Is Programming Fun?
Monday • November 4th 2024 • 12:38:30 am
Programming is a language on top of your spoken language, it is not a language for people – it is a language for machines.
Both are equally important, being able to program, is as huge as being able to talk to other people and read books.
And learning programming today, is nothing like it used to be, just a few years ago, because today you have the AI.
There are three major sources of information, Video Tutorials that you just look at, text tutorials that you follow…
And AI, that you ask questions about off things, and learn terminology from.
The biggest thing about AI, is the code snippets, it will give you tiny delicious little bits that you just inhale and comprehend.
There are two hops you need to make before you can get comfy, setup your environment and get your foot through the door.
I recommend buying a $100 computer with Linux already on it, this is a class of low powered computers called SBC (single board computer)
And from here you just search the internet for how to install nodejs, and look for some nodejs boilerplate projects as you watch videos.
Ease of publishing is a huge and largely overlooked deal, rust, PHP, or the unwisely vilified C/C++ are hard to show off.
But if you begin your education with JavaScript, you can make web page experiments.
A code bin, especially a split screen code bin, is a great mad science project, it is a kind of a little live editor where you can share and program things.
Make it self editable, and you have an infinite complexity wiki going, a WikiWiki is also a great start, of course, here you don’t have to worry about exploits.
WikiWikis are more powerful than ever in the age of AI, as the AI can help you with your projects.
Personally, I’d love to write a code cookbook with the aid of AI, there is so much to JavaScript that a hundred is needed.
In my own code endeavors I returned to a silly garbage collector idea, where I have a setter called gc, and each time I assign a Signal listener to it.
The resulting unlisten function is pushed onto a garbage collector array, it is just this.gc = someSignal.subscribe() bad practice but redabe as heck.
This Friday I wrote a language parser, that parses a lot of things, JSON, JavaScrript, GraphQL, anything with brackets is game.
A programmer is just a watch maker, the pieces are tiny and big, and it is all so incredibly fun, stupid fun.
I honestly have not been bored since I was little, any time nothing is happening, I am either diagramming or going over code in my head.
Just now I pushed myself away from a gnarly templating engine, for my visual programming language.
In a year or so, I’ll be doing advanced interface design, based on Fantasy/Futuristic User Interfaces.
I must have written 10 visual programming languages, this one is the first where animation and state machines dictate the way.
I wrote this little wrapper for enveloping some distant HTML, and easily extracting HTML snippets for user interface work.
I left myself a TODO note, to make a caching mechanism, to speed up sea4rg for templates.
And at one point, I asked AI about parsing Document Fragments, and later showed it the code that I wrote – I like seeing it as a person.
And the AI took a quick look, and did my little TODO for me, I’ve never experienced anything like it, it just did it to be helpful.
Truly,, now is the age, to learn JavaScript, or as we should call it, ECMAScript, precisely because AI is so darn helpful.
In closing, the biggest thing about programming, is not a thing in the programming world.
I don’t know how to describe it well, so let me tell you a short story.
On my way to a cash register I passed by a father looking at Christmas toys, and I told him, just get him a computer, programming will change his life.
“While I’ve always been poor” – I added, “I have never been afraid of poverty.” I said with a tone of importance.
The man immediately understood, what I meant, and walked off deep in thought.
But you see, it is about finding strength, and pushing fear, about becoming overpowered, and extremely capable.
Some say that programming is a superpower, but those tend to be rational.
I think it is more like powerful magic, because it is a perfectly limitless power.