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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Do you still type source code?

How do you rate your mental agility versus your younger self?

So far I really haven't sensed any mental decrease, but I know there must be some. I do type some source code in Python and R, but primarily I use a rapid applications development tool that allows me to build custom machine learning algorithms and ad hoc analytics to work on big data.

I'm 30 now and my background is more in mathematics, so I do focus a lot on Python and R. A lot of my work is in statistics and also in agriculture. Hopefully, but the time I am your age, I will have some secret skills to teach the young folk. I hope to do more mathematics in my everyday work as I get older.

I just realised I need to walk my dog more often after the lockdowns are getting less strict!

Do you consider what you do to be programming? How does it compare to, say, hand-writing C?

There is no doubt what I do is programming. It's similar in some ways to SQL, but the tool I use enables me to implement much more complexity than possible in plain SQL. It actually enables a lot of the functionality available in a procedural language like C, but within a structure built around database manipulations and joins. In this way it breaks the bounds of memory constraints and becomes a big data programming language. Admittedly, I don't have to type out individual commands, but that's a good thing. The logic is the same, but the development time is much less. It enables you to concentrate more on the algorithm design while the command syntax and other minutiae are handled in a much more efficient (and maintainable) manner.

That's quite interesting! Thanks for responding. :)

You don't type; is the way you create this logic similar to Ladder Logic, Pure Data or Touch Designer?

Surely he considers it programming if he self describes as an active programmer?

He might be doing other code work, as well.

I was honestly curious how it compared. What tools and processes transfer over, that kinb of thing.

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