learn-x-by-doing-y VS learnxinyminutes-docs

This list is enough, but after you get the basics from one of the above, do a project from https://aquadzn.github.io/learn-x-by-doing-y/

Some other knowledge-graph type projects for comparison:

> Metacademy - "Package Manager for Knowledge" - https://metacademy.org/

> MathLingua - language for easily creating a collection of mathematical knowledge, including definitions, theorems, axioms, and conjectures, in a format designed to be easy and fun to read and write. - https://www.mathlingua.org/

> Learn X in Y minutes - https://learnxinyminutes.com/

> Learn X by doing Y - https://aquadzn.github.io/learn-x-by-doing-y/

Many people are also starting to use the bidirectional-link style of note-taking to create their own knowledge graphs. I'm curious to see what sort of tools will emerge in the future to help people share the graphs they've created.

You see, I really needed something to do. I had been doing a few web related projects on the side and that was something I didn't want to do any more, at least for a while. So I looked into doing something "closer to the metal", something much lower level than sending requests back and forth to a web server. So I quickly fired up Learn X by doing Y and searched for something interesting, eventually ending up on Building your own Lisp (We all have a Lisp phase, it was just my turn).

Search is good, but if you're like me and would like to just see the list of available projects, it's here

https://github.com/aquadzn/learn-x-by-doing-y/blob/main/proj...

Yes, for example that's why https://learnxinyminutes.com/ exists. Like, I don't remember the particulars of JavaScript syntax or the core library after a year of not touching it, so before I had to reconstruct it in my head even for small tasks. Now LLMs solve this issue.

I can't fathom it, but if I had to start over today, I'd:

- Pick something I want to build

- Pick the tools -- whatever's at the top of the latest SlackOverflow survey, though I'm not sure SO matters anymore

- Peruse the https://learnxinyminutes.com link for the chosen tools

- Use an LLM with good prompting to assist me in making what I decided. I'd use chat and hand type the code from the LLM and try to understand what I'm typing and see how it all fits together

Not exactly what you're looking for, but I like to monitor changes[1] to https://learnxinyminutes.com/ to find out about new languages.

1. https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes-docs/pulls

This is a small code example to get the basic idea. If you want a bit of a bigger file to play around yourself or ever want to learn about a new language you can use LearnXinYMinutes which is a great starting point to learn any language you desire.

> Sure, maybe for some esoteric edge cases, but 5 mins on https://learnxinyminutes.com/ should get you 80% of the way there, and an afternoon looking at big projects or guidelines/examples should you another 18% of the way.

Not for C++, and even for other languages, it's not the language that's hard, it's the idioms.

Python written by experts can be well-nigh incomprehensible (you can save typing out exactly one line if you use list-comprehensions everywhere!).

Someone who knows Javascript well still needs to know all the nooks and crannies of the popular frameworks.

Java with the most popular frameworks (Spring/Boot/etc) can be impossible for a non-Java programmer to reason about (where's all this fucking magic coming from? Where is it documented? What are the other magic words I can put into comments?)

C# is turning into a C++ wannabe as far as comprehension complexity goes.

Right now, the quickest onboarding I've seen by far are Go codebases.

The knowledge tree required to contribute to a codebase can exists on a Deep axis and a Wide axis. C++ goes Deep and Wide. Go and C are the only projects I've seen that goes neither deep nor wide.

Learn x in y minutes: Concise tutorials to learn various programming languages and tools quickly.

StackOverflow's making their own competing LLM for all this stuff.

IMO, one of the biggest problems with the way people use LLMs right now, is that they're being treated as a single oracle: to know Java, it must be trained on examples of Java.

It would be much better if their language comprehension abilities were kept separated from their knowledge (and there are development efforts in this direction), so in this example it would be trained to be able to be able to read a Java tutorial rather than by actually reading a Java tutorial, so when the overall system is asked to write something in Java, the language model within the system decides to do this by opening https://learnxinyminutes.com and combining the user query with the webpage.

I think this will help make the models more compact, which is a benefit all by itself, but it would also mean that knowledge can be updated much more easily.

Someone would have to actually do this in order to see if those benefits are worth the extra cost of having to load a potentially huge a tutorial into the context window, and likewise the extent to which a more compact training set makes the language comprehension worse.