[JackMorgan]

So long as you don't have to learn a language, API, or framework to do it... I'm not sure what things are left you could do differently? Your list excludes all technology-related changes, so the rest becomes meta-activities: pair programming, documentation, planning, a good nights sleep, etc. Those are excellent, but I'm curious why are you willing to change those other areas but are resistant to technological ones?

That irrational fear of technological change is exactly what I'm talking about. There's a joke around some of my friends, "What's the best way to get a mediocre .NET programmer to stop talking about safety and reducing bugs? Bring up the safest most secure .NET language that exists: F#."

As the joke goes, most of these developers are confronted with the reality that they don't really care about bugs enough to even bother learning a different fully supported .NET language that will find entire classes of bugs automatically and is orders of magnitude safer than C# and is faster to write.

Most people when they have told me they "care about bugs, not languages" have been just saying something nebulous to kill the discussion and defend their life choices.

I'm not trying to be snarky to you, I'm actually very interested to know what changes you've made that are not technological to reduce bugs, fix security holes, etc. I'm always on the prowl for such stuff, and this sounds intriguing.

[RogerL]

Let's see, I'm learning about unscented Kalman filters, moving object tracking in computer vision, PCA, and more. I'm learning about the problem domain that I'm working in. I have no interest in learning yet another API unless I absolutely have to, because it isn't really interesting knowledge that I have to call the fibble() function before calling xacxtyor() in this poorly documented API. That's not learning, it's the accumulation of facts.

Of course, sometimes learning new API/languages enables meaningful learning, and I'm all for it. Want to quickly get a handle on Kalman Filters? Probably a lot faster to put something together with numpy (say) and experiment on the REPL than to program it in a performant language like C or C++, even if that is where it will eventually end up running in your project. So, yes, there's a great reason to learn those languages (or Julia, or whatever).

But the endless march of APIs is pretty tiring to me, and I do everything I can to isolate myself from that. I'm pretty happy writing my C++, and Python (2.7, btw), while trying to solve rather hard problems.

Another way to put it - what I value is intellectual work, not memorization/puzzling things out. Learn a new math technique? Awesome! Learn a byzantine set of calls I need to make to make a widget widge on the screen? Not so much.

[JackMorgan]

Well it sounds like you have no qualm learning the right tool for the job. I would consider numpy to be an API, but the difference here is it's one that helps you with your domain. If widging widges was your domain I'd expect the professional thing to do would be for you to learn that API. I'm talking about people who in your job wouldn't bother with Julia or numpy and would just trundle along with C.

[noelwelsh]

This is great, but it's not addressing the point, which is "I am, however, very excited to try things that might reduce amount of bugs and potential security issues in my code, make it cheaper to run, cheaper to support."

Also, if you like math go learn some functional programming. The ideas of abstract algebra, which you will encounter in FP, are increasingly relevant to machine learning as well. E.g. http://jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v28/izbicki13.pdf

[auvrw]

> But the endless march of APIs is pretty tiring to me

i hear you on that one

> and I do everything I can to isolate myself from that.

but still, you can't stop thinking about design entirely. when a new ideally-pure-C-but-C++-if-you-really-need-stl library is ready to actually be put to use you'll have to put an api of some sort on it. hopefully that api will be informed by your use of other people's apis, both good and bad.

don't forget that the whole point of computers is that they're immediately useful. you can still do most of the math you want with a pencil, paper, and stack of books.

[zzzcpan]

  > I'm not sure what things are left you 
  > could do differently?

There are so many thing that are left - one cannot do them in a lifetime! Analyze as much bugs as you can, invent your own language that prevents them from happening, write your own compiler for this language, make it fast, with better memory management, not some stop-the-world GC, but with something, that honors low-latency and so on.

EDIT: As RogerL is saying, useful to me intellectual knowledge is what I want to learn. It's pretty much never the same thing as anyone else in the room wants to learn.

[JackMorgan]

So clearly you are not the class of person I have ever dealt with in the past. It would be an incredible breath of fresh air to work with someone who cares enough about their work to write their own compiler for it.

Right now I'm working through SICP, having just finished PLAI, do you have any suggestions for a book on compilers I could do next? I was recently steered away from the dragon book as it's "missing a lot of recent compiler research", but that person had no good alternative.

I think there is definitely three main groups of software people: those that wire together languages and frameworks, those that write languages and frameworks, and those that use a tiny subset of languages to do research. My problem is I think I've been heading down the path of learning that leads more to the second, and you sound like someone who manages to do a job similar to mine, but by being good at that second far more interesting path. I'd be really interested to hear any advice you have. Do you basically have to just work alone?

[playing_colours]

I found this book on compilers to be rather up-to-date, clear and useful when you start going into the topic: http://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Compiler-Second-Edition-Co...

[dinkumthinkum]

There are a lot more interesting things in CS than 100 different mvc frameworks and 20 upstart languages that do exactly what LISP did in 1960.

[JackMorgan]

Oh sure, right now I've been deep into Scheme as I just finished PLAI and am halfway through SICP. I'm not chasing every new Perl derivative every six months, but I'm mostly stuck in the day job using C#. It feels constraining to be learning all this awesome about languages and not get to use most of it, hence the desire to sometimes try other languages at work.

What sort of things have you been learning that you would recommend that are off the beaten path of just another mvc framework? I'm thinking of learning about compilers next, but I'd like a book to work through rather than just "the internet". Also I'm trying to catch the type safety bug by working through Real World Haskell, I'm open to other suggestions for that too.