Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

(norvig.com)

50 points | by vinhnx 2 days ago

3 comments

  • tomhow 2 hours ago
    Seen here once or twice before... :)

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    • zkmon 41 minutes ago
      Maybe an yearly ritual?
      • sunsetSamurai 18 minutes ago
        if you had started the guide on the first time it was posted, you'd be done by now!
  • markus_zhang 32 minutes ago
    From my experience, just to say the thing that many such articles never mentioned, because the author has the innate ability anyway:

    Seek mental stability, or whatever mental state that can push you to programming for 10 years without completely burning you out. If you can’t even do some programming after a relatively easy work day, you are burnt out.

    BTW ^ is my state nowadays.

  • MichaelMoser123 28 minutes ago
    Wasn't Claude supposed to do all the coding by now? Did we have a change of mind or did we run out of tokens?
    • crystal_revenge 10 minutes ago
      I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you?

      The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and teams that don't. I still think the former is a good approach... for now, but I don't expect this will necessarily be the case in a year (or less).

      This article was such an inspiration to me when I was younger, and the advice, for that time, was very correct. However seeing it today really drives home how big the gap is going to be in really understanding code in just a few more years.

      • eventualcomp 6 minutes ago
        Programming without writing, to me, feels like doing mathematics by reading proofs but not doing proofs. Which quite frankly works very poorly for me. I write code if, for nothing else, so that I can spot bad code/proofs with an easier time, rather than dealing with an equation that blew up in prod.
    • threethirtytwo 9 minutes ago
      The utility of this stuff is largely going away. It’s more just hobbyists now or old timers like me who actually “learned” programming.

      There are HS interns at my company who admire me because I lived through a time without AI and I actually had to learn that stuff. I’m not kidding.

    • LoganDark 11 minutes ago
      Was this known in 1998?