Degree vs Self-Taught:
In my experience, people who are self-taught or who learned by experience tend to have odd gaps in their knowledge.
For example, the Shazam app. I knew right away it must be using Fourier analysis. But if one was self-taught, one might have never
WalterBright
1,320 posts
Engineer
Digital Mars, D Language Foundation
C, C++, D programming language compilers, and
Javascript compiler
Joined December 2008
- Someone asked on hackernews if a programmer's useful life is over at 35. I'm well into my 60's and am doing my best work yet. Code I wrote at 35 looks like complete crap to me today. I'm surprised it even worked.
- Replying to @LundukeJournalI would be fine with a review like that as I would then improve as a programmer
- Replying to @nettermikeI don’t think the japanese had the logistics to mount such an invasion
- Replying to @james_mtcGit is not an appropriate topic for a degree program. The underlying technology of it, however, would be.
- The claim on Hacker News today is that C++ is faster than C. But how can that be true if C is low level and can be hand optimized as good as anything? Here's my answer: Having written a great deal of C code, I made a discovery about it. The first algorithm and data structure
- Replying to @olafurwI wrote a C++ compiler and would rate mine optimistically as a 5
- My personal goal is to write code that is so straightforward that anyone looking at it would think "Pshaw, anyone could have written that!"
- There, I finally had the nerve to say it. Exception handling is a giant mistake. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281642…
- Why I write lexers and parsers by hand instead of using lex/yacc: lex and yacc gets your prototype up and running quickly, but there's a cost: 1. having to learn lex and yacc 2. running into limitations with lex and yacc 3. having a foreign program (i.e. lex and yacc)
- Replying to @Jack_FrodoA bird strike would break the cage sending metal debris into the engine along with the bird
- Bad programming ideas that only become apparent after years: 1. macros 2. implicit declaration of variables 3. operator overloading for non-arithmetic purposes 4. operator overloading for implicit casting
- C is a simple language. How many ways can I align something? Let me count the ways: 1. _Alignas(N) 2. __pragma(pack(N)) 3. __declspec(align(N)) 4. __attribute__(aligned(N)) 5. #pragma(pack(N)) Did I miss any? #programming #programminglanguages #compilers


