Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

True, mostly anyways, but nobody talks about the other side of the learn-how-to-program hill.

You can create anything. Anything. Want to write a database? Go ahead. Hack on a GPU, nothing is stopping you. Make a recommendation engine? Why not? A game? Trivial (to get started at least).

Once you know how to program (not just one language, some high level stuff and some systems stuff) and know the surrounding tools and communities around the languages sometimes you'll feel like all you want to work on is stuff that pushes your knowledge, even if you could easily make a Exec type of app that would make you more money than programming something that is new to you, like an operating system.

It is a strange situation.

You can remedy that by ditching whatever framework you use, and writing your applications at a lower level. From my experience, it is not going to be easy but the final result will be a lot simpler (and you will have lots of fun). Also, you will notice that far fewer patterns emerge than your framework try to impose on you.

What I'm talking about is beyond frameworks. I'm not a web developer, I'm a developer. For example: using scipy and numpy together to solve difficult statistics problems, rolling some stuff in C or cython to get speed boosts then pulling it together into an api by using tornado to service a rails app that needs some sort of on demand stats generation. Or programming an adrino. Or writing some mouse driving scripts, or using the SDL in C to make a game. Or whatever. Once you learn how to code to a certain degree you can do anything you want which is daunting because you don't only have a hammer. You have a tool chest and unlimited material to build whatever you want. Sure you could make cabinets (Rails apps for tabular data) which are easy and make good money, but you really want to make helicopters because that looks like a challenge, even though it will be harder and you will be in an environment you don't know how to handle.

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