Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
78. You should not trust my opinion on Python.
The only reason I learned it at all was to write a few scripts on an open source Python IDE called Leo, which had cool way of organizing knowledge in a graph, again similar to @RoamResearch
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
79. I have zero personal experience writing Erlang
However, I CAN tell you that
- The What’s App team built a $1B company with 11 engineers using it.
- Joe Armstrong (a co-author) has some really incredible talks.
He even mentions Xanadu in this one
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
80. The Elm language has had a massive impact on the front-end web
There is now so so much information about Redux on the web I can’t find it, but original writeup from Dan Abramov on his inspirations for the architecture was a treasure trove, and he credited Elm for main ideas
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
81. Programmers have accents
2019-12-16
Not my experience — I’ve seen a lot of people break problems down differently depending on their first programming language. Imperative, Declarative, Functional, Object Oriented, Procedural, Logical
each has very diff style — programmers have accents from native tongue
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
82. Good Programming Languages are DEFINITELY NOT about “Thinking Like a Machine”
2019-12-16
None of the programming languages I mentioned teach you to think like a computer.
I’ve written a bit of C — where I have to think more in terms of memory management — but again, these offer very different paradigms for modeling the world, data, and action
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
83. Ivan Sutherland’s “SketchPad” is what we should have
Ability to do direct manipulation to get to general area you want to go, and then ability to adjust code to normalize and get pixel perfect.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YB3saviItTI…
2019-12-16
CSS vs direct manipulation is an interesting topic since CSS is good at things that DM is bad at. DM works great for making one thing look exactly the way you want, but it’s hard to have a DM interface to define global rules of how all elements should appear and behave
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
84. If a project not having recent commits on github makes you immediately think you cant use it, there is something fundamentally wrong in your language community.
Code shouldn’t rot.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
85. I haven’t actually figured out how to use generative testing (test.check in Clojure, QuickCheck in haskell)
But when I do… and it generates millions of test cases my functions… I know in my soul it will be truly glorious
2019-12-16
Only trust code that is checked by code :)
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-16
I’m so tempted to finish this out with Good Book / Bad Book opinions on learning various programming languages and be done, but I think I might pull a Venkat here and just wait till later in the week.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-17
Ok, some hot takes on programming language learning material
https://x.com/ArtirKel/status/1206492488468484102…
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-17
86. Yes, you can stitch together a huge amount of free online learning material to teach yourself a new language…
BUT
It will cost a huge amount of time and energy, and once there is a thing you KNOW you want to learn, it is often good to buy a course
2019-12-09
Some devs with pretty stacked resumes, but no Clojure experience have been asking me for some getting started resources for learning Clojurescript.
At Roam we use Reagent - a thin wrapper around React
This free course seems to cover basics + setup well
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-17
87. If you are on the bleeding edge of a new technology, or in an emergent language community, there will likely not be any courses available to hold your hand
This is the best guide on the web for teaching yourself rigorous academic subjects
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-17
88. It is ok for a big chunk of your personal budget to go toward your own education — and far far more cost and time effective to work outside of academia (DON’T GO TO GRAD SCHOOL)
There were months when I was in research mode where I spent about as much on books as on food.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-17
89. Textbooks are awesome. O’Reilly books are amazing.
The Joy of Clojure I remember as particularly good — but I at least skimmed probably every Clojure book I could find once I really got into it.
Check “The Best Textbooks on Every Subject”, buy one
https://lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject…