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by GuiA 2542 days ago
If I understand you and OP correctly, it’s a kind of joy derived from doing something for a while, being acutely aware of the limitations and frustrations that come with it, and then discovering a brand new way of working that doesn’t involve any of the slog you’d grown accustomed to.

Speaking purely personally, mathematics has consistently been the discipline that’s delivered the most bang for my buck in that regard - learning a new branch can let you solve problems that are just impossible to solve, or take pages and pages of computation, in a few lines.
1 comments
tombert 2542 days ago
You did understand me correctly :).

I agree with mathematics; I came to the same conclusion about five years ago; I realized understanding some basic type theory made a whole lot of programming easier for me.

It's kind of dry reading, but I've been trying to get into different process calculi lately; specifically the Pi Calculus and Join Calculus, since these things feel like a cool hybrid of computer-science and mathematics.

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dlcmh 2541 days ago
Insightful! Any process calculus or type theory literature to recommend? Found https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/12d9/eae1638729aeb237b5be44... while googling - would this be a good place to start?
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tombert 2541 days ago
I'm still learning, but I've really enjoyed this book [1]. It's pretty theory-heavy, especially at first, but overall I have found it fairly approachable.

Also, Tony Hoare's book on CSP is actually a fairly interesting read; certainly interesting if you like Go. You can actually download it legally free here: [2]

In regards to type theory, I'd recommend starting by learning Haskell, just to make the terminology a little less scary, then picking up the book "Basic Simple Type Theory" by J Roger Hindley. Don't let the name fool you, it's still pretty heavy stuff; there's no way I would have been able to get through it if I hadn't learned Haskell beforehand. [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Distributed-Computing-Sys...

[2] http://usingcsp.com/

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Cambridge-Theoretical-Computer...

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