nathan_marz_storm nathan_marz_storm-2014 nathan_marz_storm-2014-39 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I was recently interviewed for "Programmer Magazine", a Chinese magazine. The interview was published in Chinese, but a lot of people told me they'd like to see the English version of the interview. Due to the Google translation being, ahem, a little iffy, I decided to just publish the original English version on my blog. Hope you enjoy! What drew you to programming and what was the first interesting program you wrote? I started programming when I was 10 years old on my TI-82 graphing calculator. Initially I started programming because I wanted to make games on my calculator – and also because I was bored in math class :D. The first interesting game I made on my calculator was an archery game where you'd shoot arrows at moving targets. You'd get points for hitting more targets or completing all the targets faster. A couple years later I graduated to programming the TI-89 which was a huge upgrade in power. I remember how the TI-82 only let you have 26 variables (for the character
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I get better by doing a lot of programming and trying new things. [sent-13, score-0.395]
2 One of the best ways to become a better programmer is to learn new programming languages. [sent-14, score-0.477]
3 By learn I mean more than just learning the syntax of the language, I mean understanding the language's idioms and writing something substantial in it. [sent-15, score-0.376]
4 For me, learning Clojure made me a much better programmer in all languages. [sent-16, score-0.332]
5 I took a bunch of "algorithmic game theory" classes with him – algorithmic game theory is basically the intersection of economics and computer science. [sent-23, score-0.334]
6 I took the classes not so much for the material but to improve my problem solving skills. [sent-24, score-0.396]
7 Learning those skills has made me a much better problem solver in all scenarios, as well as being a much better communicator of difficult concepts. [sent-26, score-0.388]
8 They provide a 6 week bootcamp to help math/science/physics PhD's learn programming skills so they can start a career in data science. [sent-44, score-0.379]
9 I think the industry will be much better off by building these systems more rigorously and less haphazardly, and I felt that this book was the right way to effect that change. [sent-53, score-0.393]
10 I knew that writing a book would be a lot of work, but it turned about to be signicantly more work than I expected. [sent-54, score-0.378]
11 At one point I had half the book written, but I realized I was taking the wrong approach to communicating the material so I scrapped everything and started over. [sent-56, score-0.308]
12 I was taught to make your general "thesis" statement up front, and then drill down into that general statement with supporting points and eventually specific details. [sent-60, score-0.577]
13 A much better way to communicate is to tell a story – start with a situation the reader already understands, and then connect step by step to the ultimate general statement you want your reader to understand. [sent-65, score-0.793]
14 Specific to general is always better than general to specific. [sent-66, score-0.377]
15 On top of that, when you open source software as a company, you benefit from other people trying it out, finding issues, and improving your software "for free". [sent-72, score-0.309]
16 He told me he needed a better programming language for doing AI research, so he invented Lisp for that purpose. [sent-88, score-0.477]
17 He really didn't seem to care that much about programming languages – his real passion was AI. [sent-89, score-0.306]
18 The general idea is to avoid making "general" or "extensible" solutions until you have a very deep understanding of the problem domain. [sent-99, score-0.317]
19 The key was that we had tons of experience with realtime computation so knew the problem domain very well. [sent-144, score-0.313]
20 As I've mentioned Carl Sagan is one of my favorite writers and I've learned tons from reading him – and I continue to learn tons from him everytime I read his work. [sent-160, score-0.33]
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