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aquilax
aquilax.avtobiografia.com
 (5y ago)

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake. Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.” Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate. Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both. Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly re- moved from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.) Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming? | Hacker News

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pbat.ch
 (6y ago)

rx pixel editor looks seen on HN today looks interesting to me (and the sort of thing I’ve wanted to build), but the vulkan support seems like overkill. Also, my graphics cards drivers are broken on Alpine, so the program probably won’t run. trying anyways.

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www.lord-enki.net
 (7y ago)

CS programs encourage the idea (already common among students) that software engineers are professionals. First contact with the industry demonstrates that to the extent that folks have grown since graduation, its in their ability to delay the inevitable collapse of ugly hacks.

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www.lord-enki.net
 (7y ago)

People become what they can imagine becoming, & access to tools has as much to do with this as representation. If it’s easy to fall into programming accidentally, then it’s easy to imagine yourself programming regularly.

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www.lord-enki.net
 (7y ago)

Every computer program is also a persuasive essay & a work of interactive performance art, and if you don’t consider it through those lenses when writing it you run the risk of persuading people of something you don’t agree with.

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www.lord-enki.net
 (7y ago)

Bad idea of the day: plan 9 from whitespace, a full implementation of plan9 in an extended version of the whitespace programming language, which ships with a printed copy of the source code (a blank notebook)

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nblade
nblade.sdf.org
 (7y ago)

I love it. I have a program that needs to processing about half a million records, which will take 3 days. The database that all those records are suppose to go to is acting up after I’ve just done 140K records.

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