
Becoming Foolish - matthewwarren
https://hmemcpy.com/2017/10/becoming-foolish/
======
bad_user
Nice article.

One thing I'm noticing is that I have less and less time to learn and explore.

Between the work projects, the open-source projects of my spare time, family
life and the entertainment I need to keep some sanity, I can't seem to find
the time or the focus necessary for expanding my knowledge.

I still do a lot of learning, but as I suspect that most of you are doing, the
learning I'm doing is only incremental and in small dozes. This means that I
end up rejecting solutions that invalidate my prior knowledge, because those
require a leap of faith and resources that I don't have.

Maybe this is what growing old feels like — experience and responsibilities
ends up getting in the way of learning.

I do feel the need to become foolish again.

~~~
criddell
Time is fixed and the things we want to learn is expanding. I'm not sure how
to deal with that. For me, there's a real tension between breadth and depth
and finding the sweet spot between the two is hard.

~~~
ericmcer
This perfectly describes my learning dilemma. If you have a niche job like in
the article (visual studio extensions) your skill-set may be narrow enough to
easily expand upon and gain depth in a new area. If you are a full stack
developer at a small company the breadth of stuff you need to know and learn
is such that it seems impossible to master new things.

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cannam
A lovely post. The Haskell-I/O-inspired brainflip is very nicely described.

I've never been a Haskell programmer, but a thing that struck me about the
Idris book (which is mentioned in one of the comments on that post) is its
very calm introduction to monadic I/O in terms of the separation between
evaluation and execution - which the author of the book (and developer of
Idris) manages without using the word monad, I assume deliberately.

There are a lot of appealingly surprising things in Idris. Other languages
that have given me that "oh...!" feeling in the further past include Prolog
and term-rewriting languages like Pure (and to an extent TeX).

~~~
lopatin
The Idris book is awesome. Also, Liquid Haskell is awesome, if Idris is too
painful.

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ijustdontcare
That's why in germany the first course in the first semester of CS teaches you
three things: imperative programming, functional programming and logical
programming. That way you can choose your favorite programming paradigm early
on in your career and don't get surprised and wonder what would have been if
you found it earlier in your career. I hope other countries teach programming
like that as well

~~~
sonnk
I have the impression that people tend to turn to functional programming after
spending a lot of time in imperative programming and seeing its downsides.

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J-Kuhn
This remembers me of the Blub paradox from "Beating the average" [1] from Paul
Graham.

Learning new ways how to express things is never bad.

[1]: [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

------
away2017throw
Don't learn languages - learn pure paradigms. I can write C# three different
ways - imperative procedural, functional, imperative OOP.

~~~
collyw
I have seen imperative / OOP Python written in the style of Java. It's not
great.

~~~
ben174
Relevant video: Stop Writing Classes

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0)

~~~
collyw
Thats the nice thing about a mixed paradigm language, you can use the features
when appropriate.

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alt2501
It's not clear exactly which video gave the paradigm shift...can anyone
enlighten me?

~~~
kobeya
It is explicitly named in the article.

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YPCrumble
There has to be a better way of stopping people from upvoting with alt
accounts, or emailing a listserve asking for upvotes.

One way would be to make sure the article generates good discussion. There are
no comments on this article other than complaints that it's on the front
page...

~~~
matthewwarren
(Genuine Question) Is an article only considered good if it generates a large
discussion?

What about if people read it, found it thought provoking, but didn't have
anything to add, to discuss?

~~~
noelwelsh
I agree. I thought this was a great article and don't have much to add. Is
there any evidence there is vote rigging in action here.

~~~
tenaciousDaniel
Same. I upvote all the time but rarely comment.

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oferzelig
This item has 6 points and is number #6 on Hackernews' homepage. The fuck?

~~~
Maakuth
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
see "How are stories ranked?"

~~~
dang
Right, when the stories on the front page are older that time factor dilutes
their high scores, giving lower-score but newer posts an advantage.

~~~
jaggederest
I think it would be interesting to display the derivative of votes with
respect to time, or a Wilson score or something. I assume there are good
reasons why you don't, but nonetheless it interests me.

