Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has kicked off multiple "from 0" projects, including a startup and been on the initial team doing an entire embedded runtime,

Blank source files are scary yo.

There are a near infinite number of choices that can be made when confronted with a blank file. And the ramifications of those initial choices will live on, possibly for decades! (I spent 10 years at Microsoft where it wasn't uncommon to come across 20+ year old code still in use.)

More than once I've initialized a new project, started at my blank folder structure, and spent a few minutes thinking "here we go again".

View on HN

As a kid I had a multitude of "from zero" projects. There was no Internet. No SO. There were reference books and manuals but none of those really let you just copy paste your project. Later on I worked in environments with many smaller projects that again I took on from zero and worked on for years.

Boy do I miss those days now that I work for larger companies and with larger teams where the opportunity to do that is pretty rare. Give me a blank slate all day for any project.

I feel you. A blank slate is really a joyful playground for me, but it's so rare nowadays.

I remember typing in programs from books and magazines. Although this is theoretically no different from copy-paste, I wonder if the slowness of the process gave me time to think about what I was typing. "Why is this bit here? What happens if I leave it out? Could I replace this with something else?" That's something you don't get today, when moving code from one place to another takes a couple of key-presses.

Sometimes I call this the “tyranny of choice”, tyranny is probably the wrong word but it sounds nice.

It’s pervasive in lots of aspects of my life beyond programming, where I get anxious having to make decisions. I will drag my feet to have to make a final decision, even if it’s a restaurant choice. I’d much rather have the obvious right choice in my face than have to pick between multiple good choices.

I face this same anxiety when staring at a blank source file too.

(Yes, I’m working on finding a therapist, but even picking one gives me the same anxiety)

that’s usually referred to as the paradox of choice and is an active area of research in psychology and decision theory (economics).

It can be experienced in a lot of situations. Buying a burrito from Chipotle means you have to make lot of choices before you get your burrito.

This means you become partly responsible for the quality of the product you pay for. If the burrito is bad, you are to blame because you chose the ingredients. I think that makes me anxious when in Chipotle's.

In programming it does slow your progress if you have to frequently spend time deciding which choice is the best. Not only anxiety but also plain lost time.

Similar term although with a slightly different meaning that I use "analysis paralysis", when you get so caught up in trying to figure out the "correct" answer that you get stuck.

>Sometimes I call this the “tyranny of choice”, tyranny is probably the wrong word but it sounds nice.

Barry Schwartz, is that you?

Wut.

I so much hate those project generators. First thing I do when I generate some create react app is going through it and delete stuff. Everything. To start from absolute minimum.

I can accept some project generators being an option. But I never understood people who make it default way to go.

Your post was kind of eye opener for me.

I hate generators that give me too much, but 3 or 4 sample files and a well placed "utils" folder is fine.

I hate deciding where the ubiquitous "utils" folder should go in any given project!

> Blank files are scary yo

They are. But the more programs you write, the better you get at it.

It also helps to devise a personal architecture or two for different projects. I have some that I lean on, and that means I can bootstrap myself fairly quickly. It took a while to get there though.

I love starting with a blank canvas. So many opportunities to do things better! So many opportunities to learn!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com