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0 pointscurious163y ago0 comments

Mine is not an interesting "problem" generally speaking. But, to me, it is a problem because I haven't solved it yet.

I am on the journey of learning computer science and programming on my own from awesome books and resources available out there.

I came across this article by Peter Norvig: https://norvig.com/21-days.html after I read his code of a spell checker: https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html. I was mesmerized by the code itself. It is so clean as if it is speaking to me. No series of spaghetti statements making me cringe just at the sight of it. I want to be able to achieve that skill. That is my project/problem if you can say so. In college I was studying electrical engineering when I was taught programming in C using a very bad book and I hated coding after that. Now, I am gradually beginning to see the beauty in it. It is just prose. Prose can be bad and excellent. I was taught bad prose that's why I dislike it.

I hope to become an elegant and useful programmer one day and build things that are useful to people.

If you have any particular resource in mind that can help me in my journey, don't forget to suggest some in the replies.

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Chirono3y ago· 1 in thread

That code is written in a very declarative, functional style. Haskell is a language that forces you to write code like that, so might be a worth a look if your goal is to write ‘pretty’ code.

However, I’d also add that becoming an “elegant” and “useful” programmer are often at odds with each other. It’s very easy to spend so much time trying to make your code pretty with the perfect abstractions that you never actually finish anything.

If your goal is to be useful and productive then learning by writing a lot of code in a lot of different languages, styles and code based might serve you better than focussing on beautiful source code. Though if you can do both, then please do!

curious16OP3y ago

Thanks for the suggestion. Will keep that in mind. I understand that too much perfection can be a roadblock to progress.

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