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Of course, there are plenty of actual tricky programming concepts: closures, tail recursion, coroutines, memory management, concurrency, regular expression matc

• evincarofautumn 15y ago
  And you've just given me an idea for my next article. :)
• gatlin 15y ago
  Another commenter made a great point that knowing how and when to use these things is likely more difficult, but having a good grasp of the concepts is important. Here is a minute of me stabbing at analogies: Coroutines: A subroutine is a basement which you go down into and come up from via the same door. A coroutine, by contrast, is an adjacent room with several doors and you can leave temporarily even if you're not completely done in there (of course, you must re-enter whichever door you previously left; not a perfect analogy). Concurrency: doing multiple things at once. In a kitchen, concurrent actions work best when the cooks either don't share resources or have clever schemes for ensuring there is always an alternative activity to perform if resources are in use. This can be as simple as getting on a list for the knife, or blender, or what-have-you, and you'll be called when it's open. Caching: I dislike going to the grocery store every time I am hungry so I cache things I will need to make shorter trips on average. How much you cache at once is important to determine. Regular expression matching: This isn't what I'm trying to find, this is a description of what I'm trying to find.
  • mark_story 15y ago
    Great explanations.
    • gatlin 15y ago
      Thanks! Maybe the author of the article will agree.
  • evincarofautumn 15y ago
    Coroutines are more like reading multiple books, leaving bookmarks behind and returning to them as needed. I think of caching like moving the resources you're working with to be near at hand so it takes less time to get to them. (When you're painting, for example, you keep pencil, eraser, brush, paints, and palette nearby, because they're in active use and it would take awhile to fetch them every time you needed them.) Your other examples are great though. I worked in a kitchen for a couple of years and it's definitely all about concurrency.
    • gatlin 15y ago
      That's what I was grasping for with caching, and I think I got carried away thinking about preemptive caching and conflated an idea with a common use. Either way, thanks. And, your article is fucking brilliant. I might ape its style soon in a few "Learn Perl" articles of my own.
• bostonOU 15y ago
  Just last night I was explaining regular expressions to my fiancée who has absolutely no programming experience. I just showed her some fundamentals: 1) '[\d]' means any digit 2) '+' means one or more 3) '[\d]+' means one or more digits Understanding that is not hard or tricky at all. Using that to build a complicated regular expression is hard. I think that's the author's point. Understanding the concept of a pointer or recursion is not hard. Actually using those concepts to build something takes practice and hard work. edit: formatting
• gcv 15y ago
  Honestly, most of the concepts you listed are fairly easy. They mostly apply to the mechanics of writing code, so they just require a bit of thought. Problem solving is difficult. Recognizing how to apply dynamic programming is difficult. NP-completeness proofs are difficult.