absolute beginner? Start at https://www.hedycode.com/

Which will ultimately lead into vanilla Python. This is the creator explaining why Hedy is uniquely designed for learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmF7HpU_-9k

inheritance to avoid code duplication

What no, inheritance is not for code sharing

Sound bite aside, inheritance is a higher level concept. That it “shares code” is one of several effects.

The simple, plain, decoupled way to share code is the humble function call, i.e. static method in certain langs.

If you used good objects, you’ll only have to make the change in one place

IMO that’s generally a retroactive statement because in practice have to be lucky for that to be true. An abstraction along one dimension – even a good one, will limit flexibility in some other dimension.

Occasionally, everything comes into alignment and an opportunity appears to reliably-ish predict the correct abstraction the future will need.

Most every other time, you’re better off avoiding the possibility of the really costly bad abstraction by resisting the urge to abstract preemptively.

I’ve never seen these “express code/tests in natural language” ever work well. Your non-coders need lawyer-like skills to wield English very precisely, or it falls to coders that would be better off using code directly.

problems only have one answer and often one strategy to get to the answer

Totally disagree

You’re thinking of equations, which only have one answer. There are often many possible ways to solve and tackle problems.

If you’ll permit an analogy, even though there’s “only one way” to use a hammer and nail, the overall problem of joining wood can be solved in a variety of ways.

IMO mathematical/logical/abstract thinking is critical for programming well, but IMO that’s different from “math degree” math.

Software as a means to an end can be used in almost every domain, so proficiency within that applicable domain is often either useful or necessary. That is to say, “math degree” math is likely needed for 3d rendering (certain games), scientific computation (incl machine learning), etc, but maybe not, otherwise. It depends on what software you’re trying to build.

To be more specific, general programming is definitely and specifically different from trig and calc. However, because math is also broad, “mathy” concepts like type theory, relational algebra, set theory are considered important for programming, even if only informally or indirectly so.

I don’t understand, if you’ve got easy to delete copy-pasted code, then delete it. It’ll be a nice and cathartic exercise.

But sounds like what you’re really talking about is code that isn’t easy to delete.

IMO folding to hide is about equivalent to moving all contents to another file/private function:

def bad_function(args):
    return _hide_elsewhere(args)

i.e. does nothing. Real solution to pyramids of doom is to fix the code.

That’s changing the goal posts to “not static”

Sounds easy to simplify:

Use one of: constructor A(d), function a(d), or method d.a() to construct A’s.

B and C never change, so I invoke YAGNI and hardcode them in this one and only place, abstracting them away entirely.

No factories, no dependency injection frameworks.

IMO factory functions are totally fine – I hesitate to even give them a special name b/c functions that can return an object are not special.

However I think good use cases for Factory classes (and long-lived stateful instances of) are scarce, often being better served using other constructs.

But would you pay for it?

My employer’s paying for my access, and I only find it a bit useful here and there

Maybe my company gets a great discount or something, but if they would pay me the subscription cost to give up Copilot, I wouldn’t miss it

You can reference envs from the host in docker compose, so code it in instead of manually passing tribal knowledge in: https://stackoverflow.com/a/73826410

Simpler to keep everything in one compose file if you can, under a test service that doesn’t build unless explicitly named

Un-weird that env var and use the normal, boring feature of defining environment under your test service

I’ve often been able to alias drun='docker compose run --rm --build' and simplify down to:

drun test

Should be able to encode all those wayward args into docker-compose.yml or Dockerfile and only use vanilla docker commands – that’s the whole point of containerization

One of the best tutorials on really “grokking” git concepts, and it’s online and interactive: https://learngitbranching.js.org

For programming, start with buildings things for yourself. Be practical, start small, and iterate, regardless if you consider the previous iteration was a success or failure. I’ve heard good things about https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ (in Python) in this regard.

Can address it by writing code that doesn’t depend much on indentation, which also makes code more linear and easier to follow.

Idgi – is it saying that every game is either named “X” or “Y’s X”?

wanted to add something to the end of a for-loop, but had too little indentation

To address this, I prefer reducing length & depth of nested code, so the for/while is rarely ever not visible along with everything inside it. Others have success with editors that draw indentation lines.

opening up new/anonymous scopes

I occasionally use Python nested functions for this purpose

I find it’s possible to operate Python as a statically typed language if you wanted, though it takes some setup with external tooling. It wasn’t hard, but had to set up pyright, editor integration, configuration to type check strictly and along with tests, and CI.

I even find the type system to be far more powerful than how I remembered Java’s to be (though I’m not familiar with the newest Java versions).