<story><title>Let&apos;s build an entire programming environment around Brainfuck</title><url>http://malone.cc/posts/lhbs_1.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>spacemanaki</author><text>Your comment really hit a nerve with me, probably because I&apos;m the same age as the OP and playing around with programming language implementations is a bit of a hobby for me, so I&apos;ll apologize for my reaction ahead of time, I tried to tone down what follows from the screed I initially wrote.&lt;p&gt;Your comment comes off as a little bit condescending and presumptuous. There&apos;s this underlying judgement about the relative worth of writing a Brainfuck interpreter and environment versus drinking in some bar in Guatemala or starting a company, like the latter is obviously a better use of time and energy. Aside from the fact that doing the things you mention aren&apos;t mutually exclusive with this little project, it&apos;s really tiring to hear (older) people constantly beat the drum of &quot;you&apos;re young! go travel! drink!&quot; on top of the &quot;start your own company!&quot; startup mantra. Maybe you wish you did more of those things when you were younger, or maybe you wish you were doing more of them now, and maybe I will wish the same thing when I&apos;m older...&lt;p&gt;But they are absolutely not for everyone. I think it&apos;s disingenuous to just throw out &quot;take that energy and try to build a company&quot; as an alternative. Not everyone has it in them to do all the schlep work required to succeed at their own startup, so why assume this person hasn&apos;t considered it and chosen not to follow that path? Furthermore, I would personally prefer to tinker with a Brainfuck implementation than spend any amount of time in any bar, even it&apos;s in Guatemala or Colombia. I usually find them noisy and unpleasant, and I would find &quot;partying the night away&quot; to be a boring waste of time. But I would never suggest someone &lt;i&gt;else&lt;/i&gt; shouldn&apos;t spend their time that way because that would be assuming a great deal about what&apos;s important to them.&lt;p&gt;Maybe this was just a little flip remark on your behalf, not meant to be taken seriously. I&apos;m probably projecting a little bit, and reacting to something you may not have intended to imply. For that, I apologize again.</text></item><item><author>melling</author><text>He&apos;s 27... As someone who&apos;s 47, I&apos;d like to say: take that energy and try to build a company, join a few start-ups, try to change the world, travel a lot, drink in some far away land, etc.  This place is a lot of fun :-): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cafenose.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cafenose.com/&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghshephard</author><text>On the flip side - I would say, 20+ years into a reasonably successful career in IT/Network Engineering, that one of the best uses of my time in the last couple decades was spending hundreds of hours grokking awk.  I&apos;ve had my share of travelling, socializing, and startups - but I certainly don&apos;t, for a second, regret my days and late weekend nights staring into the face of awk.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t know if this is a &quot;when you have a hammer, everything appears to be a nail&quot; - but I continually am shocked at how few of my six-figure salary colleagues in the IT industry (networking, unix, systems integration) are incapable of slicing and dicing a large text file and reporting on it.  Activities that take them the better part of  day in Excel, can sometimes be done in a few minutes with a fast awk script.&lt;p&gt;Knowing awk (and all the regex associated joy) has brought me (personally) great pleasure, and I&apos;ll die a happy man knowing the time I put into it was well spent.&lt;p&gt;We each have to find joy in life where we can.</text></comment>
<story><title>Let&apos;s build an entire programming environment around Brainfuck</title><url>http://malone.cc/posts/lhbs_1.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>spacemanaki</author><text>Your comment really hit a nerve with me, probably because I&apos;m the same age as the OP and playing around with programming language implementations is a bit of a hobby for me, so I&apos;ll apologize for my reaction ahead of time, I tried to tone down what follows from the screed I initially wrote.&lt;p&gt;Your comment comes off as a little bit condescending and presumptuous. There&apos;s this underlying judgement about the relative worth of writing a Brainfuck interpreter and environment versus drinking in some bar in Guatemala or starting a company, like the latter is obviously a better use of time and energy. Aside from the fact that doing the things you mention aren&apos;t mutually exclusive with this little project, it&apos;s really tiring to hear (older) people constantly beat the drum of &quot;you&apos;re young! go travel! drink!&quot; on top of the &quot;start your own company!&quot; startup mantra. Maybe you wish you did more of those things when you were younger, or maybe you wish you were doing more of them now, and maybe I will wish the same thing when I&apos;m older...&lt;p&gt;But they are absolutely not for everyone. I think it&apos;s disingenuous to just throw out &quot;take that energy and try to build a company&quot; as an alternative. Not everyone has it in them to do all the schlep work required to succeed at their own startup, so why assume this person hasn&apos;t considered it and chosen not to follow that path? Furthermore, I would personally prefer to tinker with a Brainfuck implementation than spend any amount of time in any bar, even it&apos;s in Guatemala or Colombia. I usually find them noisy and unpleasant, and I would find &quot;partying the night away&quot; to be a boring waste of time. But I would never suggest someone &lt;i&gt;else&lt;/i&gt; shouldn&apos;t spend their time that way because that would be assuming a great deal about what&apos;s important to them.&lt;p&gt;Maybe this was just a little flip remark on your behalf, not meant to be taken seriously. I&apos;m probably projecting a little bit, and reacting to something you may not have intended to imply. For that, I apologize again.</text></item><item><author>melling</author><text>He&apos;s 27... As someone who&apos;s 47, I&apos;d like to say: take that energy and try to build a company, join a few start-ups, try to change the world, travel a lot, drink in some far away land, etc.  This place is a lot of fun :-): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cafenose.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cafenose.com/&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Apocryphon</author><text>After all, this site is called Hacker News, not Startup Lifestyles.</text></comment>