<story><title>The Little Printf</title><url>http://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andars</author><text>Wow. I&amp;#x27;m a college student, but I still feel like a kid. This seems to pretty much sum up every reason I decided not to study computer science and make a career as a developer. I love computing, but I have just gotten tired of the billions of js frameworks and wars about how everything anyone tries to do is wrong. Little printf strikes too close to home. This is a fantastic piece of writing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0942v8653</author><text>&amp;gt; the billions of js frameworks and wars about how everything anyone tries to do is wrong&lt;p&gt;IMO...&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t universal. HN is one of the places where it is the worst. I probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t be fighting with Go right now if it weren&amp;#x27;t for HN; I&amp;#x27;d probably be using Java. Staying up to date isn&amp;#x27;t really as important as it appears. There are people having successful careers with COBOL right now, and while that may not be where you want to go, switching between JS frameworks does not sound any better. And you can basically ignore the JS frameworks. They don&amp;#x27;t matter.&lt;p&gt;Because of HN I switched from TextMate to Sublime Text to Emacs to Vim. What did I get out of it? Not a thing. Maybe I can type a little faster when I am in vim. But mostly I just get annoyed when the rest of the OS doesn&amp;#x27;t support the shortcuts that I am now used to. I switched from Mac to Linux to Mac. I got nothing out of it, except that now I get more annoyed when I can&amp;#x27;t do something on my Mac that I was able to do on Linux. Don&amp;#x27;t do what I did.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s completely possible to be a developer without all this, as long as you can recognize when you are wasting your time.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Little Printf</title><url>http://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andars</author><text>Wow. I&amp;#x27;m a college student, but I still feel like a kid. This seems to pretty much sum up every reason I decided not to study computer science and make a career as a developer. I love computing, but I have just gotten tired of the billions of js frameworks and wars about how everything anyone tries to do is wrong. Little printf strikes too close to home. This is a fantastic piece of writing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>You can ignore all that and still make a career as a developer.&lt;p&gt;I started out as a physics major, largely because I didn&amp;#x27;t want to lock myself into a practical career at the beginning of college.  Spent most of my college career avoiding my physics homework by learning lambda calculus, and Haskell, and compiler design, and all of the impractical side of computing.  When it came to get a job, I dusted off my Java and got a job in a financial software startup.  Left it after two years after discovering that I hated finance but actually liked both software and startups.  I&amp;#x27;ve made more tech switches than I can count since, but it&amp;#x27;s always &amp;quot;Well, what do I need to know to get a job that will pay me and give me interesting challenges?&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;What do I need to know?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;You can choose to avoid all the language&amp;#x2F;framework&amp;#x2F;editor wars about which is better.  None of them are better; it&amp;#x27;s just some are better &lt;i&gt;for certain circumstances&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>