Programming Thread

My programming "achievements" were like this:

• Learning the commands of my first programming language.
• Learning the concepts of "if-when-else" and "while".
• Using functions to manage programs with more than dozen lines.
• Using multiple files to manage programs with more than dozen functions.
• Realizing the importance of writing good documentation.
• Cooperating with other people on the same project.
• Using directories and projects to manage programs with more than dozen files.
• Realizing the importance of reading the specification.
• Learning design patterns.
• Realizing the importance of using the right tools for the job.
• Learning refactoring.
• Testing my code.
• Seeing my code as a web of functionality, instead of a list of text files.
• Learning a few new programming languages, and using parts of their style in other languages.
• Designing architecture of a large project.
• Leading other people in a project. (not completed yet)
• Keeping focus on Getting Stuff Done. (not completed yet)

Each one of them could be a topic for a separate discussion. Some of them have this zen-like aspect that you first learn about a concept (e.g. object-oriented programming) and you use it everywhere; then at some moment you start to understand where it provides value and where it does not, and then you use it less. Stuff that once felt like the essence of programming gradually becomes just another tool in the box, to be used or replaced when necessary: you don't have to use this specific library, this specific programming language, or this specific programming style.

The "social" skills (cooperating, leading), are not programming per se, but they will force you to use the other skills more carefully, because every mistake will hurt you tenfold.

Things that helped me:

• Learning about formal languages at university. I would probably never learn it alone, because it seems so abstract. Most self-taught programmers don't learn this. But for a certain kind of problems (text processing: parsing data files, evaluating expressions, interpreting or compiling a language) it gives you the magical skill of looking at the problem and almost instantly seeing that "this problem belongs to this category of problems, and these are the standard tools to solve it; the tools for a different category would fail because so and so".

• Learning different programming languages. The new languages introduce new concepts, but sometimes they show how the concepts which seemed essential in other languages can be avoided or done differently. -- I don't need line numbers outside of old versions of Basic. I don't have to make data type a part of the variable's name if I use static typing. The data types are not only for the compiler to determine the variable size in bits, but they can describe the meaning of the value. I don't have to use complicated variable names, if the scope of the variable is limited. In Java I use interfaces to describe what the class does, and extend classes to specify how. JavaScript and Lua allow object-oriented programming, and they don't even have classes. A function is just another type of value, and it can be stored in a variable. Functional languages do not even allow changing the value of a variable, and you still can do what you need. You can write a program to generate a program. You can make your own programming language. All Turing-complete languages are equivalent, so at the end what really matters is the convenience of use.

• Reading the original documentation, as soon as you are able to understand it. For information about HTML, read W3C specifications, and avoid w3schools. For information about Java, read Java Language Specification and tutorials made by Sun. Most online tutorials are written by people who don't really understand the topic, they just learned it yesterday, and today they are trying to make some fame and adsense money from sharing their confused thoughts. (Especially everything related to PHP. Also PHP itself.) If most programmers are on the level zero, there will be many level-one gurus, and level-two system architects.

A book that greatly improved my code was Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. It helped me understand things such as when code comments are appropriate and how to split code into well-factored functions. The book’s main flaw is that it’s sometimes hard to tell which of its advice is Java-specific and which is widely applicable. But I definitely still recommend it.

The author wrote another book, The Clean Coder, which is also about improving as a programmer. It’s not about coding well – it’s “a code of conduct for professional programmers”, and talks about things like when to say “no” to your boss, how to make a commitment, and how to estimate time for tasks. It was not as good as Clean Code, but it was helpful.

You can easily download ebooks of these from Google searches: Clean Code, The Clean Coder.

It seems to me that many of the people we see as great programmers are those who made their mark on a particular field of programming. So my answer would be, if you're already an okay programmer (can get hired at Google or a hedge fund), you could pick a subfield that intensely interests you, and just dive as deep as you can.

The reason most people don't do that is most jobs have a mismatch between what's interesting to you and what's useful to the employer. It's worth trying to minimize that mismatch and get encouragement from your employer somehow, though I have no idea how, it seems to mostly depend on luck.

There's http://norvig.com/21-days.html with provides a bunch of suggestions.

Otherwise getting better at programming is like getting better at anything. You need to spot patterns of suboptimal behavior.

Do code reviews with other people. Talk about whether the code is optimal and how it can be improved.

Paul Graham's writings on programming and learning Haskell leveled me up. Although i suspect you are already at that level.

Just more Euler problems will help, though they may not be optimal. Around problem 50, brute force stops being a viable option, and you have to start referencing wikipedia and, sometimes, the resources wikipedia lists. By the time you reach 100, the problems start getting genuinely hard (for me, they may not get hard until significantly after that for you). See if you can solve each problem with paper and pencil before you even create a program, or, if you must create a program, use it to test a hypothesis instead of to find the answer.

For bonus points, try to get your algorithms down to one second of running time once you get a working algorithm.

Disclaimer: I myself have only been programming for about a year, and while I have been told I write very good code by my manager, I'm still an amateur

This seems like it'd be better as a wiki page than a Discussion post.

Wikis aren't great for discussion or Q&A. The list of resources could go there though.

Consideration: Many more people regularly check the discussion feed than look at the wiki page.

A workaround could be having the actual discussion post in the wiki, but announcing it here.

This seems like it'd be better as a wiki page than a Discussion post.

I put the links from the article here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Programming_resources

I think it would be best as a sticky, in some sort of "more permanent/ongoing" threads category. Do we have something like that on the wiki?

I associate Yosefk's nomad programmers with maximizing the amount of program you can hold in your head, since you don't find working very closely with other people very productive. This gets you weird super-expressive languages like Lisp and Haskell in favor of things like Java or C++, which have the forced common idiom and interface conventions to help collaboration between multiple developers. This gets you different types of culture, with the nomad programmers making small works that can get arbitrarily tricky and impressive, while the settler programmers do less idiosyncratic work in order to keep being able to talk to each other, and build the stuff that's eating the world by the sheer volume of output they can collectively manage.

This interfaces a bit oddly with Yegge's language taxonomy. By this idea, the solo programmers prefer languages that let them do clever stuff in a small number of lines. This works both in very statically typed languages like Haskell and very dynamically typed ones like Perl. While there are similarly languages like Java (designed for peons) and PHP (designed badly) that programmers often avoid if given the choice.

The interesting bit in Hanson's post is the idea that while everyone cares about fairness, liberty and care, only farmers also strongly care about loyalty, respecting authority and respecting sanctity. The group hierarchy virtues only make sense in projects that require cooperation from multiple people, and possibly hierarchies of teams operating under a managing authority. These kind of groups can also use sanctity norms like syntax formatting conventions to keep it easier for different people to work on all parts of the project.

Learning and using an actual language is important in that it will give you much a tighter feedback loop than just learning about the concepts abstractly or through pen-and-paper.

Python is the most commonly recommended programming language for those who want to learn the basics. Learn Python the Hard Way is often recommended as a beginner's learning source. I haven't tried it myself (I already know how to program) but it looked reasonable when I gave it a skim.

I mostly agree with ShardPhoenix. Actually learning a language is essential to learning the mindset which programming teaches you.

I find it's easiest to learn programming when I have a specific problem I need to solve, and I'm just looking up the concepts I need for that. However, that approach only really works when you've learned a bit of coding already, so you know what specific problems are reasonable to solve.

Examples of things I did when I was learning to program: I wrote programs to do lots of basic math things, such as testing primality and approximating integrals. I wrote a program to insert "literally" into sentences everywhere where it made grammatical sense. I used regular expressions to search through a massive text file for the names of people who were doing the same course as me. Having the goal made it easier to learn the syntax and concepts.

Programming is about processing data automatically. You could do a "programming without a computer" if you have something else to process the data. For example, humans.

Giving commands to humans could be an analogy to programming. The analogy would work best if we ignore the human-specific stuff (e.g. how to motivate them) and focus on the large task.

For example, in an alternative universe without computers, you could be a director of a new library. You have received one million new books; they are in unsorted heaps in the next building. Your goal is to make a system where it is easy to find a book by title, and if possible, also by author's name. It should be possible to later add or remove books. The work of your employees costs money, and the total costs of running the library should not be unnecessarily large.

This is almost like making a program. You have to design data structures (where do you put the books? will you also use some notes on paper? what notes? how will the papers be organized?) and program (instructions for your employees: the initial book import, finding a book, adding a book, removing a book). You have to make estimates about complexity of the program (how many man-days will you need for one million books? if you have twice as much employees, can you make it happen twice faster? for two million books, would your costs double?).

Databases predate computers. I don't have good examples for other programming concepts.

I have also designed a lesson for children to teach the skills of "being specific", "following instructions literally" and "designing instructions to be followed literally". They had a chess-board and a small toy which could be put on some square and face a certain direction. They had paper cards with commands "go forward", "turn left" and "turn right". The task was to create a list of commands which would make the toy get from a starting position (e.g. B3, facing north) to an end position (e.g. D5, facing north). They arranged the list of paper commands next to the chess-board. Then they switched places with a classmate and tested their commands. But I did not measure if this lesson really increased their skills.

It depends on how much programming knowledge you currently have. If you want to just learn how to program, I recommend starting with Python, or Haskell if you really like math, or the particular language which lets you do something you want to be able to do (eg Java for making simple games, JavaScript for web stuff). Erlang is a cool language, but it's an odd choice for a first language.

In my opinion as a CS student, Python and Haskell are glorious, C is interesting to learn but irritating to use too much, and Java is godawful but sometimes necessary. The other advantage of Python is that it has a massive user base, so finding help for it is easier than for Erlang.

If I were you, I'd read Learn Python the Hard Way or Learn You a Haskell For Great Good- the second of those is how I started learning Haskell.

If you're studying a language to learn from it, then the choice of language depends on what you want it to teach you.

Erlang and Haskell are similar languages, and mostly teach the same things: purely applicative (“functional”) programming and high-order (also called “functional”) programming. Erlang also teaches message-passing concurrency and live patching; Haskell also teaches laziness and modern static typing. I've found Haskell more educational than Erlang, possibly because more of the things it teaches were new to me, possibly because I've done more with it, and possibly because it has more to teach. (But it is more complex.) Haskell is also more popular and has more libraries. IIRC you're a mathematician or at least math-inclined, so you'd be comfortable with Haskell's very mathematical culture.

Of the “employable languages”:

• C teaches low-level data representations and efficiency concerns, and how to deal with unsafe tools. These are all things a programmer needs to know, and C itself is very widely used, so it's almost essential for a professional programmer to learn, but not for someone who only writes programs as an aid to other things. (Your blog suggests you already know some C.)
• C++ is very complex, and most of what it teaches is C++-specific and not very enlightening, so I don't recommend studying it unless you need to use it.
• Java is simple (except for its libraries) and not very enlightening. If you know C and Haskell, you know 3/4 of the important parts.
• I don't know MATLAB. This is the second time I've heard it described as practically useful, so I suppose I should look into it.

Let me try again: has anyone had any experience e.g., building something with Erlang?

I don't need a compare/contrast of feature sets or textbook recommendations; I want to know what it was like doing something with it.

Is MATLAB particularly employable? I wouldn't have guessed that.

In ascending order of resolution:

• There are a lot of quicker ways to set up a website -a lot of hosting solutions come with one sort of web designer, or another; you can be up&running with a general blogger account in 2 minutes. If you have a specific end-goal (eg. moving inventory) in mind, this'll give you disproportionally quicker bang for your time.

• Depending on what your goals are, the primary challenges of websites might not be the technical details, but rather clear communication & value presentation. If you have a goal, articulate it in writing first.

With that said...

• Knowing HTML allows you to create static websites; CSS gives you fine-grained control over presentation; Javascript (and specifically, JQuery) allows you to create client-side (in-browser) interactions. You can get through these without the understanding of CS basics (for JS specifically, there are a lot of online collections for scripts, etc)

• Web-specific domain languages (php, python, ruby) gives you server-side capabilities (storing & querying data, generating dynamic pages, business logic). More assembly required, and this needs some CS fundamentals.

In short: it depends on whether you see this website&programming as an instrumental goal towards something larger, or as a terminal goal towards "being a better website creator". Hope this makes sense.

Depends what kind of website.

Read Learn Python the Hard way. It teaches python, plus has a big extended example for buildign a website.