Crockford on JavaScript - Section 8: Programming Style & Your Brain
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as an entertaining, insightful talk about the nature of programming, with memorable lines about programmers and a refreshing slide style.
What it is
Douglas Crockford's YUIConf 2011 keynote on why programming style matters, particularly in JavaScript. He draws on science about the brain and shows how tools like JSLint help.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2014 to 2015.
What Hacker News said
Recommends Perseids · 2014-03 · on “PowerPointless: Digital slideshows are the scourge of higher education”
> A straightforward lecture delivered directly from a powerpoint is not automatically a bad thing. It might not be bad in itself and if you do it right it can be as good or better than a presentation without the material that is read aloud. But at the same time you are wasting the potential of a presentation that is solely meant to help the attendee/listener along and to drive home the important points or even to just use it as a rhetoric device . As an extreme example, look at this presentation: [this video] [1]. Most of the time his slides do not even contain a summary of what he talks about but just the headline or the punchline. And I find his style very refreshing. If you really want to have
Recommends tejohnso · 2015-05 · on “Gut Feelings: The “Second Brain” in Our Gastrointestinal Systems”
Douglas Crockford has a great talk that touches on the head-gut connection and how it relates to programming. "We could not program without our gut. I have absolutely no evidence to justify that statement. But my gut tells me it's true, so I believe it." [this video]
Recommends myth_buster · 2015-05 · on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks”
Douglas Crockford touches on this aspect in this entertaining and insightful talk [0]. I'm guilty of what you state and I think a large part of "programming" is rudimentary boiler plate coding/configuration and staring into the Abyss. I think our role will be to design algorithms and come up with creative solutions/hacks (which would be difficult for a program) and designing a workflow/flow chart and feeding it into a program which spits out binaries and flag for edge cases. A whole swat industries and economies (read outsourcing) will become redundant and only outsourcing done would be to the generator. [0]: [this video]
Cites ggreer · 2014-02 · on “500 days – the longest streak on GitHub?”
Wow, that's impressive! My streak is a mere 416 days so far: [LINK] I think the most important thing is that you must want to do it. Without an innate desire, it would require inhuman willpower to maintain such a streak. That said, it does get easier over time. Once you get into the habit of doing at least a little work every day, the streak comes pretty naturally. I say "want" and not "like" because wanting and liking are not the same thing. I usually find myself frustrated and annoyed by code, but for some reason I keep coming back. I think most programmers are weird in that respect. As Douglas Crockford says: I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this w
Cites ggreer · 2014-03 · on “I Didn’t Want To Lean Out”
I think the exact opposite is true: Programming is more scientific than most science. A biologist often spends months experimenting before invalidating a hypothesis. A programmer's hypotheses are proven wrong dozens of times a day. By failing so quickly and often, we build mental models of code that closely correspond to reality.[1] Also, our experimental apparati are more powerful than anything in the analog world. We have debuggers that can stop time and examine every aspect of a running process. No other field gets such tools. In fact, I'm not sure I'd feel safe if other fields had debuggers. The chemistry-equivalent of a debugger is molecular nanotech. The physics-equivalent is omnipoten
Cites ggreer · 2014-12 · on “You can't dig upwards”
> But when does this grief stop? It doesn't, but we get used to it. I take the same view as Douglas Crockford: I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this work. A normal person, once they’ve looked into the abyss, will say, “I’m done. This is stupid. I’m going to do something else.” But not us, ‘cause there’s something really wrong with us. [1] I'm pretty sure this "brokenness" can be trained, but tossing someone in the deep end is not the way to do it. 1. From Programming Style & Your Brain: [this video]