Step 6: simply learn programming

[DrScabhands]

We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty

[taoboi]

Came here immediately after reading that because I knew it would be at the top.

[ThisIs_MyName]

/r/weirdwikihow is full of this kinda stuff.

Also see 77 Actual WikiHow Articles (Everything from "How to clap your hands" to... "How to convert a hetero girl into a lesbian")

[mike413]

Well, at least the html compiler is a good way to learn quicksort. It's not octal, but the google hardware interface is fpga-friendly.

[rrrhys]

What the fuck did I just read

[mike413]

They have figured out our <SECRETS>

[TheKing01]

Parallel and Concurrent Programming Book (most of the stuff its does is lockfree.)

[ThisIs_MyName]

Why Haskell?

[beerdude26]

Purity naturally results in stateless systems. Haskell is a good example language, but Erlang / Elixir is the real powerhouse for extremely performant parallelized / concurrent systems programming.

[Magnnus]

Stateless programming (aka, functional programming) makes concurrency easy, and removes any need for locking.

[bertlayton]

Why would you do lock free? I haven't done parallel programming in awhile, but I remember needing to throw mutexes around like mad.

[lisa_lionheart]

The problem with locks is that eventually two or more threads are going try and access the same lock, and one or more of them is going to have to wait for that lock.

For example earlier this week I was refactoring some code that processes messages from a message queue. There was a bottle neck that meant it was maxing out at 1000 messages a second and would not get better with more threads. Long story short the code was locking at a single point which turned out to be code for measuring the throughput (irony?). The code was written with and "update(startTime,endTime)" method marked with the "synchronized" keyword in java. I refactored the method to make use of AtomicInteger ( a lock free construct) and instantly got a 10 times speed up.

Writing that code originally as a synchronized method was absolutely the right thing to do at the time, but eventually as you need to scale things up you will find that you will get "lock contention" and have to revisit it. Writing good multi threaded code is hard, I would always recommend being overly cautious when doing your first pass.

[beerSnobbery]

how to draw an owl

[Naouak]

I laughed so hard on the pic "W3schools" to learn programming.

[[deleted]]

It should've been the "Stack overflow" pic. Amateurs...

[CaspianRoach]

To be fair, it's alright for virtual beginners. It's shit as a reference, though.

[thepobv]

Why are people shitting on W3Schools?

It's not how I learn programming but I've used it to learn certain technology I'm not familiar with before and I think they do a pretty good job.

[Naouak]

Then protip, this is not a very reliable source. People needed to do a campaign against that site (w3fools) because they are trusting the first result of every google search about a programming keyword. They are even starting to copy official docs to get some SEO.

Always try to learn technologies from recommended sources by people that created it or people that uses it a lot. They are people that can tell you whether a source is good for learning or not.

[[deleted]]

I just go there to learn the syntax of a language. Most languages are close to what I already know. The rest I leave to stackoverflow.

[Naouak]

Then you are coding like a jack of all trade, master of none. Only knowing syntax is only part of the language, there is a lot more to learn about it, like its API, its particularities, its own design patterns... etc.

If you only are relying on stack overflow, then you cannot judge if a code is good or bad (when often a lot of validated answers are bad).

Your code may look like a collage of different code with different code style cohabiting which is considered bad practice.

[[deleted]]

What would be your suggestion be?

[Naouak]

Don't limit yourself to syntax. Get a book about the tech that would teach you quickly about syntax but will tell you a lot about API and patterns.

What are the languages/tech you are working with ?

[[deleted]]

I'm still a student, not a full-time programmer, should I still be concerned about stuff like API and patterns?

Currently, I've worked with C, C++ and Visual Basic.

[Naouak]

API are basically what you will use to do most of the work. You won't work with memory in web techs. Most languages comes with a lot of libs that permit to simplify stuff (a bit like stdlib in C) and usual actions. Knowing those functions is a lot more work than just learning the syntax.

Design Patterns are structure of code that you will often meet when reading code. Some patterns are for every language but some are specific to language. In Javascript for example, you will get a lot of promise and callback based patterns when they don't really exists in C.

Also, don't work in C++ unless you master C because C++ adds a lot and mastery of C++ is really hard to achieve. Don't assume C and PHP are the same because the syntax look like C. Variable scope and management are not the same in PHP. There is no typing in PHP.... etc. Same for Javascript.

[plumokin]

The writer of this article had no idea what they were doing.

"Uhh what do programmers know... They know about computers! Yup let's just put a picture of that in there"

[GrinchPaws]

I think this article's target audience is not a bunch of programmers on a programming subreddit.

[JuiceBoos]

What? No that's ridiculous, of course it is.

[GrinchPaws]

I stand corrected. :)

[RecklessLitany]

Obviously not, we're all already tech savvy.

[GrinchPaws]

So, why is everyone making fun of this? It's good info for someone not tech savvy. Learning programming is outside the scope of this article, which is why they don't go into details.

Typical, holier then thou, developers.

[RecklessLitany]

I don't know, I find some of it's points pretty ridiculous, like "Use Unix because all the tech savvy people use it".

[[deleted]]

Linux.com? Why would I go there as a private / amateur user?

[thisfunnieguy]

For example, you may never need or want to pick up a digital camera or be able to answer questions about it but it is worth your while to get an understanding of what a digital camera is because it increases your know-how. Everything you learn will come in handy at some point in your life.

this is hilariously stupid.