There are 2 aspects to programming that you might or might not be getting. First is figuring out what the solution to your problem is, Second is to put the solution on paper (write the program). Both of these take practice, but the former is much harder to learn that the latter. Most programming courses will teach you the latter. I wrote my first C program at 11, but I certainly didn't understand what that * meant next to a variable at the time, but I could think of the solution to the problem in terms of a program.
Ask HN: When does programming start to make sense?
51–53 of 53 posts
Re: Ask HN: When does programming start to make sense?
#52If you really want to badly do it, then
Be patient with yourself, don't let frustration get the better of yourself, keep trying, get immersed and give yourself some time.
For me, it took quite some time of interspersed half-hearted attempts, then accidental and incremental opportunities to do increasingly complex tasks that I could learn and scale (on different environments, SAP, NC, Excel Macros, JMP), then some big time immersion over 4 weeks with David Power's books (his style clicked for me). I am no expert now, but am doing stuff that I didnt' think I could.
Would have to disagree about the "Natural" part of your comment. Keep working at it.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: When does programming start to make sense?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting, and actually quite encouraging: it suggests that you do think in terms of abstractions of the problem you're trying to solve, which is arguably the most fundamental skill in programming. If your difficulty is that you haven't got the mechanical process of turning your thoughts into code down yet, that's a much easier thing to overcome. Could you share with us what books and programming languages/t…
The book I've had the most luck with is Learning To Program by Chris Pine. There's a question in the book about counting the sections of land on a standard X,Y grid map. That would be a good example of a problem that blows up my brain.
Which of these would you say is closest to your difficulty?
a) You don't understand what the problem means.
b) You can't describe an algorithm that would solve the problem in plain English or "pseudocode".
c) You could describe the algorithm informally, but don't know how to code it.