One Thing Done Well; Or, The Two Reasons Why Programming Seems Scary

There are two road bumps, when looking into programming at some depth.

One is that being able to program everything, feels like having no structure.

Which will result in a blob, rather than a program.

When you take a class in college, you will generally be assigned a blob.

A mix of ideas, that create an abomination window of program.

The solution to this, is to become an elitist.

Raise your eyebrows, and look down at mortals.

Do one thing, and do it well.

Not everything, just one thing.

Example of such a things would be, not even a full window.

But a task tray popup, popped-up by a program that scrapes your news-sites.

You'd just copy somebody else's scraper, until you were ready to code one yourself.

So the a topic you are interested in appears, you get a popup.

There is very litter complexity here, you are just doing one thing and doing it well.

I have an example for you, a beautiful tiny program called dat.gui

It it just a little box that pops up, in the top right corner of the web page.

That allows you to adjust something, with sliders, check-boxes, and drop-downs.

One thing, one thing, done well.

Doing one thing well, is an example of wild-wild-west programming.

You set the rules, you decide what is right.

No one may question you, and no one will.

Because your program is complete, done, one thing done! well.

Beyond this is the second bump, this is where you put your cowboy hat away.

And put on a nice suit, with belt and suspenders.

And of course, I don't have to mention the pocket protector.

The key word here is: GROK.

I can't remember if groking is from, Stranger in Strange Land or Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy.

I am sure it is not from Neuromancer, or the wordy Cryptonomicon, Woe To House.

I let you listen to those, and figure it out.

To grok is to understand something so well, that you become one with it.

This is a big deal with programming, this is something that will really help you:

Please understand, that past wild wild west...

Everyone follows well defined patterns, some are recent like the extremely costly Large Language Models.

And some are mean for desperate times, where programming languages were primitive.

Fast, clean, sharp, yes, but to the point of bullying the coder a bit.

Be a good language, a coder would say.

And then the company would go out of business, because their software was so buggy, so bloated.

That while it worked, it would drain phone battery, and make browsers constantly hack-able.

Just now one of those letter agencies, mentioned, "Hey, you know, have your memory managed for you."

Because doing it by hand, introduces bugs, looking back, they would say:

The languages that pampered the programmer, caused less memory leaks and arbitrary code execution exploits.

It matters not how beautiful, powerful, or advantageous the language in the moment.

What matters is, that 30 years from now, the apps are still safe to run.

The patterns come from the old world, but are made much cleaner today.

we are talking about, groking, Software Design Patterns.

Not an easy task, since they are optimized for the old world.

And need to be reinvented, in un-typed memory safe languages, like JavaScript.

Now, now, don't say "Up until the moment he mentioned JavaScript", and certainly not when slinging TypeScript.

Remember, Embrace, Extend, Enshitificate, and Extinguish, the other gang of four.

Stick to the mainstream, don't deviate to bastad remakes.

Atom editor had a lot of CoffeeScript, and to this day, even after it was abandoned, it is still disgusting.

It went from coffeescript to typescript, I am using Pulsar edit to write this.

But I really just want to code my own editor, under Electron, or just any browser engine, there is never time.

If you keep to the center, stay with JavaScript.

And learn all the design patters, not just from the Gang Of Four...

But from all the good little ideas everywhere, you will neither be scared nor confused.

You will not deviate far, from all the most powerful patterns.

Yes, you can code anything, but only what you code with the most powerful patters, will last.

Here, developing is no longer scary, the pattern sets everything up.

The mechanism is just so good, that it beats all the other ideas.

You see how that works, once you figure out what the patterns are.

You'll just use those, and never be intimidated by the infinity of choice.

Sprinkle in some, do one thing, do it well, and you'll have yourself an application going.