5 ms·

Truly inspiring. I am in my late forties, and I was wondering if I have enough time to learn Haskell, now I have no reason not to.

xwdv 6y ago
It’s never too late to learn anything. The problem is, are you ever going to be able to put it to good use before forgetting much of it? I’ve wasted so much time in the past decade learning random shit that I never used, it’s been a poor ROI compared to just continuing to hone the skills and languages I use daily. Really demotivating.
- pbourke 6y ago
  If you’re a working programmer using a mainstream language, then I feel that spending some time with an ML-derived language such as Haskell and a Lisp will pay dividends in your day to day practice. There are some keen insights about computing that are revealed by these languages - and those insights are transferable to your daily work in JS, C#, Python, Java, etc to some degree.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Can you give any examples?
    - jimbokun 6y ago
      Looking backwards, I dug pretty deeply into Clojure for a while. When Streams came to Java, I felt like I was already an expert in that paradigm, and was able to adopt it immediately in ways that made my Java code clearer and more concise, and maybe even more performant in some cases. (Streams can allow you to transform a very long sequence of data, without needing to realize the whole sequence in memory first, as one example.) I also use immutable data structures by default wherever possible, unless I know I really need to mutate the data. I try to make the output of a method dependent only on the inputs, wherever possible. You shouldn't take it to extremes, but incorporating paradigms from one language into another can pay big dividends.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - st1x7 6y ago
    > and those insights are transferable to your daily work Some people say this, others say that it makes your daily work worse because going back to a language that isn't on the cult-approved list is so difficult.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  It sounds like your problem is a certain outcome dependency. A better mindset is to learn things out of curiosity. You could level your criticism at learning anything that doesn’t help you in the cubicle tomorrow.
  - b3kart 6y ago
    People should really learn to separate work and play. As soon as you utter “ROI” your play has become work.
trangon 6y ago
Do it. You never know where it will lead. For example I started screwing around with C a few months ago and now I playing with microcontrollers and cameras because of that.
- bitexploder 6y ago
  I started playing with Linux and C in 96. I was just an ignorant teenager. I didn’t know C was “hard”. I didn’t really care that Linux was different from Win95, I just knew Linux had fvwm2, gedit, and C compilers I needed for hacking on MUDs. I didn’t know chasing down obscure memory leaks was hard, I just linked libefence and did it. I was just playing and learning. Then I got offered a job doing web development with ColdFusion while still in high school. I was amazed at how easy the language was compared to C. Every “wow they must have a lot of time” project is often some other hacker playing and learning. Play and finding a way to make programming and computers not seem like work is how you develop a life long love of hacking and learning :) (this is not follow your passion advice, I think that is terrible advice, but if you can make your work feel like play and your play very intentional you will struggle to burn out or find it hard to sit down and write code any given day) :) Edit: also, in 96 the Internet was very different. Many problems were solved by reading man pages, reviewing library source code, and thinking hard about what was happening. Modern Internet and stackoverflow /can/ make you more efficient in the short term but in the long term, it’s worth not rushing to google every error or weird problem. Give it a few minutes. If you’re writing a web app for example, in say Django or Rails go peek at the source code (they are beautiful projects). It’s almost a crime to not review the Go standard library source code, it is one of the cleanest out there. Etc, etc.
  - djeiasbsbo 6y ago
    That's awesome. I am currently an ignorant teenager and I started messing around with C around this time last year. If I had to describe this current age I'd say it's driven by endless curiosity; I can't wait to start studying later this year. I don't think there has been one day in 2020 on which I haven't tinkered/hacked around. The latest thing I did was looking at the AArch64 reference manual and studying the structure of ELF binaries and then disassembling them manually.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
My dad is a 55 year old mechanical engineer. He have called me 3 times today with various questions regarding C++. He’s learning it by writing a program to draw Bezier curves. Maybe at 55 I’ll pick up mechanical engineering as a hobby.
- fortran77 6y ago
  Hey! I'm 58 and just starting a new contracting position writing software for Software Defined Radios, which I never did before. Started working with Matlib. Need to learn/relearn some math, too. 55 is certainly not too old to learn C++.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
iso8859-1 6y ago
The Berlin FP group on Meetup just finished the haskellbook.com , you're just in time to join in with the next reading group!
- submeta 6y ago
  Sounds good. Will check that out. Thanks.
VladimirGolovin 6y ago
I’m also in my late forties. I did learn myself some Haskell, and it was literally mind-blowing. The last time I had so much fun learning a language was in my late teens when I was learning class hierarchies in OOP.
wiz21c 6y ago
Late forties too... Got burn out and now I'm studying again to get a engineering degree in data sciences (yeah, the full hype thing). It feels so good to study (with 20 y.o. kids :-)), and it sure dwarfs the lack of money coming in (I'm not working because studying is a full time job). So it's a totally risk career move but that's either that either being sad at my workplace. Hopefully I'll feel empowered by the degree and be able to move on professionnaly.
- RealSpaceMonkey 6y ago
  This should just be normal. The idea that you study until a certain age then that's it is outdated. We are not mechanical cogs coming out of an educational factory. Societal norms are not always right. Do what makes sense.

xwdv 6y ago

It’s never too late to learn anything. The problem is, are you ever going to be able to put it to good use before forgetting much of it? I’ve wasted so much time in the past decade learning random shit that I never used, it’s been a poor ROI compared to just continuing to hone the skills and languages I use daily. Really demotivating.

pbourke 6y ago
If you’re a working programmer using a mainstream language, then I feel that spending some time with an ML-derived language such as Haskell and a Lisp will pay dividends in your day to day practice. There are some keen insights about computing that are revealed by these languages - and those insights are transferable to your daily work in JS, C#, Python, Java, etc to some degree.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Can you give any examples?
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    Looking backwards, I dug pretty deeply into Clojure for a while. When Streams came to Java, I felt like I was already an expert in that paradigm, and was able to adopt it immediately in ways that made my Java code clearer and more concise, and maybe even more performant in some cases. (Streams can allow you to transform a very long sequence of data, without needing to realize the whole sequence in memory first, as one example.) I also use immutable data structures by default wherever possible, unless I know I really need to mutate the data. I try to make the output of a method dependent only on the inputs, wherever possible. You shouldn't take it to extremes, but incorporating paradigms from one language into another can pay big dividends.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- st1x7 6y ago
  > and those insights are transferable to your daily work Some people say this, others say that it makes your daily work worse because going back to a language that isn't on the cult-approved list is so difficult.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
It sounds like your problem is a certain outcome dependency. A better mindset is to learn things out of curiosity. You could level your criticism at learning anything that doesn’t help you in the cubicle tomorrow.
- b3kart 6y ago
  People should really learn to separate work and play. As soon as you utter “ROI” your play has become work.

trangon 6y ago

Do it. You never know where it will lead. For example I started screwing around with C a few months ago and now I playing with microcontrollers and cameras because of that.

bitexploder 6y ago
I started playing with Linux and C in 96. I was just an ignorant teenager. I didn’t know C was “hard”. I didn’t really care that Linux was different from Win95, I just knew Linux had fvwm2, gedit, and C compilers I needed for hacking on MUDs. I didn’t know chasing down obscure memory leaks was hard, I just linked libefence and did it. I was just playing and learning. Then I got offered a job doing web development with ColdFusion while still in high school. I was amazed at how easy the language was compared to C. Every “wow they must have a lot of time” project is often some other hacker playing and learning. Play and finding a way to make programming and computers not seem like work is how you develop a life long love of hacking and learning :) (this is not follow your passion advice, I think that is terrible advice, but if you can make your work feel like play and your play very intentional you will struggle to burn out or find it hard to sit down and write code any given day) :) Edit: also, in 96 the Internet was very different. Many problems were solved by reading man pages, reviewing library source code, and thinking hard about what was happening. Modern Internet and stackoverflow /can/ make you more efficient in the short term but in the long term, it’s worth not rushing to google every error or weird problem. Give it a few minutes. If you’re writing a web app for example, in say Django or Rails go peek at the source code (they are beautiful projects). It’s almost a crime to not review the Go standard library source code, it is one of the cleanest out there. Etc, etc.
- djeiasbsbo 6y ago
  That's awesome. I am currently an ignorant teenager and I started messing around with C around this time last year. If I had to describe this current age I'd say it's driven by endless curiosity; I can't wait to start studying later this year. I don't think there has been one day in 2020 on which I haven't tinkered/hacked around. The latest thing I did was looking at the AArch64 reference manual and studying the structure of ELF binaries and then disassembling them manually.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

My dad is a 55 year old mechanical engineer. He have called me 3 times today with various questions regarding C++. He’s learning it by writing a program to draw Bezier curves. Maybe at 55 I’ll pick up mechanical engineering as a hobby.

fortran77 6y ago
Hey! I'm 58 and just starting a new contracting position writing software for Software Defined Radios, which I never did before. Started working with Matlib. Need to learn/relearn some math, too. 55 is certainly not too old to learn C++.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

iso8859-1 6y ago

The Berlin FP group on Meetup just finished the haskellbook.com , you're just in time to join in with the next reading group!

submeta 6y ago
Sounds good. Will check that out. Thanks.

VladimirGolovin 6y ago

I’m also in my late forties. I did learn myself some Haskell, and it was literally mind-blowing. The last time I had so much fun learning a language was in my late teens when I was learning class hierarchies in OOP.

wiz21c 6y ago

Late forties too... Got burn out and now I'm studying again to get a engineering degree in data sciences (yeah, the full hype thing). It feels so good to study (with 20 y.o. kids :-)), and it sure dwarfs the lack of money coming in (I'm not working because studying is a full time job). So it's a totally risk career move but that's either that either being sad at my workplace. Hopefully I'll feel empowered by the degree and be able to move on professionnaly.

RealSpaceMonkey 6y ago
This should just be normal. The idea that you study until a certain age then that's it is outdated. We are not mechanical cogs coming out of an educational factory. Societal norms are not always right. Do what makes sense.