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Comment by naet | Hacker News Reader

Maybe JavaScript is actually what saved your PHD, although cookie clicker was what pointed you in that direction.

Certain people love to talk trash on JS for many different reasons, some probably valid ones too, but you can do so much with just a basic understanding.

I've probably never felt as empowered in my entire life as when I learned a bit of HTML CSS and JS; it was like I l suddenly had the tools to make tons of new projects. I didn't feel this way using Python or C (those had felt very command line oriented the way I had learned them), but when I saw how easy it was to use JS and make an interactive web page I felt like I could make full applications, games and toys and whatever else I wanted to. Having the browser to draw images and UIs and access to built in features like the HTML canvas or web audio APIs made dream projects feel much more achievable.

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> Maybe JavaScript is actually what saved your PHD, although cookie clicker was what pointed you in that direction.

I think you're basically saying the same thing as the article, except their emphasis is on that they learned the skill they ended up needing while doing silly things for fun rather than trying to be productive:

> But perhaps the simplest way to view this episode was as a playful, recreational activity which through sheer dumb luck gave me the skills needed to solve an important problem in my work life. My colleague Titus Barik analysed how programmers talk about programming as play, involving ‘spontaneous and creative expression’, ‘experimentation’, and ‘purposeless, ludic activity’. He found that many programmers reflect on episodes of playful programming as joyful experiences that catalysed learning.

> I’m extremely grateful to Cookie Clicker for the journey it put me on, but even if I hadn’t ended up learning JavaScript because of it, I still wouldn’t regret, and would cherish, the many many hours I spent tinkering and clicking away in my college dorm bedroom.

I read the article as less about touting the benefit of some specific technical tool but more about the value of time spent purposely _not_ being productive. It's a counterpoint to the "cult of productivity" that espouses the important of maximizing efficiency and "hustling".

Play is every child's way to learn about the world after all, and it works amazingly well.

Well that is more or less what I meant. The author put most of their emphasis on playful exploration leading to learning an unexpected skill (and the moral of the importance of play in learning). On the other hand, the usefulness or ease of use of the JavaScript ecosystem played a big part and maybe the moral could have been that JS is underappreciated and saved the author regardless of their path to learning it.

I don't mean to devalue play or passion projects, that is how I learn most. But JS itself played a big role and I wanted to share my perspective on it.

Ah, makes sense. JS and its ecosystem do have a bit of a reputation in the tech community, but I suspect that you're right that even the complaints that have merit might not really matter much to someone not as worried about the finer points of professional software architecture. It's easy as a software engineer to get caught up on something like a giant node_modules folder that we forget that someone looking to write a visualization for their PhD research probably doesn't care at all about that (and rightly so!)

I fully agree with this.

A couple months ago I tried to do a quick hack project where I could get the computer to play a sound and render an image when there was a keystroke.

Turns out with python, without additional libraries, you had to read from stdin which requires the user to end the input with newline before python could read the char. (2 keystrokes, not 1)

But I switched to JS where it’s trivial to intercept single key strokes and finished my script in ~30 minutes

I couldn't agree more. The browser has everything you need to make an insanely wide array of rich and dynamic applications with just HTML, CSS, and JS.

Learning that a browser and a notepad are all you need to have a basically zero second feedback loop in an iterative development experience was pretty breathtaking the first time I press reload and some stuff moved around.

> Maybe JavaScript is actually what saved your PHD, although cookie clicker was what pointed you in that direction.

Yes the article strongly implies this with some added nuance:

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