
Interview with Andy Hunt, Coauthor of the Pragmatic Programmer - bodiam
http://bestprogrammingbooks.com/interview-andy-hunt-coauthor-pragmatic-programmer-journeyman-master/
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rmason
Spoke with him in the early days of his company about an order. Very chill guy
and Pragmatic Programmer has had as much effect on me as I work day by day as
any book.

I look at the book as a benchmark on how far along you are in the programming
journey. I'm fond of saying young coders will agree with 50% of the book and
reject the rest. But the more experience they get the more they agree with it.

I've re-read it a few times and still disagree with 2% of it so I guess that
is good as it means I still have room to grow;<).

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tobltobs
Not too much interesting stuff in this interview apart of this:

    
    
        I hate languages that introduce accidental complexity
        such as JavaScript—what a nightmare of pitfalls for 
        newbies and even seasoned developers.

~~~
bodiam
To make the next one better, what kind of questions would you like to see?

~~~
3am_hackernews
Not the OP, but something a bit more open ended and allowing interesting
answers (IMHO):

\- If you had to design a programming language, what would be some of the
decisions you would make?

\- (Since he lists things such woodworking, fiction writing, etc.) How has
programming influenced your life?

\- If you had to write another book, what would it be on?

\- What do you think about the general state of interviews (programming
related positions) in the industry?

\--

Other non-question comment:

\- UX/Usability/Readability, layout, font selection of you website is really
poor. Please make it easier for the readers (e.g.
[https://blog.ycombinator.com/chris-slowe-
interview](https://blog.ycombinator.com/chris-slowe-interview))

~~~
bodiam
Hi, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. Will take your questions into
account for the next interview.

Regarding the UX/etc, is is that bad? Any suggestions to improve? I'm not sure
if the ycombinator is that much better to be honest, but I might be missing
something, and I'm open for improvements!

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aecorredor
Damn, almost all of his next projects involve elixir:

"Writing Elixir and Phoenix code to manipulate MIDI in real time

Expand my Halloween project of multiple Raspberry Pi’s, Arduino, pneumatics,
audio and effects to a full-blown Elixir/Phoenix/OTP demonstration.

Revise my book Pragmatic Thinking & Learning

Maybe a top-secret project or two.."

~~~
hew
Just such a joy to write both syntactically and conceptually.

I wrote C to get through school. I wrote PHP to hack CRUD web apps. I write JS
because it's ubiquitous and I'm required to. I write Elixir because I love to
do it.

~~~
ams6110
Did you come to Elixr from Ruby or Erlang? Or neither?

I learned a bit of Erlang first, and never really found a taste for Elixir's
syntax. Can't say that I've really used it beyond tinkering though.

~~~
digitalzombie
Elixir's syntax is much easier compare to Erlang's prolog inspired syntax.

I think anybody coming from any C inspired language would take Elixir over
Erlang imo. Sure Erlang is a small language but the hump is much higher to get
over the syntax than in Elixir.

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mifreewil
> Programming is an inspirational activity best learned from reading books
> written by great authors.

Or by doing and reading others code.

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jamesdwi
why no mention of python? seems strange than any modern programmer to leave it
out.

~~~
AlexeyBrin
> why no mention of python? seems strange than any modern programmer to leave
> it out.

Maybe because Andy Hunt was more into Ruby than into Python. Not every
_modern_ programmer uses Python. From practical point of view Ruby and Python
are similar scripting languages. Python has an edge only if you need NumPy,
SciPy.

~~~
regulation_d
or anything having to do with NLP

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developerdanny
Well, that was disappointing.

~~~
bodiam
Thanks for the feedback. How can we improve it for next time?

~~~
GoodbyeEarl
Hey, I'm not an UX specialist but

    
    
      .entry p {
        margin-bottom: 1em;
        font-weight: 400;
        line-height: 25px;
        font-size: 16px;
      }
    

did the trick for me. I found it more pleasing to the eyes. BTW, nice
interview! ;)

~~~
bodiam
Added it! It indeed looks better. Not 100% sure about the line height, but
thanks for this!

~~~
GoodbyeEarl
NP. Glad I could help. :)

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virtuexru
Holy cow the font on this page is almost unreadable.

~~~
bodiam
Hi, thanks for the feedback. Which browser/os are you using?

