Ask HN: What do you consider to be the fundamentals of programming?

2 points by user0x1d 3 years ago | 1 comment

I guess there's a stack of knowledge and you can always pick at which bit of this stack you'd like to be. You can learn about JavaScript but use whatever you know about Assembly to help you code (e.g. is that multiplication really the same as adding that number 4 times to itself. one is more expensive than the other... bla bla).

To you in your career, are there some things you consider to be deep fundamentals to what you do that really benefit your work? What are these fundamentals?

To me, understanding how some algorithms work is not fundamental, for example. But understanding where your code actually goes to (think of the logic gates in a processor) is fundamental to understanding what it is that I'm doing (and not thinking of things as magic)

david927 3 years ago |

That's a good question. I would say architectures and data structures, generally.

We tend to get into the weeds as programmers, but 9/10ths of it is the above. If you approach the problem in the right way, everything is easy. The wrong way and everything is hard.