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I think I see where you're coming from, although I find it rather dispiriting, in that this point of view seems to be arguing against exploring and understandin
by matfil 8y ago
I think I see where you're coming from, although I find it rather dispiriting, in that this point of view seems to be arguing against exploring and understanding the universe of different programming techniques.
It would perhaps be instructive if you could enumerate or point to what you consider to be a good set of concepts to work from. Clearly there are some absurd answers ("it's all NAND gates in the end"), but I don't imagine that's what you're thinking. Would you include functors? applicative functors? Different forms of memory management? APL/R/Numpy-style arrays? setjmp/longjmp?
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoI don’t see how it argues against exploring and learning about many programming techniques / language specifics / etc. By all means any practicing programmer should be investing to learn about these things. It’s kind of like martial arts. You are encouraged to learn a huge variety of skills, mostly fundamentals but also esoteric advanced things. But when it comes to actually using them in real life, you should try to avoid needing to use them at all costs, and even when you are absolutely forced to use the knowledge, use the simplest, most straightforward way to address only the problem at hand, never in excess or for personal interest. It’s about self-discipline, to orient your code for the mind of an inexperienced novice despite the fact that your simple code might be solving state of the art problems.