What's the best way to become technologically literate and capable?
How do you get to the point where you can type out your own App, your own Microsoft Word like program, your own little video game, your own bit torrent client, etc?
1. read tutorial 2. start doing shitty little programs 3. keep doing it 4. ???? 5. profit
Ian Gonzalez
RTFM
Kayden Baker
>999973) gives an honest and true answer What more could you want, nigger? Practice makes progress.
Caleb Morgan
By reading >>>/reddit/
Nobody wants to talk to a degenerate who probably lives in a third world country that doesn't want to better himself.
Jeremiah Sullivan
That site had an interesting concept behind it but it just turned into hipster twitter. It's full of larpers and people who just repost memes they rip out of other sites as well as SJWs who like proverbially shouting their unsollicited opinions.
Since no one has posted a proper answer yet, let me try.
You will want an OS that lets you tinker with it and is Free Software. In practice this pretty much means GNU/Linux or one of the BSDs. Don't worry about going for one of the advanced distros like Gentoo, just any distro is good enough for now. You will will be taking baby steps.
After you have settled into your new OS it's time to take a first dive. Learn about using the command-line interface. Most importantly: learn how to read manpages. This I cannot stress enough: you must aquire the skill of reading documentation, or else you will be condemned to eternally scour PozOverflow for shitty code snippets from streetshitters. Learning how to read manpages will allow you to become self-sufficient. Like the old saying: give a man a fish and he will have to eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he will have to eat forever. Give a man a command and he will have code for a day, teach him how to read the manual and he will have code forever.
Now that you know how to do things on the command-line it is time to automate your work. Shell scripting allows you to glue commands together, building your own small toolbox as you go along
Shell scripting is nice, but it's like duct tape. For actual work you will want something more robust. There are many languages to choose from and over time you will learn multiple ones. It doesn't really matter which one you start out with, just pick one that does not encourage bad practice (e.g. not JavaScript or PHP). Forget about online tutorials, get a good textbook, read it and work through the exercises
Enough learning, now is the time to actually make something. Start out small, you will not write an office suite as your first application. Find an itch you want to scratch or lurk in an existing project.
Of course there are other things in-between these steps, these will usually arise naturally as you go along. They might lead you on a detour, which is not necessarily a bad thing. As you take these detours you will learn new things and pick up ideas you might not have come across on the straight path. For example, as you start out you will want to use a text editor you are familiar with. Just get anything that allows you to write plain-text files. As time goes on you will find your editor lacking, so you will start looking for a better alternative or for plugins for your existing editor. Don't be afraid to try out new things.
Grayson King
same way you get good at anything. do it for multiple hours per day for a long time. when you've invested 10,000 hours into developing a skill, you'll be an expert in it. if you want to be good at nothing else in the world, invest over 8 hours per day into it. if you want to be good at multiple things, invest several hours per day into all of them. cut out the distractions in life and focus your time on the craft.
Times to 10,000 hours 8 hours per day = 3.5 years 1 hours per day = 27 years 2 hours per day = 14 years 4 hours per day = 9 years 8 hours per day = 3.5 years 12 hours per day = 2 years
don't want to put in the time? enjoy your useless existence.
"technologically literate" can mean a thousand different things. figure out what you want to be doing for a career and learn what those people do. and then just fucking do it all day everyday until you git gud.
Blake Jones
...
Zachary Nelson
Sadly, a typical nigger couldn't even pass step 1.
10+ years professional software developer w/ CS degree here. Start learning programming now, any project with any language. You learn by doing. I'd also recommend you enroll in a Computer Science/Engineering program, so you can learn to pickup languages and tools as necessary, instead of being a one-trick pony (which is what a lot of self-taught programmers are).
Colton Jackson
making video games and bittorrent clients is easy, you should aspire to soemthing better
Brody Garcia
making video games and bittorrent clients is easy, you should aspire to soemthing better
15 year software engineer college dropout here, college/uni is a waste of time. literally the first few years you will just be going through all the stuff you learned on your own in a few months as the rest of the class, who are just there because they had to pick a course, stubles through
Oliver Lewis
lol confirmation bias Wow your CS curriculum was shit. Best to check program rankings, I guess. Maybe you were right that it would've been a waste of time for you.
I cannot believe that the first two years of an educational course would have you study entry level subjects. It's inconceivable.
Hunter Edwards
To follow up on this user's post, choose OpenBSD. Its man documentation is phenomenal and if you use pledge and unveil it'll help you learn to write software with security in mind. Don't touch the poo, stay away from GNU. Documentation is at best all over the place, at worst non-existent.
Andrew Green
no, you should learn to think first study logic and mathematics and formally spec the algorithms you will write , as it promotes a coherent base code that can be expressed in any regular language afterwards. otherwise, like most devs, be a nigger monkey shitting away on a keyboard
Christian Thompson
I have found GNU to have really good and extensive documentation. You just have to know where to look for it: not the manpages, but the Info documents. Don't use man bash, use info bash, and you will have a book-sized manual.
You do know it's possible to do things in parallel, right? Learn a bit of logic, tinker a bit on the terminal, learn a bit more, tinker a bit more, and so on. Focusing only on one or the other is just going into one or the other extreme case.
Kevin Williams
Take loads of HRT and dye your hair for a start
Nicholas Price
if sicp is too difficult a good alternative would be HTDP
Parker Russell
...
Nathan Garcia
Literally doesn't matter what you do. All roads lead to Rome. A fool who persists in his folly will become wise. The only thing that matters is that you do. A lot.
Hudson Diaz
How about making your own website?
Oliver Green
(()((()()()()())(((()()()()((())(((((()))()()((())())))(()))))()())))())())())))()())())(((()))(()))(()()()))()()())())))))))(()()(((())))(())))) Tried to read the book once just because people recommend it (and because the cover is awesome). Made my head explode and I just went back to C. I don't know how you people deal with that shit, it's basically parenthesis hell, and I don't like the prefix notation either. Lisp is not for me, I hated it and as far as I'm concerned it's too retarded for me to deal with it considering that it has horrible performance anyway. So far, high level languages seem to be a mistake, including C. Going straight to asm might have been a better choice. It's not surprising that there are so many damn programming languages when all of them seem to suck.
Adam Stewart
Parentheses are no issue if your editor inserts matching pairs automatically. I use Vim with delimitMate, it makes me completely forget about parentheses. A plugin for rainbow coloring can help as well, and there is built-in highlighting of matching pairs and jumpting back- and forth between matching pairs already (% key). github.com/Raimondi/delimitMate
He, it's really not a big deal. Instead of 'poo(in_loo)' you write '(poo in-loo)', every function call in C is technically already in prefix notation.
It's never going to be as fast as C, but Racket is JIT-compiled, that should make it fast enough for a scripting language. If you want a fast Lisp you should look into SBCL, it's an implementation of Common Lisp that generates native machine code.
Not at all. Aseembler is inherently unportable, so if you don't want to rewrite everything from scratch every time, high-level languages are very good. Modern C compilers can optimize your code better than a human anyway. Scripting languages like Scheme or Python or whatever are best used when the loss in performance is not perceivable, but the gain in productivity is.
Samuel Anderson
It does. Still don't like it. Reminds me of those graph papers that I had to use in college, that gave me headaches every time I had to look at them for extended periods of time. For some reason looking at a bunch of squares for a few minutes made my head almost explode.
I only care about it working on my own hardware. What do you think I am, employed?
Should DW rank have any bearing in what distro to choose? MX Linux, which has openly socialist devs, is in the top 5.
Michael King
I think it was the project lead/manager who disappeared and he was the one who ran the site, the IRC, and the github. The devs are (?) all still there.
Angel Sanders
Sorry, my bad. I had forgotten where I am.
Lincoln Diaz
He was secretly Terry the whole time. That's my explanation.
Don't worry about it. You will eventually be one of us and then you'll fit in. See you in the homeless shelter if we can't get autismbux.