Test automation in labview is pretty good, lots of hardware interaction, requires more engineering skill rather than IT

Anything safety critical, aviation, defense, medical devices. misra c, ada and the like.

Fascinating article, he put into words what we've all been feeling, and did it well.

It makes me want to build a fucking website.

I did one in the late 90's by viewing page source, and a web design magazine my mom got me from a news stand on a whim one time. I was 12. It sucked and looked much like the high schooler MySpace pages of years later but I was proud of it.

I think the main reason I hated Java was because they made us learn it in school. Also it was slow and I wanted to make high performance programs at the time.

Apart from that I got annoyed at being made to jam everything into this object paradigm, with classes and constructors and get and set methods ugh. It was also a pain to look at people's code with so much ugly nesting and braces and keywords. Declaring variables and functions with all those terms in front of them, trying to trace these chains of things pointing to each other, digging into that Api site to figure out what the damn thing was doing. It was just a huge pain in the ass and Python to me always felt cleaner and easier.

That and the constant security updates, having to support them, the incompatibilities, the thing constantly blocking, vendors refusing to update their application to be compatible with the latest JRE, forcing you to containerize everything, again, giant pain in the ass.

I can see the appeal in Java if you have a bunch of business logic and want to be able to maintain it 10 years later, it spares you the pain of trying to keep ancient evil green screen machines alive. They really convinced the world it wasn't gonna be another cobol. For the web sites and applications that most of us seem to be working on I'm not seeing the appeal.

But I agree with the premise I guess, it probably is worth a second look

I'm curious about what sort of different tools you are using. Nobody is really teaching me any of this stuff and I'm guessing my way through it.

I try to avoid the folks upstairs as best I can, but I hear you about relationships. These people don't really understand the amount of weight I'm carrying for them and the only way they ever could is if I spend time with them.

Sometimes it feels like they go out of their way to keep us in the dark about the proprietary stuff, I've heard a couple of those acronyms before.

There are lots of modules for it

I find the language easier than others to look at code and figure out what it's doing at a glance. That's probably subjective.

There's blogs and tutorials and videos aplenty that explain anything I'm likely to be curious about.

The local user group is very smart and helpful.

I like a bunch of different languages but for 'ease of development' Python is my favorite of those that I've tried.

I work IT for a bank. They don't treat their employees well. There is a lot of turnover. Management has required that everyone's job functions be listed and documented, everyone has been reduced to robots that follow checklists. This is to avoid what they call the "key person vulnerability". It has the side effect of sapping everyone of any problem solving skills. Any time something off script happens they call me.

I studied computers but find myself solving problems like ach transfers not posting, mysterious fees showing up on people's statements, credit reports containing inaccurate information, money going to middle eastern countries, etc. I get treated like a lowly computer monkey and it is frustrating, but that is life if you want to keep a job I suppose. It's better than living in the parents basement.

I use Python scripts to automate the jobs of people who piss me off at work. Since I already solve all their problems anyway, I can just open up their checklists and make scripts that perform their regular functions and put them on a schedule. Most of these people are just downloading files from vendors and putting them into different folders on the network, then firing off jobs in our financial core to parse the information. My scripts are better at it than they are. The sad thing is, people get really happy when I make one of these scripts for them, nobody has caught on to the fact that I'm automating them out of existence.

These programs aren't particularly advanced. Parsing text files ad copying things across samba shares, real beginner level stuff. You can do a lot of work with just that. I use python. If you want to get into it I suggest you star accumulating what I call a "code pallete" which is just a big file of commonly used code snippets for typical tasks that you can copy from to make your program.

Some suggestions for snippets you'll want to have:

Command line argument parsing and validation, using glob and path expansion (that is, * for capturing all files, ~ for referring to the home folder, etc)

Copying files between servers on a network(this is usually Windows samba shares, pretty much every language has a nice module for this available)

Sending emails (to report task completion, job failure, etc)

Connections to ftp, ssh, telnet servers

Ping (for monitoring connection status of remote systems)

Mind you, this is all beginner level stuff, we haven't even gotten into proper data manipulation, I'm still trying to learn that part, but you can do a lot with web page scrubbing and database connections and stuff. I'm looking into the selenium kit, it automates web page interaction, I could replace a lot of my annoying users if I was good at that.

"Learn SQL the hard way" is what you want. It will walk you through beginner level SQL in the form of a series of exercises. If you use your imagination a little you can use those exercises as a template to get real work done.

This was more about encouraging kids to get into programming, I was hoping for insights on improving one's ability beyond the basic introduction to the concept, misleading headline.

I was seduced into emacs by org-mode. Once you figure out navigating and configuring the thing, you start feeling like you may as well use it for every text based thing you do, since you are already deep in the hole anyway. It doesnt help that there are modules and addons and blog posts about everything you could imagine doing in it. I'd say org mode alone makes emacs worth it. It has this cult-like way of sucking you in. That said, I enjoy working in it and find it a pleasure to use. I find that I can recycle a lot of prior learning into whatever new mode or language I feel like trying, so in the long run it has probably saved me a little time.

If you do note taking, todo lists, calendars etc in org mode it will change you life, I have mine synced up to my phone and laptop and work computer to keep track of friggin everything.

windows powershell is actually pretty amazing, I don't enjoy admitting that.

my, this looks fascinating

I'm a fan of zed's various "Learn X the hard way" books and courses. That and his general style and attitude about the whole thing.

I'm really tempted to get into sql

Labview. Doing everything graphically really felt alien after doing Java through school. Then I accumulated a library of frequently used modules and I can't go back. Everything else takes too long to complete.