4 ms·

>"Consuming abstractions produced by others and building our own abstractions on top of them to solve our own local business problem. This is what programming r

• naniwaduni 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure following a recipe is generally considered cooking.
  • porknubbins 5y ago
    Isn't following a recipe to make food exactly the definition of cooking? Maybe they meant that a chef has to invent original dishes but I think the whole cooking metaphor fails to map to programming since its mass production vs programming being essentially always custom one off.
    • fridif 5y ago
      If I dictated every ascii character of Romeo and Juliet to you, would you then call yourself a playwright? I would call you a good typist. EDIT: I never cook with a recipe and do everything by taste, feel, and instinct.
      • watwut 5y ago
        Then you should have used Romeo and Juliet example instead of cooking example. Following receipt is in fact cooking. You can go by feel, but you don't have to. Majority of cooking is following receipt, whether written or not.
  • fridif 5y ago
    what happens when you burn the food because you have no concept of how hot is too hot? what happens when you get a null pointer because you have no concept of exception handling?
    • samatman 5y ago
      Did the recipe say "burn the food"? Ok, then you didn't follow it.
      • fridif 5y ago
        "Did the programming tutorial say 'watch out for flipped bits in your hello world'"
    • slver 5y ago
      What happens is you learn, and next time you have a concept. That doesn't mean you stopped using recipes.
• cyanf 5y ago
  Of course it is. You don't write a new web framework when you want to build a website.
  • fridif 5y ago
    which framework do i use to translate my cool idea for a game into a triple aaa title, merely through speech alone?
• vladmk 5y ago
  This is literally how some of my coding friends told me they learned to code and created their own programs. And yes following a recipe is cooking otherwise chefs would never do it, it’s called standardization
• fenomas 5y ago
  "A submarine propelling itself through water? Pfft, that's not swimming."
  • fridif 5y ago
    It's strictly not. Marine soldiers are not asked to pass a submarine piloting test, they're asked to complete a swimming test. Why is this important? Because how can one import a library for a problem that currently has no solution?
    • fenomas 5y ago
      It's a reference. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Dijkstra
• slver 5y ago
  Literally all programming fits that sentence. Your language is an abstraction, the opcodes it compiles to are an abstraction, the machine code is an abstraction and the microcode it translates to - also. The engineering software for hardware is a highly simplified abstraction based upon physics and math. The physics and math, ...an abstraction for reality we barely understand. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. But maybe you create your own universe from scratch and program it without abstraction, who knows.
• a0-prw 5y ago
  A computer "follows the recipe", the programmer writes it. Sometimes the programmer runs parts of the program in his head. A chef creates recipes and sometimes follows them. He can also extemporise.