Ask HN: When does programming start to make sense?

It was no fun when I REALLY learned how to program, it was pure panic. I was half way through a CS degree and got a summer job, and I just had get it done no matter what so I beat my head against the problems and solved them. After that, all the theory that I'd been learning started to make sense, and now I have a more nuanced approach to coding, and a successful career.

Just trying to say, learning is not always fun. Get a job doing something you don't know how to do. Maybe that will motivate you. :)

Alan Turing said that programming would always be interesting because the boring mechanical aspects could be automated (where "interesting" means "you don't understand it" - or else you could automate it.) I daily run into issues that I don't understand. That's what programming is for me, I'm afraid; rather like science. It's a sequence of monsters. The best we can do is to be tackling new monsters, not the same ones.

Of course, programming jobs do exist where you do the same thing over and over again. And there's a threshold of skill required before you can automate some classes of things; and you also need a clear understanding of the task, to see precisely which aspects are mechanical, and which aspects are configurable. It pretty quickly gets into compsci research. And sometimes it's not worth the effort (it can take a lot of effort.)

But if you've ever called a method twice, instead of writing the code twice, then you have done some of it.

I feel that your question "start to make sense" suggests your thinking is all-or-nothing. Does no aspect of programming make sense to you - or do some "trivial" aspects make sense but they "don't count"? Does a print statement make sense to you, to some extent? Does a loop make sense to you? There's a continuum of mastery. If you only acknowledge perfect and complete mastery as "mastery", then you won't feel any satisfaction in mastery of one small bit of it. And without the confidence and encouragement of that success, it's very hard to be motivated to continue. (oh yeah, plus, of course, it's impossible to have perfect and complete mastery of programming anyway, for Turing's reason.)

Programming, as a whole, is far larger than any one person could come to comprehend in a single lifetime (imagine it being 1000x bigger). And to make matters worse, it is continually growing more complex at a rate no person could follow either!

Just when you think you've finally gotten a solid grasp on writing CRUD apps in PHP, someone shows you Haskell, or Prolog, and suddenly realized just how little you thought you knew.

That said, this all makes for programming being an excellent domain for both a career and a passionate hobby. Easy to learn (a tiny corner) and hard to master (a chunk you can really appreciate 10 years in) -- what more could you want?

I cannot stress this enough: learn refactoring, http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-...

You will simultaneously learn:

- terminology and models relevant to software design and construction at every level

- principles of good coding and how to tell good code from bad

- the ability to redesign code as needed

- the experience and knowledge necessary to approach coding with confidence

All of these are the most critical tools you need to transform yourself from someone who sorta-kinda knows a few principles of coding to someone who groks software construction.

If I had to choose between a co-worker who truly groked the principles of re-factoring and a co-worker who had a PhD in Computer Science I would choose the former every time. It's really that important.

I don't think that's good advice for a newbie.

To the OP: practice, practice and practice. It will take a long time. Months to start getting it, years to go anywhere. 10+ years to be good. If it's too hard, choose another profession. 99% of folks out there would hate programming.