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Personally, I don't find learning to program new things as much fun as I did when I was 13-20. I would learn assembly, c++, basic, etc, all from books I got fr
by dpcan 9y ago
Personally, I don't find learning to program new things as much fun as I did when I was 13-20. I would learn assembly, c++, basic, etc, all from books I got from Hastings or the local computer store.
I didn't know if what I was doing had already been done, I struggled and struggled and struggled until I figured out the right answer, learning how other things worked with every failure.
Now, jumping straight to the right answer eliminates all those other things I learned along the way.
I believe I was a more well-rounded and talented programmer when I was 15 than I am now pushing 40.
Anyway, maybe I just miss those years where I had 100 hours a week to teach myself something new and fun. I could never find the time for that now, and so jumping to the right answer is really my only option.
- rpdillon 9y agoThis has been exactly my experience. The only difference is I got books from the local library. I have the same nostalgia for working through Pascal and assembly language books while hunched over an old 386 as a teen. Now, it's much more about how fast I can generate value. Probably speaks equally well to the process of growing up as it does to how learning programming has changed.
- ashark 9y agoI think it's 3rd party libraries/tools/SaaS, all sitting on top of a much more complicated stack, causing most of the problems. They provided enough of a boost to productivity that you can't justify avoiding them, but mean you swap thinking about and fixing real problems for googling obscure broken shit in these almost-always-terrible libraries et c. It's the difference between 8 hours, 1 of which is wrestling with dumb broken crap, and 4 hours, 3.5 of which is wrestling with dumb broken crap. The latter is way less fun, very demoralizing, and more mentally draining IMO. But it's almost all one gets to do these days, because you do get done faster with them. A blessing (to productivity) and a curse (to fulfillment/happiness as a developer) [EDIT] add missing word
- omaranto 9y agoWho or what is Hastings?
- khedoros1 9y agoA (defunct) U.S. book, movie, music, and game retailer, as well as video rental store.
- nubbins 9y agoI find looking up Java or similar answers to be almost universally unsatisfying, usually its just "use this library in this way and don't worry about behind the scenes", but then looking up answers to C questions I have to understand the logic of the solution so its much more worthwhile.