Well put. I wonder if a lot of this comes from classical piano players (which there seem to be a lot of, proportionally?) assuming that everyone who learns piano is necessarily aspiring to play those super difficult classical pieces one day. I've started picking up the piano with jazz in mind and it's hard to tell if a lot of the advice out there is spot on and I'm worse off for ignoring it, or if it's really just not relevant to me because I don't intend to play Bach or Mozart. A lot of it _feels_ irrelevant, but I hesitate to dismiss it when it's coming from people who are clearly a lot more experienced than I am.
This brings to mind something Ira Glass said about "the gap":
> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Couldn't this same reasoning be used to argue that we don't need for loops or functions because we have GOTOs? Boilerplate is tedious and error-prone to write and to read/understand in my experience.
For anyone else who happens by and has the same issue, vim had (has?) substandard syntax highlighting for javascript. Pulling in pangloss's vim-javascript (https://github.com/pangloss/vim-javascript) fixed that up for me. If you write JSX, you can pull in https://github.com/mxw/vim-jsx to get great highlighting for that too.
I wonder why text editor preferences are so personal. I use the same editor and probably 90% of the same config as this guy and was nodding along until I saw he remapped B and E. Horrifying! Those are fundamental motions.
Does learning about the Lambda calculus have any take-aways for programming in modern languages, or is it more of a cool toy/mostly of interest for language designers and academics?
Could anyone weigh in on his assessment of Martin Fowler's Refactoring book? I'm considering picking it up - some seem to be of the opinion that its ideas are old news in 2016 and there's not much to learn from it, others say there's still lots of useful information.
I had a similar problem working over a metered cellular data connection recently. One thing that helped a lot was the uBlock Origin extension for Chrome & Firefox, which has a feature that prevents automatically loading media elements over a certain size (say, 50kb). If you want to load a large image or video you can click to load it or turn the feature off on a per-site basis. Can use it in Firefox on an Android phone, too, since it has extensions.