Programming

423 readers

3 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

Project idea for learning (lemmy.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by GreatBlueHeron@lemmy.ca to c/programming@programming.dev

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm a retired Unix sysadmin. Over the years I've built things in COBOL, FORTAN, C, perl, rexx, PHP, visual basic, various Unix shells and maybe others. Nothing has been a real "application" - mostly just utilities to help me get things done.

Now that I'm retired, and it's cold outside, I'm curious to try some more coding - and I have an idea.

The music communities here seem to post links to YouTube. I generally use Lemmy on my phone but don't use YouTube, or listen to music, on my phone if I can help it. I'd like to scrape a music community here and add the songs posted to a playlist in my musicbrainz account.

Does that sound like a reasonable learner project? Any suggestions for language and libraries appreciated. My preferred IDE is vim on bash and I have a home server running Linux where this could run as a daemon, or be scheduled.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] hallettj 3 points 10 months ago

That sounds like a good learning project to me. I think there are two approaches you might take: web scraping, or an API client.

My guess is that web scraping might be easier for getting started because scrapers are easy to set up, and you can find very good documentation. In that case I think Perl is a reasonable choice of language since you're familiar with it, and I believe it has good scraping libraries. Personally I would go with Typescript since I'm familiar with it, it's not hard (relatively speaking) to get started with, and I find static type checking helpful for guiding one to a correctly working program.

OTOH if you opt to make a Lemmy API client I think the best language choices are Typescript or Rust because that's what Lemmy is written in. So you can import the existing API client code. Much as I love Rust, it has a steeper learning curve so I would suggest going with Typescript. The main difficulty with this option is that you might not find much documentation on how to write a custom Lemmy client.

Whatever you choose I find it very helpful to set up LSP integration in vim for whatever language you use, especially if you're using a statically type-checked language. I'll be a snob for just a second and say that now that programming support has generally moved to the portable LSP model the difference between vim+LSP and an IDE is that the IDE has a worse editor and a worse integrated terminal.