I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Dear YouTube tutorial makers, if you list your video as a tutorial doing something only to make people download a library of framework and then teach us how to use the library you can go fuck a cactus :-3

Every single video that interests me like building interpreters, new 2D game methods and the like all have no actual ground up programming at all... Ugh!

Turns out writing interpreters is just a gateway drug and all I want to do now is build a compiler and custom language runtime...

I still don't understand the effect devRant has had on me...

When I first joined I was quite happy just being my old 2D game developer self but now all I want to do is build CLI tools, interpreters, root through source code I don't understand and not shut up about arch... Not sure of I'm down the right track or not now

How I met python
[long read but worth]

There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?

But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.

She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.

But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.

You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.

After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".

The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.

For fuck sake I get that people like python but not everyone is going to use it!

Just want a few articles or tutorials on interpreters and would you fucking look at that, it's all just in fucking python using external libraries...

Then I purchased a couple Linux and Raspberry pi magazines just to have a gander at some of the code examples and what do you think every single piece of code is? C? C++? Vala? Nope, fucking python!

I will eventually finish learning what I can about python but there are other languages that exist that isnt fucking python, give us some C, C# or even bloody JavaScript... Please

Ok rant about python over, back to my hole

Day 1 of learning to build interpreters: finished the scripts for basic mathematic operations and beginnings of functions... Spent 4 fucking hours trying to track down why the compiler is treating an end of file token as an addition token... No luck, going to bed with a headache and half a head of torn out hair...

Posting a meme found in Instagram instead of Reddit for a change

I don't understand my brain when it comes to programming...

I know how to build complex modding systems and RPG mechanics that self balance themselves in games... Yet I don't know how to make a platformer (pretty much where everyone begins)...

And the most recent thing is I can't seem to grasp interpreters and put it into code yet in 4 hours at work when I was working the register I worked out how to build a virtual machine with its own custom vCPU architecture to use in my game engines terminal...

Anyone else have shit like this? I can't be the only one on this...

Writing a full interpreter for a pseudo-assembly language.

It's kinda fun but the things a bit of a cunt of a problem because I only did this once before almost a decade and a half ago.

getting just the right format and deciding on the syntax is a slog. Just need something thats quick and sufficiently expressive because I'm not writing the assembly myself, I'm generating the assembly code that runs through the interpreter, so it has to be valid under a lot of conditions.

At what point can I claim to not be a script kiddie anymore?

Like, I've built compilers, and interpreters for an excel-like syntax, I refactored a pdf-parsing library from the ground up. I managed databases and wrote protocols for communicating with hardware.

But most of my experience is with python / nodejs / golang. It is only recently that I started playing with C and rust for actual efficient system code.

Found a relatively good blog post regarding building interpreters and holy shit it feels weird to understand things but amazing to realise it's some of the cleanest code I've ever written...

Anyone able to link me to some good reading material on compilers, interpreters, emulation and CPU design?

Keen to actually get some of this knowledge under my belt, don't mind if it requires a little investment as long as it isn't written in (fucking) python, preferably C if anyone knows of anything.

Thanks guys! :-D

I'm searching for some stuff on creating compilers, interpreters.
I couldn't find something really good on the internet so far, so if you know some good resources, I'd be happy to know them.

"We are interpreters – not merely translators between sender and receiver. What we say and how we say it makes a difference. If we want to speak to people, we need to know their language. In order to design for understanding, we need to understand design." - Erik Spiekermann

Ok so Im doing a project about interpreters for college, and need people to answer questions for it.

If youve ever made an interpreter could you answer these, thanks!

1) how long have you been in the computing industry?

2) what got you into interpreters?

3) what do you think is the hardest part about creating an interpreter?

4) what do you think aare the best practices for creating an interpreter

5) do you think its best to create a language or create your own?

Does any of you have the compulsion to micro-optimize every bit of code that you write? How do you deal with it?

I'm not just talking about algorithmic optimizations, but the real nitty gritty stuff. I'm talking about using bit fiddling to avoid if statements where speculative processors might make mispredictions. Anything that might make a program compile to fewer machine instructions or avoid extra stack frame overhead.

This all started a year ago when I took a systems programming course at my university, and started learning C and C++. But I find myself doing this in the wrong places. Who cares if this trivial program that I wrote runs in 1.2 or 0.6 seconds? My future employers won't care if my code is 10% more efficient when it takes four times as long to write.

It's gotten to the point that I can't bring myself to use languages like Python because I don't know how it's implemented under the hood and can't predict how the different ways I could write a function will affect performance. How do I bring myself to trust that the compilers (or interpreters) and the programmers that wrote them will be sufficiently optimal, and just move on? 😩

The reason there aren't independent web browsers anymore is that the web standards include a lot of concepts that should never have been standardised and their presence in the browser as opposed to compilers and interpreters targeting the web has no benefit whatsoever.

After trying to print colored text to the console using a portable Python 3 interpreter on Windows I came up with a "solution". I tried pretty much everything possible (I could think of): curses couldn't be loaded, ansi didn't work and installing libraries wasn't really an option, because it's not my device. Fuck portable interpreters and have fun with the "solution".

Def color_print(text, color):
text = text.replace("\n", "\\\" \\\"")
os.system ("powershell \"$host.ui.RawUi.ForegroundColor = \\\"" + color + "\\\"; echo \\\"" + test + "\\\"; $host.ui.RawUi.ForegroundColor = \\\"Gray\\\"")

It's slow, unreadable, only works for on Windows and requires powershell and is probably the worst piece of code I ever wrote, but it works 👍.

Adding opportunistic move to a large recursive tree processor is not a fun exercise, I would advise anyone who intends to dabble in interpreters to design with opportunistic move from the get go.

Python's ast package is the coolest thing I've recently came across. If you're a compiler writer, you can translate your language's source code into python's ast. And your language has instant access to all of the python's libraries.

Thierry A Davis, but already mentioned by kiki. So, Robert Nystrom, his book crafting interpreters is amazing. What a knowledge. His book is free online but you can buy as ebook too. He currently works for Google at dart programming language

!Rant
What books would you suggest for someone who wants to learn how to make compilers/interpreters?
Is the dragon book good for a complete beginner ?

What do you think about AI replacing translators and interpreters?