pseudo-code on paper and it helps me organize my thoughts far better than I can do on the computer (maybe I haven't found the right tools). I seem to solve more complex problems quicker too on paper (ymmv of course).
- partisan 10y ago
  I personally don't write literal code on paper very often, but I draw workflows, interactions between pieces of code, thoughts and notes that I then refer to when coding. I spent about 4 hours the other day writing in my notebook working through a large refactor. I don't think I've written so much in such a short time since taking tests in school and I am sure the paperwork saved me a few days of stumbling around.
jccc 10y ago
More coders ought to try weaning themselves off of syntax highlighting and inverting their terminal colors to dark on light, document-writing style. If you don't need the training wheels and you're not a hacker in a movie, I think you'll discover over time that it is a sweet sweet liberation to be free from the ball and chain of syntax.
- burkaman 10y ago
  I could not disagree more. I often have to write without syntax highlighting at work, and there are zero positives and many significant negatives. It's not there as "training wheels" or to look pretty, it's there to help you avoid trivial mistakes and easily navigate through the code. There was discussion here recently about why we still edit code as text rather than as a tree, and syntax highlighting helps bridge that gap slightly, so you can think of the code as a tree rather than a long series of meaningful letters. Seriously, have you tried this for more than a few minutes? I've been doing it for a year and a half and I've never seen any benefit. You're only "free from the ball and chain of syntax" until you try to run the code, when you realize the syntax is still there, and you're only "free" from being able to clearly see it.
  - jccc 10y ago
    Yes, I've been doing this for at least a couple years. I've been writing various kinds of code for money since 1995, and no change has ever been as helpful to me as this one. It's just a suggestion. Not everyone will like it or agree to seriously try it. I don't think it would necessarily work well for someone who's forced to use a certain editor or configuration at work, for example (and probably continues to rely on highlighting elsewhere outside of that job, preventing the mode shift from settling in). But I think a good many developers who haven't considered this might discover as I have that it helps them to be calm and focused on higher problem-solving at the levels that matter to them. It really is liberating to read and write code more broadly as a meaningful language rather than just fitting and stacking bits and pieces together. You might reasonably claim you can just ignore the highlighting at will, but I and others have discovered after making the move (and really giving it time to set in) that we didn't realize how much the highlighting anchored our thinking to syntax. I've had no more trouble at all preventing or finding bugs without highlighting than I did before. Also, while I've never used one I know that there are syntax-aware editors (or probably plugins for all the usual editors) that will show you broken syntax without drowning your code in syntax color.
maxander 10y ago
I've often thought about coding with a touchscreen and stylus- could be the best of both worlds. But though applicable hardware exists, such an IDE still doesn't, as far as I know.

hosh 10y ago

I suppose it is a gift. But you can turn this on by training in mindfulness and concentration exercises. The former increases lucidity. The latter increases clarity. Frankly though, the dreams you get are the dreams you need to see and experience, whether you like the contents or not. If someone is not dreaming about code but about those other things, those are the deeper stuff related to life that the person needs to deal with. If you are consistently dreaming about code, the gift is not that you are dreaming about code. The gift is that your daily life is aligned to a deeper sense of purpose and being. Your inner life and outer life is in better alignment than most people's. _That_ is rare.