21 Nested Callbacks

http://blog.michellebu.com/2013/03/21-nested-callbacks/

by ericz • 13 years ago

362 113 13 years ago

blog.michellebu.com

kennu• 13 years ago

Nowadays whenever I see a callback waterfall forming, my first thought is https://npmjs.org/package/node-async.

dmix• 13 years ago

Yep there's plenty of solutions to callback hell.

My particular favourite is the Lamina library in clojure which takes the event-driven approach https://github.com/ztellman/lamina/wiki/Introduction

wfunction2• 13 years ago

You should take a look at C#'s 'async' and 'await' keywords, which keep code asynchronous code looking sequential:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/hh156513.asp...

catshirt• 13 years ago

OP is in a pretty unique form of callback hell. a list, a function, and a for loop would suffice.

lincolnq• 13 years ago

I love that the author was persistent enough to actually get to a solution -- any solution, no matter how ridiculous -- using nothing more than Google. I can't count how many times I've tried to help someone get started on the basics of the web programming stack only to realize that the inferential distance for this person is so high that I would have to spend hours explaining things in order to help them solve the problem.

Sorry world. It's getting better. But slowly.

mbillie12• 13 years ago

I recall being a novice and learning Java, and trying to solve http://projecteuler.net/problem=5 - I had nested if statements like "if(x % 20 == 0) { if (x % 19 == 0) {..." and I was thrilled that it worked. I have since learned far better ways to accomplish things like that; but I probably wouldn't have if I had just given up in frustration and never become a professional developer. Cool job by the author in posting the original code. I'm too embarrassed to post my nested-if business :)

lelandbatey3• 13 years ago

I love this. The code may not have been beautiful, but it worked, and the author figured it out themselves!

I'm simultaneously reminded of two different quotes:

Let's argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better while somebody else ships products using PHP and duct tape. --@agentdero [0]

And the other:

<dm> I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.

-- Bash.org [1]

You should always try to do SOMETHING over being frozen in indecision. Additionally, we really should do a better job of explaining things to people, so they don't have to stoop to trolling for answers :)

[0] https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352

[1] http://bash.org/?152037

hazelcough7• 13 years ago

Blog post writer here. I was going to mention this in the post, but I ended up deciding against it:

I'm from Middle America. In Middle America, when you ask a farmer what he feeds his pigs, he tells you what he feeds his pigs, what he doesn't feed his pigs, why he feeds his pigs what he feeds his pigs, how he feeds his pigs, and what sunscreen he applies to their skin.

So it was very weird to me that a lot of programmers didn't like to share their knowledge of programming (except, it seems, when they are trying to impress other programmers).

derefr2• 13 years ago

It seems to me that farmers spend a long time agonizing over what to feed their pigs, but don't often get to talk with people who are interested in hearing what they feed their pigs. To have someone to braindump to is a delight.

For programmers, everyone is trying constantly to braindump to everyone else; that's half of what the blog posts on HN consist of. And everyone wants their braindumps analyzed, and, more importantly, debugged. "I'm feeding my pigs horse meat--did I make the right decision?"

When you're exposed to it so often, it's hard not to get tired of telling people about the benefits of grain over horse meat.

nicolethenerd• 13 years ago

Huh- that seems weird to me too - my experience is that programmers generally love to share their knowledge and talk about their field. My tendency when newbies ask me about programming is to share as much info as possible, possibly too much - but then, I've been known to bust out my laptop at fancy dinner parties and start demoing how to write HTML.

jychang2• 13 years ago

Hi Michelle!

That's not too hard to explain. Some programmers see themselves as part of a clique. Their code and ways are what keeps them superior, experts in the field that they work in. The sunscreen that coats their javascript perhaps took them a hard couple hours of debugging to discover, and many programmers are the type of people who feel and rationalize "If it took me this long, this newb should go through the same process".

Of course, there are many exceptions- all the online communities, forums, etc. But there's always some part that does work as I described. Hell, even I get annoyed sometimes and tell someone who's starting out "go google why you don't want a GOTO statement in code"...

elteto2• 13 years ago

Hey OP, kudos on finding a solution. However, I want to see the original, can you provide a link?

rurounijones• 13 years ago

If someone asks me a programming question then I always answer it in the simplest, shortest method possible unless I already know they are at a good skill level.

I think the farmer can reasonably expect a layman to understand most of the things related to feeding pigs.

I, on the other hand, have no expectation that a layman would understand pointers, lambdas or any of the other lovely complicated things that even answering simple questions COULD entail if we went into details or expanded around the question.

[EDIT: Apologies it this comes off as arrogant or elitist or something, not intended.]

tikhonj2• 13 years ago

I think that really depends on whom you ask. For many (maybe even most) people I know, you would get too much information. With maybe a nice detour into theory. (Most of the best things in CS come with deep but surprisingly simple and elegant mathematics behind it.)

Of course, the information might also be a bit biased: everyone has their own preferences and opinions, and usually present them fairly strongly. Some people hedge about other options half-heartedly, but I doubt anyone would give you an even spiel on more than a couple of different options. Which is entirely natural: chances are, nobody has much experience with more than a couple of different options.

This might also vary a bit by community. I haven't spent much time recently talking to web developers. But the general programming languages/functional programming community is certainly fairly talkative.

neilk• 13 years ago

I kind of want to punch the guy who said "no programmer would do this" in the nose. I'm glad you didn't let that person tell you who you were, or what you could be.

You wanted to do a thing. You made the computer do that thing. Programmer.

It's not about proving you're the smartest person before you even touch a keyboard. It's about being persistent, doing experiments, and always learning.

And I expect that your friend has forgotten the sort of things he did when he started.

trhtrsh• 13 years ago

I heard a different version:

Young farmer: I got some pigs, but I don't know what to feed them. What do you feed your pigs?

Old farmer: I had some pigs once, I fed them one of my cows that had died of consumption.

Young farmer: Really?

Old farmer: Yup.

<2 weeks later>

Young farmer: One of my cows died, so I fed it to my pigs. They all died. Your pigs really thrived on meat of a diseased cow?

Old farmer: Nope, my pigs died.

donaq• 13 years ago

Hi, I used to write code like your 21 nested callbacks, so I'm baffled by your friend's assertion that no programmer would be so patient. I've always thought that the patience to grind endlessly at a problem (or bug) without an obvious solution was one of the more laudable shared virtues of our tribe. Patience is, in fact, a vital part of my learning process.

In fact, I think that's probably a part of the reason why some programmers don't have patience for beginners with a lot of questions. It's because beginners actually have Google and StackOverflow these days, so it might seem like laziness to someone who had to learn using books and man pages. It's not that they don't like to share their knowledge, it's that they think the answer is already there if you'd bothered to look. I'm not saying that they're right to have that attitude, by the way. I'm just trying to present things from their perspective.

reeses2• 13 years ago

Cheeseburgers, you don't even need to ask the farmer about slopping his pigs. Just ask for directions.

"Slow down when you get to the old Willoughby place, you'll know it by the brick shed they built in back, because the statey likes to sit behind the hill and catch speeders, and after five minutes, you'll want to go left..."

I grew up on the extreme western frontier of Flyoveria, in Eastern Washington State. We had a culture of the same sort of accreted experience that results in journeymen in their various careers. There's a reason a lot of phrases such as "college boy," "doesn't know sh8t from Shinola," etc. tend to be more common, and it's not just because they're "folksy." On the other hand, they really want to save people from themselves if they're willing to learn, and they'll tell you all you need to start farming pigs. You'd better be ready to help him with his computers, though, even if he's running his farm on a Kaypro II.

In programming, there's not as much of a long-term investment in the apprentice-journeyman-master guild-style system, although you can find pockets here and there. I have lamented it and pondered the reasons for its erosion over the past 20 years, but I can't say with real authority why we don't have it any longer, other than an expected lack of tenure at any organization.

It's not like big law or finance, where your first firm is there to grind you out of the business before your second firm decides if you're up or out.

powatom• 13 years ago

This is probably one of my favourite comments ever.

niggler• 13 years ago

One of the main reasons PHP is still kicking is because it's still easier to get things done with PHP.

lelandbatey3• 13 years ago

I find that true. For most people, having messed with accessible things like bash scripts or .bat files in Windows, the approach that is taken in PHP, where the act of accessing a file runs the code in it's contents, is quite intuitive. I know that for me PHP was by far the easiest web-app language to come to understand when I started programming.

radio4fan2• 13 years ago

And the other is its ubiquity on cheap hosting.

shurcooL• 13 years ago

Agree, I thought it was really neat.

The fact that she went through with it and got it to work, despite how it ended up looking, is commendable.

And I really like the result. Anyway, this article was neat and put a smile on my face.

prawn• 13 years ago

The Linux Guru line reminds me of a technique I used to get quick Mac OS help many, many years ago. Emailing a friend for that sort of help often left me with a long wait, so I'd email two rabid Mac people in the same email, let them see that both had been included, and then watch as they fought over themselves to quickly show how the Mac solution was so fast and easy.

reeses2• 13 years ago

"I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem."

This is one of my Jedi-level secrets of technical management.

I am quick to say I have a huge ego, because anyone who knew me would fight to say it first. The fact that I know what I know and have a good feel for where I'm weak lends me confidence in those situations where I'm mostly out of my depth.

I've managed ultra-introverted developers for about makesmesoundold years. Numerous are the times I've asked a question and gotten no answer. "How would we go about accomplishing x?" "How long would it take us to do y?" "What letter comes after z?"

Crickets

Throw a proposal just plausible enough that people think you're serious, but so "insane" that it almost defies logic ("what if we put, say, hmm...log base two of 2097152 is 21...jQuery callbacks in an HTML file full of id'd divs..."), then it's as if a tiny rock starts rolling down a hill. First one person offers a criticism, and then we get more people engaged, throwing out the alternatives that they would have suggested in the first place.

Eventually, they recognize the game, and then it's a fun brainstorming activity. Or you fire three as a message to the others.

delinka• 13 years ago

"Or you fire three as a message to the others."

This got my upvote. ;-)

benatkin• 13 years ago

Reminds me of http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html

kushagrawal• 13 years ago

I know Michelle, and it's impressive that she started coding just two summers ago. Testament to the fact that it doesn't take long to become a good programmer

nickporter2• 13 years ago

Depends on your definition of "good programmer".

hazelcough7• 13 years ago

Haha, I'm a programmer who will write 21 nested callbacks no more :). That's enough for me to claim for now.

radio4fan2• 13 years ago

Unless I'm missing some wit, that seems uncalled-for.

And judging by her github profile, she's a good programmer by any reasonable definition.

akavi• 13 years ago

I just clicked to the fact she's the same person behind PeerJS.

Impressive is a slight understatement.

kadabra9• 13 years ago

Great article.

For a while, I was even hesitant to simply show some of my projects to other developers I looked up to..I figured the code was so bad, and the project so trivial, that why bother?

Reading sites like HN, you read about these tremendously talented people.... doing exits, building absurdly cool projects that you think you'll never be able to build... and it's easy to benchmark yourself against that sort of ideal and think that your stuff isn't cool enough. When I finally was confident enough to share some projects with a few people I respected, I was blown away by how much I learned just listening to their feedback.

Even if you think you're code sucks, you'll improve rapidly by learning WHY it sucks, and using that in new projects.

kailuowang2• 13 years ago

Programming is hard, but that's where the fun is. Writing 21 nested callbacks isn't that hard especially with some copy and paste, finding a solution that does not look that ugly is hard, but otherwise programming will be really boring. I mean writing code that merely works is boring most of the time. If finding an elegant solution is not more fun than finding a working solution for you (those who enjoyed math knows what I mean), then programming maybe not your thing.

daleharvey• 13 years ago

Thats pretty pointlessly dismissive. Its great that there are people who like finding elegant solutions to problems but in the same hand its also great that there are people who care more about solving users problems than generating pretty code. (I would count myself in the latter group)

kailuowang2• 13 years ago

I am not really trying to dismiss people how care more about solving users problems. In that case, product is your thing, and I love love love to work with a product person who is passionate about solving user problems. But I doubt I would enjoy maintaining the code written by product person who doesn't care that much about "pretty code".

Mahn• 13 years ago

We all have written code only to come back to it a few weeks later and think "oh god, what in the world was I thinking". If only code refactored itself over the time; small projects aren't an issue, but there's a point in every devs life when you have this monstrous one-eyed, ten thousand lined class that works fine in production but no one knows how or why it works and the idea of making a single change to it gives you pure panic and terror. And you know you have to rewrite it, but you have a hard time justifying spending two weeks on getting nothing tangible done, so to speak. The class goes on unfactored for a while (until it inevitably breaks) but at least you come to this almost zen realization that beautiful code = simple, short, and self descriptive code.

danneu• 13 years ago

user.rb

Cushman• 13 years ago

> (I gathered from these exchanges that programmers have a perpetual competition to see who can claim the most things as 'simple.')

Nobody hits my brother but me.

Programmers are persistently frustrated in our tools-- when you can see how things work, you start to see just how broken it all is. Things that should be easy are hard, things that should be hard are nearly impossible. And for every thing gotten right, there's something a little subtler that's completely and opaquely wrong, wasting days of your life. We hate our tools, and we love to complain about them.

But if you complain about our tools... Sorry, who are you? This is basic stuff.

rhizome4• 13 years ago

"A poor craftsman blames their tools."

qu4z-22• 13 years ago

We're in a funny profession where we're both the people making and using the tools.

In other professions, blaming your tools is essentially a "There's nothing I can do about it -- the tools just suck."

In programming, we can go "These tools suck, but I can fix them". Of course, then you never accomplish what you initially set out to...

camus• 13 years ago

"Programming is hard." No it's not. Resources are everywhere today ,tons of books , Stackoverflow , tutorials ,etc ... you cant accuse programmers of not wanting to share their knowledge ,that's not true , they all do.

You have entire and complex projects on github available for free , so no Programming is not hard , it takes time to become a good programmer yes but like everything else in life. You want to try something hard ? try to be a doctor instead.

bjliu2• 13 years ago

Programming IS hard. You can ask the PhD. Computer Science students at any decent college and they will tell you that they are humbled because the field of programming is so vast and wonderful and full of mystery. I think we can admit that we have discovered .000000000000000001% of the things that can be discovered at this point in the field of programming.

kragen3• 13 years ago

I think you overestimate our knowledge of programming. Still, it seems like the pace of discovery has slowed down considerably since the 1960s, for whatever reason.

tikhonj2• 13 years ago

> (I gathered from these exchanges that programmers have a perpetual competition to see who can claim the most things as 'simple.')

Amusingly, I've noticed the same thing: I do claim that a surprising amount of things are simple. And you know why? Because they are. A whole bunch of things (most recently F-algebras and F-coalgebras) really are simple: you start with a very simple concept (say sets and functions) and build up to them, taking very simple steps along the way. Maybe you have to bring in a couple of other concepts that are similarly simple.

EDIT: I should have made this clearer: I say something is simple before trying to explain it rather than instead of. I mainly do it to avoid scaring people without reason, and everyone gets far too scared of words like "F-coalgebra" or even "monoid".

Every single step along the way? Virtually trivial. But put them together and you get something genuinely difficult to follow.

It turns out that enough trivial steps all building upon each other becomes difficult to follow for anyone. Yet, once you've finally understood it, you can't see why it was difficult any more: after all, all the components are so simple, and it all makes sense! (Now.)

I realized this in a pretty direct way: I was trying to explain the aforementioned algebras to some of the smartest people I know--people with much more mathematical experience and aptitude than me--and they all found it a bit hard to follow. Not because they couldn't follow any particular step, but because putting it all together in your head is difficult.

So really, the ultimate conclusion is: just because something is simple does not mean it is easy. Having some trouble with simple concepts like this is not an issue at all; everybody does. But that doesn't mean they aren't simple!

Another, more surprising, conclusion is just how shallow the stack of concepts has to be to cause people trouble. It's not like there are hundreds of parts in these definitions: there are maybe 10. (Say: set, function, algebra, identity, category, morphism, functor, dual.) And yet this is more than enough to confuse.

doelie_• 13 years ago

Well put. I have the same experience with compilers and program transformation. Many small steps, all of them simple , lead to a lot of heavy lifting if you put them all together. In some sense all those steps are "orthogonal", each taking the path into a completely new direction, ending up far away from the initial point, conceptually.

wtallis• 13 years ago

That's something that I think laypeople never realize about computer science - it's all really simple things, but combined together at such a scale and pace that in a few decades we've done the equivalent of building a cat from scratch out of DNA. Big complex things really can be built out of extremely simple parts, and we're doing it all the time, but for a lot of people our technology is indistinguishable from magic.

meric• 13 years ago

Markets too, in the end they are all just information, limit and market orders.

tomasien• 13 years ago

Everyone I know who codes or designs is anxious to help others learn to do the same. However, it's just common decency and respect to Google it, try to do it, and then have specific questions about what you couldn't get past.

Just a rebuttal to one point that irked me.

hazelcough7• 13 years ago

See, getting value out of Google is something that's learned over time. At the very beginning it was hard to get very far at all with just Googling and when I asked others they pointed me back to Google--some of them unhelpfully, but others showed me how to use better search terms for the subject at hand.

That helped a lot, and I don't resent them for that type of help at all. I'm sorry if it came across that way in the writing.

mbillie12• 13 years ago

> See, getting value out of Google is something that's learned over time.

This is very true. Especially early on, while learning basic concepts, I found it very difficult to Google things because I did not know the terms or concepts involved. When I was attempting to self-teach my first programming language (Python), I could not understand the difference between parameters and arguments - but I didn't know that that was how to characterize my problem either. I just thought "why doesn't 'x' mean what I said it means over there?"

ianstormtaylor• 13 years ago

Thank you for posting this. I had never thought about how understanding the terminology required to Google was something that needed to be built up over time. Need to keep this in mind.

jcampbell12• 13 years ago

I just wasted about 30 minutes writing a short solution, when I could have written the 22 callbacks in about 5 minutes. I did learn quite a bit about jquery, and the fn.delay isn't great. The funny thing about programming is that it does seem simple once you have a solution.

    function animate_opacity_to(opacity) {
        var elems = $('[id^=row]').get();
        (function x(){
            var el;
            if(el = elems.pop()) 
                $(el).animate({opacity:opacity},100,x);
        })();
    }

dandelany• 13 years ago

Actually, jQuery animate includes a built-in animation queueing system for this exact purpose, so callbacks really aren't necessary at all! For example:

  function animate_opacity_to(opacity) {
      $('[id^=row]').forEach(function(el) {
          $(el).animate({opacity: opacity}, {duration: 100, queue: true});
      });
  }

(haven't tested this but I think it should work.) In general, I've found that using a queue or queue-like structure can often help alleviate the dreaded "callback waterfall". Instead of saying "do this, then when you're done, do this, then when you're done, do this", you're saying "here are a list of the things I want done, do them in order and don't start the next thing in the list before the previous one is done". If you have some things in the queue that can be run simultaneously, you can combine them with a Deferred (see http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.Deferred/ )

In any case, great article - I definitely remember many similar scenarios that came up while I was learning to code. Sometimes you just gotta go with the crappy implementation you know will work rather than the efficient implementation that is beyond your current understanding :)

jcampbell12• 13 years ago

I tried something like your code, but it doesn't work. The queue parameter defaults to true, and it only applies to the set of elements in the jQuery object.

What will work is adding `delay` e.g.

    $(el).delay(i*100).animate(...

But that causes other problems because frantically clicking will cause the animations to get queued. Setting `queue` to false, breaks .delay().

utopkara3• 13 years ago

After some reading, it seems animate attaches a deferred on the element, so this works:

  $('[id^=row]').toArray().reduce(function(l,r){
		return l.pipe(function(){
			return $(r).animate({opacity:opacity}, 100);
		});
	}, $.Deferred().resolve());

Obviously, you can put any selector in there and you'll get them animate in order. Hence, allowing you to play with many combinations, once you spend the time to write this once. I agree with the OP about getting something done is always better than nothing. Yet, the responses that s/he got from programmer friends is not an issue of technical pragmatism, but one of collaboration culture. Unfortunately colleges are like that. Things are different in more professional settings.

mac1175• 13 years ago

Your comment made me look up reduce(). Just when you think you know javascript, good code like yours throws me back to researching. If I didn't see this, I would have continued to use underscorejs to do a reduce().

gknoy• 13 years ago

The time difference between the dead-simple (and ugly) solution that we almost all shy away from ("it burns us!") and the more elegant solution is especially interesting.

robomartin• 13 years ago

I hate snob programmers and designers.

It isn't very uncommon to have code that would cause most to projectile-vomit in products that are massively successful, reliable and, yes, very profitable.

For design, there's always Craigslist.

noahsark769• 13 years ago

I used Michelle's website last year when I was looking for examples of how to write good CSS and HTML - I definitely couldn't have told you then that she had started web programming less than a year ago!

It just goes to show that if you really have a passion for something and you really work hard at it, you can become awesome at it (or at least good enough to know you can be awesome without that much work) in no time. I find that this usually holds for most things in life, but it lends itself to web design especially.

sirmarksalot• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the first pseudo-3D thing I wrote back in high school. I'd borrowed one of my brother's 3D graphics books and came across the simple algorithm for depth drawing (x = x0/z, y = y0/z), and immediately set to work writing a wireframe space shooter in Pascal.

I was so eager to get the graphical part out there that I didn't think about the problems of modeling, or having multiple objects on the screen at once. The whole thing was a single-file, thousand-line, hard-coded mess. And I still think it was awesome.

untog• 13 years ago

My real regret after reading this post: my early code is lost. Git didn't exist. Maybe SVN did but I wouldn't have had a clue.

To my genuine amazement, the company I worked for immediately after leaving college is still using a program I wrote for them seven years after I wrote it. When I left, they said that every company operation was going to be covered by SAP- weird how that didn't work out...

But still, it was written in VB.NET (!) and was a horrible, horrible mess. I would love to take a look at that code now, but I'm afraid that if I contact them they'll hold me responsible for updating it.

domlebo70• 13 years ago

Be glad. My forays into programming have been gitified. It's like these teenagers growing up with social media and cameras everywhere. They'll always have those years to haunt them :P

bjliu2• 13 years ago

Well...it seems like Eric Z. and the UC Berkeley Hackers@Berkeley club really can easily vote their way up on HackerNews. It's happened more than once and its not a coincidence :\ Still, amazing article and learned a lot in 5 minutes :)

dirtyaura• 13 years ago

I like this quote:

"I gathered from these exchanges that programmers have a perpetual competition to see who can claim the most things as 'simple.'"

hazelcough7• 13 years ago

So many people like this quote that I wish I had structured the sentence less awkwardly.

skore• 13 years ago

I found it perfectly simple.

joshuacc• 13 years ago

No reason you couldn't change it now. :-)

lmm• 13 years ago

Programming may or may not be hard, but it's not a good idea to think of it as hard. You need the laziness that makes you think, as soon as you get to callback 3, "there must be a better way than this". Occasionally you're disappointed, but generally if you know programming is easy then it will be.

sergiosgc• 13 years ago

To the writer of the post: my thanks. You brought a smile to my face. The awe at the complexity of programming is something I felt a long time ago, when I was 9 or 10. It is still vivid, and your post brought back memories and a smile.

Just goes to show that talent is as much inate as it is countless hours bashing against the wall. I had a lot of patience when I was 9.

jwmoz• 13 years ago

I find those 21 nested callbacks strangely elegant.

Choronzon• 13 years ago

21 nested callbacks sounds like my current attempt at twisted programming,except Michelles code is a lot clearer and easier to read! Even more experienced people write complete rubbish in an new language or worse port their old language patterns over. No shame in being a beginner.

rhizome4• 13 years ago

"Be a better beginner," has served me well over the years.

cmurphycode• 13 years ago

I've been getting pretty sick of the whole "look how dumb I am, but I'm iterating!!!11" meme, but I really like this post. As a young person working in a company of people with far more experience, I've asked my share of stupid-simple questions and made my share of dumb mistakes. Luckily, I've got enough experience with programmers to get the most out of these interactions (also helpful to have decent human beings for co-workers!)

The important thing is to remember that there aren't (m)any super geniuses for which this stuff spews out first try. It's just that some people had the benefit of working through their ridiculously terrible code at the age of 8, writing BASIC, or whatever. And while they may have to learn jQuery the same as you did, they have a massive class of "intuitive" knowledge, which is really just experience, to help them through most of it.

sps_jp• 13 years ago

This reminds me of a novelty I created early on in my programming career. I wanted to recreate the color picker from Photoshop (I think version 4) on a webpage. This was several years before jQuery and "Googling" it would have produced meager results. After considerable effort and writing equally "elegant" code as the OP, I had a 256 x 256 grid of divs displaying my color picker. Little to no CSS in that bad boy, but a ton of javascript hex conversions. The page loaded soooooo slow and brought my computer to it's knees, but I was very proud of it. I did actually use recursion, but not to the degree I could have if I had more knowledge. The achievement was not in writing perfect and optimal code, but in having an idea and seeing it through to completion.

yati• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the days when I was learning, even before I got into college. Fortunately, we as an industry have more resources than any other field for beginners, but as lelandbatey said, "...we really should do a better job of explaining things to people,..." - +100

munificent• 13 years ago

> "No, no programmer would do something this." He was not sarcastic. I wanted to switch back into Molecular and Cellular Biology right then. But then he added, "No one would end up with code like this because they simply would not have had the patience."

My brother and I learned to program in BASIC on an Apple IIe when we were kids. At the time, we were also into making little movies with our family's VHS camcorder. You could draw graphics in BASIC, so we thought it would be radical to write a program that would draw a cool logo animation for our movies.

We got a big sheet of graph paper and hand-drew the intended pixel art for our logo. Then started writing code to draw it one line at a time. We put a delay between each line so that it would do an animated wipe. We knew how to pause by doing a busy loop:

    10 FOR I = 1 to 100
    20 NEXT I

What we didn't know was how to define reusable procedures (GOSUB). So between each of the hundred lines of pixel art, I typed in that loop. And I mean that literally: this was a line editor. No copy and paste. I wrote it out each time.

Now I just lament having the much free time and focus to be able to do that...

JamesAcorn• 13 years ago

Supposing you could travel back in time and give your earlier self a book (or at least, a few sheets of paper) that described 'good programming' (e.g. using GOSUB, in this context) - would you do it?

Would you have been better off 'doing things right' from day one, versus experimenting and muddling through?

gizmo686• 13 years ago

This reminds me of some of my earlier excursions into coding. For example, early on I needed to be able to randomly select from a set of 100 numbers. Not knowing about arrays, but knowing about classes and the random module I created a class that had 100 fields, and a method that contained a giant if-else tree to select one. Of course, I did not want to write out all of that, so I ended up creating an excel spreadsheet, and used that to mass produce a bunch of the repeated lines.

joshguthrie• 13 years ago

I love this code, reminds me of my seven-level cascade in server-code javascript.

And it's always funny to go back to our beginnings and see the difference in code and level after only some years :)

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