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Ask HN: Least Overwhelming Field of Programming?
Hi HN,
Part of my career is in web development. I'd love to pursue another field. But I am weary of overwhelmingness, accidental complexity, "plumbing" and tools.
I don't want to keep spending my energy on connecting dozens of systems in 8 different languages and endless layers of abstraction just to launch a web app. I love the web, and I loved making web apps and websites, but today I rarely feel it's worth the hassle.
What are the least overwhelming fields of programming?
Ones that:
- not as complex as the web
- are "slow" (as in, the opposite of ever-changing JS world) and mature
- more concerned with either end user problems (apps) or important fundamentals, but not the middle ground complex engineering problems (e.g. kernel development)
- maybe, closer to math and theoretical CS (because math is the dream of "zero accidental complexity, pure problem domain")
Desktop app development? Quite overwhelming, it seems. macOS/Swift maybe?
Mobile? Android, even with Kotlin, isn't very nice (at least the last time I tried it). Not sure about iOS. Maybe, sandboxing and lots of limitations are rather good?
Microcontrollers? ML? Computer vision? Robots?
I appreciate any input.
Thank you.
- smt88 7y agoWeb often seems to me like the least overwhelming field. There are so many people doing it well that there are tools to make everything pretty easy. All of my biggest problems are people/org problems. Maybe your problem is that doing something professionally will always force you to spend time on parts you find uninteresting? I agree mobile is awful. You might find 2D game dev to be fun, if you hyper-focus on a single platform.
- 100100010001 7y agoAgreed. Web development seems more approachable and I think MySpace has a lot to do with that. Allowing users to post html and css on their profile was probably the best feature! I think it also made programming relatable to a lot of people who wouldn’t have tried it otherwise.
- freetonik 7y agoI think I know what you mean. In terms of the quantity of tools, people and solutions it's hard to beat web. >Maybe your problem is that doing something professionally will always force you to spend time on parts you find uninteresting? Maybe. But that's just part of the problem. The other part is breath-first nature of work. In web, you have to cover a lot of different bases in order to get things going. I imagine in mobile dev it's more of a depth-first nature. There are less things to think about. >You might find 2D game dev to be fun, if you hyper-focus on a single platform. Thank you, I haven't even considered that. Quick look at the current state of Unity and it seems like it could be interesting. I like to draw [1] and the idea of drawing game art sounds appealing. [1] https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/ https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/
- elcomet 7y agoI think you can do simple and powerful web programming without pursuing the latest front-end or back-end frameworks. Just use jQuery and frameworks like symfony or django, or others depending of your favorite language. Those are mature technologies that have been there for years. Mobile might be less complex if you stick with the default native language and tools. I'd say maybe embedded programming is the field where you have the least plumbing, but is more complex on other matters (chip power and consumption). I wouldn't recommend machine learning, computer vision, and certainly not robotics, which is tedious to make it work.
- freetonik 7y agoI'd say Symfony and Django are pretty complex still. I remember the "good old days" of vanilla PHP and bad coding practices as the simplest, most free-feeling web dev I knew. >Mobile might be less complex if you stick with the default native language and tools. That's where I'm leaning so far.
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