3 ms·

The Joy of Programming

67 points by mpweiher 4y ago

revskill 4y ago
I truly found programming is fun after discovering Haskell and functional programming. OOP is fun, too with .NET, Java, Ruby,...
gregfjohnson 4y ago
Been programming for 50 years, and still love it. Can't believe I'm paid to do it! Learn something new every day. I started for real as a freshman at 17; took a CS course taught by a guest professor. The course was taught using APL. If you will forgive the pun, I always thought APL was unique in its timeless beauty. I've always thought that viewing software from an "outside of time" perspective was something of a secret weapon. It is what I think Dijkstra was trying to get at, but I think Iverson did a better job of it. Started writing embedded code for medical devices about 20 years ago, and that has been a profound and meaningful occupation. I'm currently working on convex optimization code for treatment planning in cancer radiation therapy.
- rcurry 4y ago
  I’m probably nowhere near your level technically, but I’m 52 and still going strong. I love this field so much, and best of all I’m a hiring manager and so I get to welcome all these young kids into it. Warms my heart when some youngster comes in and knocks it out of the park. Just reminds me so much of being a kid and dreaming about one day being a “real” programmer. Skipping school and reading Roger Wagner’s Assembly Lines - the Complete Book, and hoping some day I’d get my hands on a real computer. Sounds silly, now that we all have supercomputers in our pockets. But I still treasure the memories.
analog31 4y ago
My brother, 4 years ahead of me, learned programming in college, and came home on breaks full of excitement about it. My mom, a high school science teacher, took a programming course at the community college. She ended up teaching the course a year later. I took a class in BASIC at my high school, around 1981. We used this IBM machine that looked like a keypunch but recorded the data onto an 8" floppy. Each of us got a floppy. We'd edit our program, then hand it to the operator, who would run it and give us our printout. Batch programming enforced a certain discipline -- you might get only a couple edit cycles every day. I wrote a program that made little mazes, using the built-in random number function RND. Then I made the maze a bit bigger, until I figured out what size would fit on a piece of 132 column green bar paper. I had little inkling of the order of algorithms, mine might have been O(N^3). Anyway, the next day I received a stern rebuke from the teacher, apparently the operator found it still running the following morning, and shut it down. I still love to program, though I'm not a software developer, but a so called "scientific" programmer.
rcurry 4y ago
When I was a kid we didn’t even have ones! We had to write all our code with zeros. Apologies to Scott Adams of course. https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-08 https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-08
- fsckboy 4y ago
  In the days of typewriters it was quite common not to have a 1-key, you used lower case L. There were also typewriters that didn't have zero, just used capital O but look at that, they had handy fractions! (found this with ddg search) https://mycupofretro.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC09416-2048x2048.jpg https://mycupofretro.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC09416...
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Heh. One of my first hard bugs was in FORTRAN. I was doing some trig, and FORTRAN didn't know what COS was. Turned out that I overshot the Oh key, and hit the zero which is just past it. Of course, being FORTRAN, it was all caps. It took me two days to find that one-character difference.
EarlKing 4y ago
Given the Bob Ross story earlier today I was expecting happy little programs. I'm disappointed.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  There is no program too small. The happiest code is the one that was never written. There.
  - EarlKing 4y ago
    Insufficient poofy 80s hair in that statement.
vishnugupta 4y ago
Been coding for 25 years. I still feel the same sense of wonder as I did all those years ago. Began with Fortran and now a days I dabble in JavaScript and Java. I’ve coded in a bunch of languages, COBOL, Pascal, C, and Haskell, not to mention Bash. One thing I vividly recall is coding in paper and pen. Back in those days, the computer time was limited and we didn’t have access to all those debugging tools. It meant I would think of the entire logic in mind and then write it on paper and even execute it using sample inputs. While it was cumbersome I developed this skill of mentally executing a code which helps immensely in debugging. It also helps me being able to keep track of business logic and architecture for longer term so that I could refactor or debug while taking a walk or while lying awake in bed. One code I vividly remember is calculating determinant of a matrix. I was trying to figure it out when my friend outlined the algorithm to me. I quickly opened a book and began coding. After couple of days of trial and error I got it right covering al the edge cases. I still feel proud of that! Later I learned that that method is quite old and even has a name, LU Decompisition!!
ankurdhama 4y ago
Programming is fun as long as it is being done for fun/personal project. It is a different story when the context is a professional setting or a business setting.
- bluetomcat 4y ago
  For me, it can be fun when I am solving a more abstract problem that fascinates me, when I am not constrained by time and by other people’s opinions, and when starting on a clean slate without any accrued technical debt. On the other hand, oiling the cogs of a big legacy CRUD app can be a highly soul-sucking experience. You would do some small changes required by the business process, while stepping on egg-shells in order to keep the fragile thing still working.
- omoikane 4y ago
  Probably because most of the time for professional software developers aren't spent on fun things such as programming, but on meetings, scheduling milestones, planning resources, even more meetings, and so forth. I enjoy programming both as a job and as a hobby, but there are definitely days where I wrote more code for my side project than for work, despite spending more hours at work.
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  I love programming at my job and getting paid fat stacks of cash for it.
ge96 4y ago
It is great willing something into existence. The feeling when you solve a problem/achieve something, that's great. See something you designed work (like a robot). My day job is building microservices/another CRUD thing but I hope to transition to more physical stuff in the future. I didn't grow up with code/technology. I just came into it in my college years. Was a desperate attempt to escape poverty while failing out of college with debt. I got lucky to stumble onto this field. Later on I grew to like it just for creation. I have always been a builder (rc stuff when I was younger).
travisgriggs 4y ago
Fellow Smalltalk Groupie from back in the day here. I jumped out of the balloon just over 10 years ago. I used to feel that I too would love coding forever. I looked up to those that did. I wanted to be like them. I still do. Of late, I feel like I’m waning. I’ve spent the last 10 years “using the right tool for the right job”. I became a polyglot. Because Smalltalk alone wasn’t where it was at. So I’ve become proficient with one tool/language or another for just about everything except front end web development. And… I just feel tired of late. What I’ve worked on has been successful. I’ve played a key role in watering literally millions of agriculture acreage (well maybe more 100s of thousands, but there isn’t a good single word for that). And yet… I’m tired. And it doesn’t feel fun anymore. I can’t find the sense of community I used to feel in the Smalltalk tribe. I loathe the types of non technical management that seems to oversee software development more than ever (I like them as people, I just hate the ineffectiveness of their roles). Where simplicity and elegance used to seem a laudable goal in software, it just seems to be an attractor of complexity anymore. Complexity attracts more positions, more roles, more process, and the extra cash that has sloshed around for the last 10 years just seems to soak that right in. Curious if any of the “still loving it too” here, have any good advice on how to right this ship of enthusiasm before it founders.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Well, no advice here, swap watering for $B in shipped product, etc. and the feeling is the same. "I will do this forever" becomes "You know what? I don't want to die in a meeting or in front of a keyboard."
mnemotronic 4y ago
Did the stem cell implants help your wife?
zanethomas 4y ago
Me too! I began programming mid 70s (although I was 25, not 11) and I've been programming every since. I'm still picking up contract work.
ChrisCinelli 4y ago
I started when I was 6 on a ZX Spectrum in Basic, then assembly Z80, then 80x86 assembly, then C/C++ ,then I went to high school where they wanted me to learn PROLOG :-P
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
My first coding was Machine Code, punched into a hex keypad, attached to a single STD-Bus-based MC6800 microprocessor board, nailed to a piece of wood, and displaying in a 4-digit hex LED display. In 1983. My first program was an EEPROM duplicator. Around that time, I also got a Commodore VIC-20 computer, with a Machine Language monitor cartridge. Since the whole thing had 3KB of RAM, I needed to write most of my stuff in Machine Code. Still programming to this day. I’m retired. I could be sitting on the couch, channel-surfing, but instead, I spend most of the day on the computer, writing iOS apps.

67 points by mpweiher 4y ago

I truly found programming is fun after discovering Haskell and functional programming. OOP is fun, too with .NET, Java, Ruby,...

gregfjohnson 4y ago

Been programming for 50 years, and still love it. Can't believe I'm paid to do it! Learn something new every day. I started for real as a freshman at 17; took a CS course taught by a guest professor. The course was taught using APL. If you will forgive the pun, I always thought APL was unique in its timeless beauty. I've always thought that viewing software from an "outside of time" perspective was something of a secret weapon. It is what I think Dijkstra was trying to get at, but I think Iverson did a better job of it. Started writing embedded code for medical devices about 20 years ago, and that has been a profound and meaningful occupation. I'm currently working on convex optimization code for treatment planning in cancer radiation therapy.

rcurry 4y ago
I’m probably nowhere near your level technically, but I’m 52 and still going strong. I love this field so much, and best of all I’m a hiring manager and so I get to welcome all these young kids into it. Warms my heart when some youngster comes in and knocks it out of the park. Just reminds me so much of being a kid and dreaming about one day being a “real” programmer. Skipping school and reading Roger Wagner’s Assembly Lines - the Complete Book, and hoping some day I’d get my hands on a real computer. Sounds silly, now that we all have supercomputers in our pockets. But I still treasure the memories.

analog31 4y ago

My brother, 4 years ahead of me, learned programming in college, and came home on breaks full of excitement about it. My mom, a high school science teacher, took a programming course at the community college. She ended up teaching the course a year later. I took a class in BASIC at my high school, around 1981. We used this IBM machine that looked like a keypunch but recorded the data onto an 8" floppy. Each of us got a floppy. We'd edit our program, then hand it to the operator, who would run it and give us our printout. Batch programming enforced a certain discipline -- you might get only a couple edit cycles every day. I wrote a program that made little mazes, using the built-in random number function RND. Then I made the maze a bit bigger, until I figured out what size would fit on a piece of 132 column green bar paper. I had little inkling of the order of algorithms, mine might have been O(N^3). Anyway, the next day I received a stern rebuke from the teacher, apparently the operator found it still running the following morning, and shut it down. I still love to program, though I'm not a software developer, but a so called "scientific" programmer.

rcurry 4y ago

When I was a kid we didn’t even have ones! We had to write all our code with zeros. Apologies to Scott Adams of course. https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-08 https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-08

fsckboy 4y ago
In the days of typewriters it was quite common not to have a 1-key, you used lower case L. There were also typewriters that didn't have zero, just used capital O but look at that, they had handy fractions! (found this with ddg search) https://mycupofretro.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC09416-2048x2048.jpg https://mycupofretro.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC09416...
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Heh. One of my first hard bugs was in FORTRAN. I was doing some trig, and FORTRAN didn't know what COS was. Turned out that I overshot the Oh key, and hit the zero which is just past it. Of course, being FORTRAN, it was all caps. It took me two days to find that one-character difference.

EarlKing 4y ago

Given the Bob Ross story earlier today I was expecting happy little programs. I'm disappointed.

speed_spread 4y ago
There is no program too small. The happiest code is the one that was never written. There.
- EarlKing 4y ago
  Insufficient poofy 80s hair in that statement.

vishnugupta 4y ago

Been coding for 25 years. I still feel the same sense of wonder as I did all those years ago. Began with Fortran and now a days I dabble in JavaScript and Java. I’ve coded in a bunch of languages, COBOL, Pascal, C, and Haskell, not to mention Bash. One thing I vividly recall is coding in paper and pen. Back in those days, the computer time was limited and we didn’t have access to all those debugging tools. It meant I would think of the entire logic in mind and then write it on paper and even execute it using sample inputs. While it was cumbersome I developed this skill of mentally executing a code which helps immensely in debugging. It also helps me being able to keep track of business logic and architecture for longer term so that I could refactor or debug while taking a walk or while lying awake in bed. One code I vividly remember is calculating determinant of a matrix. I was trying to figure it out when my friend outlined the algorithm to me. I quickly opened a book and began coding. After couple of days of trial and error I got it right covering al the edge cases. I still feel proud of that! Later I learned that that method is quite old and even has a name, LU Decompisition!!

ankurdhama 4y ago

Programming is fun as long as it is being done for fun/personal project. It is a different story when the context is a professional setting or a business setting.

bluetomcat 4y ago
For me, it can be fun when I am solving a more abstract problem that fascinates me, when I am not constrained by time and by other people’s opinions, and when starting on a clean slate without any accrued technical debt. On the other hand, oiling the cogs of a big legacy CRUD app can be a highly soul-sucking experience. You would do some small changes required by the business process, while stepping on egg-shells in order to keep the fragile thing still working.
omoikane 4y ago
Probably because most of the time for professional software developers aren't spent on fun things such as programming, but on meetings, scheduling milestones, planning resources, even more meetings, and so forth. I enjoy programming both as a job and as a hobby, but there are definitely days where I wrote more code for my side project than for work, despite spending more hours at work.
artificialLimbs 4y ago
I love programming at my job and getting paid fat stacks of cash for it.

ge96 4y ago

It is great willing something into existence. The feeling when you solve a problem/achieve something, that's great. See something you designed work (like a robot). My day job is building microservices/another CRUD thing but I hope to transition to more physical stuff in the future. I didn't grow up with code/technology. I just came into it in my college years. Was a desperate attempt to escape poverty while failing out of college with debt. I got lucky to stumble onto this field. Later on I grew to like it just for creation. I have always been a builder (rc stuff when I was younger).

travisgriggs 4y ago

Fellow Smalltalk Groupie from back in the day here. I jumped out of the balloon just over 10 years ago. I used to feel that I too would love coding forever. I looked up to those that did. I wanted to be like them. I still do. Of late, I feel like I’m waning. I’ve spent the last 10 years “using the right tool for the right job”. I became a polyglot. Because Smalltalk alone wasn’t where it was at. So I’ve become proficient with one tool/language or another for just about everything except front end web development. And… I just feel tired of late. What I’ve worked on has been successful. I’ve played a key role in watering literally millions of agriculture acreage (well maybe more 100s of thousands, but there isn’t a good single word for that). And yet… I’m tired. And it doesn’t feel fun anymore. I can’t find the sense of community I used to feel in the Smalltalk tribe. I loathe the types of non technical management that seems to oversee software development more than ever (I like them as people, I just hate the ineffectiveness of their roles). Where simplicity and elegance used to seem a laudable goal in software, it just seems to be an attractor of complexity anymore. Complexity attracts more positions, more roles, more process, and the extra cash that has sloshed around for the last 10 years just seems to soak that right in. Curious if any of the “still loving it too” here, have any good advice on how to right this ship of enthusiasm before it founders.

foobiekr 4y ago
Well, no advice here, swap watering for $B in shipped product, etc. and the feeling is the same. "I will do this forever" becomes "You know what? I don't want to die in a meeting or in front of a keyboard."

mnemotronic 4y ago

Did the stem cell implants help your wife?

zanethomas 4y ago

Me too! I began programming mid 70s (although I was 25, not 11) and I've been programming every since. I'm still picking up contract work.

ChrisCinelli 4y ago

I started when I was 6 on a ZX Spectrum in Basic, then assembly Z80, then 80x86 assembly, then C/C++ ,then I went to high school where they wanted me to learn PROLOG :-P

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

My first coding was Machine Code, punched into a hex keypad, attached to a single STD-Bus-based MC6800 microprocessor board, nailed to a piece of wood, and displaying in a 4-digit hex LED display. In 1983. My first program was an EEPROM duplicator. Around that time, I also got a Commodore VIC-20 computer, with a Machine Language monitor cartridge. Since the whole thing had 3KB of RAM, I needed to write most of my stuff in Machine Code. Still programming to this day. I’m retired. I could be sitting on the couch, channel-surfing, but instead, I spend most of the day on the computer, writing iOS apps.