how do u program? 😅

Saw this on Hacker News, and…um, wow.

Don’t mean to dunk on this one poster, but I’m just sort of dumbfounded by the seeming lack of understanding the fundamentals of how to do programming. Like, OK, I’ll bite!

“generate new modules/classes in your projects”

Most frameworks just have a one-liner CLI command to do this? Or honestly I just copy’n’paste a few lines from an existing file and tweak? This is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. (And if it’s not…get a better framework??)

“integrate module A into module B or entire codebase A into codebase B?”

I’ve been refactoring modules since the dawn of time at this point, I don’t really think about it? It’s just sort of the basics. As for the second question, I have no idea what that means. I think if you’re trying to merge two separate codebases, you have a much larger problem on your hands than anything related to code per se.

“get someones github project up and running on your machine, do you manually fiddle with cmakes and npms?”

I’m not a big Docker fan, but I thought that’s what it’s for? docker compose up 😅
or just spin up a lightweight VM and walk through INSTALL.md 🤷🏻‍♂️

“convert an idea or plan.md or a paper into working code?”

That, I believe, is called programming.

“Fix flakes, fix test<-›code discrepancies or increase coverage etc”

That, I believe, is called programming.

“If you do all this manually, why?”

Because I’m…a programmer? 🤔🤔

Look, all snarkiness aside, I get why this stuff is hard for newbies. Of course it feels easy to me, I’m a domain expert…so how dare I gatekeep and criticize new tools which make it less complicated?!

Au contraire mon frère! 😂

I am desperately wanting programming to get easier! I wrote about this years ago, in fact.

https://www.spicyweb.dev/zero-boilerplate/

It saddens me that at every opportunity, the industry seems to relish in overly complexifying (if that’s a word!) architectures, infrastructures, and best practices; then reaching for the ultimate cop-out by claiming we’ll just get “AI” to solve those problems for us. RATHER THAN doing the harder yet cleaner work of actually designing better languages, libraries, frameworks, code editors, and the rest.

All that to say, I’m not upset with the OP. I’m sure they mean well. I just think those questions reveal a damning indictment of the state of our industry right now.

TL;DR: folks in the know, roll your sleeves up and make better tools. Don’t hide the bad ones with more bad ones (aka the slop machines!).