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"The ADHD/Bipolar mind of the article isn't great at making plans, it's great at following its gut instinct, making shit up step by step." Which is why I do be

"The ADHD/Bipolar mind of the article isn't great at making plans, it's great at following its gut instinct, making shit up step by step." Which is why I do best with the command line, piping outputs and rapidly iterating to get the output I want. And why I struggled so much writing Python in a larger, more complex script/app. I wanted to constantly run and rerun the smaller parts to get each one just right. Unfortunately that doesn't work great when you're interacting with a half dozen different APIs that take minutes to run each time. Until I realized what was slowing me down, I was just getting more and frustrated. Now I am at least aware of the issue. Part and parcel of growing from sysadmin to DevOps to coder, I guess? Now I know to look for shims or stubs that help me. Now I can write tests that isolate and verify, rather than run the whole damn thing end to end. It helps me to think of objects as those command line tools. Their method parameters are the stdin that get passed through pipes. I apologize that this isn't particularly profound, but sometimes epiphanies are made from smaller realizations. Maybe I should have tried writing part of my most recent script in Lisp? Just to see if it resonated like described in this thread?

sph 3y ago
> I wanted to constantly run and rerun the smaller parts to get each one just right. > Maybe I should have tried writing part of my most recent script in Lisp? 90% of Lisp programming is selecting an expression in your editor and pressing C-x C-e to execute it. And continue until you are satisfied it operates as you want, then integrate it in the larger system.
jimmaswell 3y ago
> I wanted to constantly run and rerun the smaller parts to get each one just right. One one hand, as you alluded too, I've found unit tests are a great solution to this. Kill two birds with one stone - rapidly iterate on a chunk of code and come out of it with solid test coverage. It's too bad that's not very feasible in gamedev most of the time with so much going on in the world, but over time I think that environment improved my skills to where it's less of a problem.

sph 3y ago

> I wanted to constantly run and rerun the smaller parts to get each one just right. > Maybe I should have tried writing part of my most recent script in Lisp? 90% of Lisp programming is selecting an expression in your editor and pressing C-x C-e to execute it. And continue until you are satisfied it operates as you want, then integrate it in the larger system.

jimmaswell 3y ago

> I wanted to constantly run and rerun the smaller parts to get each one just right. One one hand, as you alluded too, I've found unit tests are a great solution to this. Kill two birds with one stone - rapidly iterate on a chunk of code and come out of it with solid test coverage. It's too bad that's not very feasible in gamedev most of the time with so much going on in the world, but over time I think that environment improved my skills to where it's less of a problem.