11–20 of 102 posts
Do you enjoy programming? If so, you will be good at programming. If not, you most likely won't.
Seconded. Quality comes only from quantity. And quantity can only happen if your efforts result in bruises you can tolerate.
Do you enjoy programming? If so, you will be good at programming. If not, you most likely won't.
Even if you were somehow very good at programming but you hatted it, would you choose it as a job? I'd drop it immediately, don't waste your precious time on it.
This leaves one other option: If you loved it more than any other job but you sucked at it, what would you do? I'd say: Do yourself a favor and find a job where you do what you love. If you prove my advice to be bad, you'd be the first human who made it through childhood without the ability to get better by practice, so don't worry. (And certainly don't think you have be on the Linus/RMS level to do meaningful things.)
(The options for sucking and hating and for loving and excelling are obvious ;))
You don't necessarily need to enjoy programming. But if you're also not particularly interested in the results of programming, or the ways that you might get better results, it's probably not for you.
I don't know of any particularly good tests for aptitude, I suspect general intelligence is probably more predictive than anything else.
Math-heavy but interesting
2. Clojure koans (http://www.4clojure.com/)
Here you're good if your solutions are close to the best solution - which is often short and readable (= elegant?)
There are probably similar koans for other languages and I'd also strongly recommend a functional language (because it frees yourself from the shackles of imperative and OO thinking, but YMMV)
If you can grasp pointers, recursion, asynchronous programming/callbacks in less than a week (as a concepts, not apply-able skills) you have it.
If you can grasp pointers, recursion, asynchronous programming/callbacks in less than a week (as a concepts, not apply-able skills) you have it.
Pro tip: In order to understand recursion, you have to either just know it or know someone who understands it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pro tip: In order to understand recursion, you have to either just know it or know someone who understands it.
Not at all. This is just basic mathematical induction in reverse. I think we learned it in 7th or 8th grade.
I read a study a while ago that addressed this exact problem - a CS professor gave an intro class a test on CS. The students who had a consistent view of how a computer works (no matter if it was wrong or not) turned into programmers. Everyone else failed. There was essentially no movement between the groups.
If you can grasp pointers, recursion, asynchronous programming/callbacks in less than a week (as a concepts, not apply-able skills) you have it.
I'm fine with C now though.