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From TFA: "You have reached that stage, because you have the time and skills to do this, but what about Joe beginner? Do they deserve this?" Joe Beginner will

by crikli 16y ago

From TFA: "You have reached that stage, because you have the time and skills to do this, but what about Joe beginner? Do they deserve this?" Joe Beginner will be fine provided he has the tenacity to learn, learn, and continue to learn. What he "deserves" isn't relevant. The reality is we're all Joe Beginner at something. For example, I have been writing code for almost 30 years (started real young) and have been doing web-dev for 10 years, but I'm Joe Beginner dealing with Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, and several other technologies I'm trying to wrap my head around. Part of...well, actually one of the key aspects of being a programmer is maintaining a complex and diverse skill set. This was true back in the 80's when I started with AppleBasic, it was true in the 90's when we were writing Win32 in C++, it's true now, and it's not going to change. Call me crazy, but I think using three or four different languages is of the things that makes web development really fun, more fun than trying to wade through pointer pointers to figure out where the hell I forgot to toss memory back on the heap. And isn't that why most of us hack anyway, because it's freaking fun?

Yoric 16y ago
Interesting point of view. I started coding 7 years after you (started real young, too) and I'm pretty sure the reason I picked up coding was because it was so easy to just get "hello world" running in GWBasic (and then Turbo Pascal).
- crikli 16y ago
  Good 'ol Turbo Pascal. I wrote an encrypt/decrypt program in TP and a friend of mine and I used to pass encoded messages back and forth on 3.5" floppy disks. To the subject at hand...I think it's a question of motivation. "Easy" was never part of the seduction; I wanted to make games, freak my folks out by making the screen flash and beep when they turned the computer on, hack the computers at school to lock out Walt the dickhead computer teacher guy, etc. "Fun" was always the motivation; "easy" never part of it because easy is...sorta boring. "Easy" has value, to be certain: IMO it's a signal that it's time to automate that task. For example, I used to hack Apache vhosts files by hand. Now it's easy, and we've automated it (and the rest of the LAMP stack setup, for that matter).
  - Yoric 16y ago
    I agree that "Fun" is just as important as "Easy", if not more. But the nightmares I'm mentioning? In my experience, they're just waste of days of my life. Not Easy. Not Fun. Not even remotely interesting.

by crikli 16y ago

Yoric 16y ago

Interesting point of view. I started coding 7 years after you (started real young, too) and I'm pretty sure the reason I picked up coding was because it was so easy to just get "hello world" running in GWBasic (and then Turbo Pascal).

crikli 16y ago
Good 'ol Turbo Pascal. I wrote an encrypt/decrypt program in TP and a friend of mine and I used to pass encoded messages back and forth on 3.5" floppy disks. To the subject at hand...I think it's a question of motivation. "Easy" was never part of the seduction; I wanted to make games, freak my folks out by making the screen flash and beep when they turned the computer on, hack the computers at school to lock out Walt the dickhead computer teacher guy, etc. "Fun" was always the motivation; "easy" never part of it because easy is...sorta boring. "Easy" has value, to be certain: IMO it's a signal that it's time to automate that task. For example, I used to hack Apache vhosts files by hand. Now it's easy, and we've automated it (and the rest of the LAMP stack setup, for that matter).
- Yoric 16y ago
  I agree that "Fun" is just as important as "Easy", if not more. But the nightmares I'm mentioning? In my experience, they're just waste of days of my life. Not Easy. Not Fun. Not even remotely interesting.