I don't know if this can be classified as a legit "regret" or not, but anyway (hence no wk78 tag).

I've always chosen to focus more on the theory behind computers and computing rather than on practical dev skills. Not saying that the more theoretical things aren't fun - concepts from theoretical CS and maths still regularly blow my mind, as do the more "esoteric" languages like Haskell, Idris, and Coq. However, after seeing you fine folks here at dR talk about practical development, it feels like there's a whole world of stuff that I've missed about computers and programming, especially web programming. I think I'll tackle that next when I have some free time, maybe spend some time learning PHP to see what all the hate's about... (really though, it must do something right if it has such a huge userbase, plus, I think devRant uses it too...?)

Anyway, just wanted to say that you folks are really cool and an awesome source of inspiration. Best community ever.

Weird. I used to love theory more than practical stuff too. A big reason I went for an AI minor during my masters is because I wanted to read papers, learn a bunch of maths and theory instead of going to coding classes where I have to create J2EE projects or whatever crap the teacher was into...

At this point I'm a web developer, and don't use much of the knowledge gained through hard work and dedication. I'm probably not working as hard as when I was going for my degree because it's less challenging intellectually.

At some point I started to do real world stuff, quite early in fact, and it has its fair share of challenges. It can be much more frustrating than when you have to stay up and try to grasp formulas or proofs.

I encourage you to do so, maybe not PHP but that's completely from a subjective viewpoint. I'm loving Go at the moment. You don't get the same vibe when understanding something finally, as you do with theory IMO. You get a different one though.

If you were asking for my 2 cents, I'd say go for it, because practical stuff can help you put your theoretical mind to action, but don't forget your roots in theory and thinking logically, because many practical problems could force you to abandon logic and "just go with it" :)

@mzeffect
Thanks! I hope you'll find some use for all the time spent on papers and theory someday :)

Haha, I mentioned PHP because I've been quite curious about it for a while :p
There seem to be a whole lot of new languages like Elm and PureScript which try to apply Haskell-style programming to web dev, they look pretty interesting.

I'll have a look at Go, though I was checking out Rust the other day, seems to be a good mix of low-level and high-level features. I have a project in distributed systems coming up that needs the speed of something like C++ for a few operations, I was wondering if Rust could do the job instead. Oh well, time to go learn some more stuff.

@hsbfsix oh yes, Elm is really interesting. I've done a few tutorials on it so can't tell much but it's indeed an amazing sight if you're coming from javascript fatigue.