3 ms·

I see this assumption quite frequently -- That what is easy for a beginner is easy for an expert. I'm not sure that's the case. FWIW, I'm in the anti-boilerpla

• skybrian 12y ago
  Well, most things are easier for an expert, or they wouldn't be an expert, right? I think it's good practice to try to write code that's readable by people with a wide variety of skill levels.
  • rnbwd 12y ago
    I began programming in September of last year. For loops were trivially easy to understand (took me about a day), 1-2 weeks to become proficient. I started with php, moved to 'jquery', and then rails. Rails pisses me off. I said fuck this class I'm learning node/javascriot. After a week of js I switched to clojure (my instructor hadn't even heard of it, this is a full day bootcamp coding course). Rich Hickey is my single greatest influence in programming habits styles. I spent a few months, off and on, learning clojure. I still can't program competently, but I learned how to replace for loops with map / filter / reduce. Once I realized what was going on there, I had my greatest 'ah ha' moment in programming thus far. Clojure blogs led me to Om, om to react, react to frp and gulp, gulp lead to streams / piping, and I haven't used a for loop in 6 months. It's boilerplate that's so trivial, you only need to code for about 3 months for the functional abstractions to become more useful to you. It took me a few weeks to learn how map, filter, reduce work. It took me a few hours to learn a 4 loop. I still consider myself am amateur programmer, but this trend of code abstraction will continue rapidly, and our CPUs and more that capable of handling the potential performance hits.