dgulledge

4 ms·

1.
by dgulledge 15y ago
I read just enough about it that I can get a "Hello, World" program written and running. I then try a few things to modify that program to learn more about the language. In particular, I'll often try breaking it in several different ways.
2.
by dgulledge 15y ago
Sometimes. It depends on what I'm typing. Documentation I mostly touch-type. Code, never. Touch-typing is one of those skills that pays with an economy of scale. The time it takes to place both hands on the home keys isn't justified wh
3.
by dgulledge 15y ago
I agree 100% about Ubuntu, Python and PostgreSQL. They're an excellent tool set. You'll want to learn how to configure PostgreSQL. Go to the project website. The manuals are quite good.
4.
by dgulledge 16y ago
A variant on 4 that I've been meaning to get to for a little while now is to implement the same network protocol in several languages.
5.
by dgulledge 16y ago
Both Vim and Emacs have some very nice features. Compared to a full-featured IDE, yeah they do look a bit old school. Even so, you can be incredible productive in either of them. I use Emacs myself, and I can't imagine trying to live wit
6.
by dgulledge 16y ago
Congress shall make no law abridging the laws of physics.
7.
by dgulledge 16y ago
Absolutely! By learning to deal with pointer manipulation and memory allocation, you can learn what it is, why it is necessary and how to recognize when it is broken. One of the problems with garbage collection is that it suffers from a m
8.
by dgulledge 16y ago
There are a lot of good ones, but my favorite is still Erin McKean's talk about dictionaries: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/erin_mckean_redefines_the_...
9.
by dgulledge 17y ago
One of the best things about HN is precisely that there is a core focus to it, but that it touches on many related topics. Some of the most valuable areas for exploration are where one field of knowledge meets another. Each sheds some lig
10.
by dgulledge 17y ago
There are situations where the order of evaluation is not guaranteed. The big one that I've seen is evaluation of expressions as arguments in a function call, but there are others. It is easy to create floating point expressions where bec
11.
by dgulledge 17y ago
Your motivation to learn the language will be a strong factor in your success. Wanting specifically to communicate in the language is a big plus. Get as much contents as you can and use it. Since you are studying Spanish, if you have acce
12.
by dgulledge 18y ago
You're right. And the problem with that is that the only opportunities for 100% coverage happen when you can start a project that way with the buy in of everyone on it. That is only likely to happen when everyone is familiar with TDD and