Personally, I feel it takes a certain kind of person to want to program. I never really understood this push to have everyone learn to code... maybe if just to get them to stop using their computers like a type writer and realize they're capable of more.
Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#32I learned 20+ years ago and I feel like back then it was a lot easier to learn. You would get a VB or C++ book and immerse yourself in it. The book would be self-contained --it had all the information you needed to become decent at that topic. Once you were done, you moved to the next book. If I was learning today, I think that I would be completely overwhelmed by the amount of information that we have at our disposa…
I had the same experience. When I was learning 20+ years ago, I absorbed books. I would go cover to cover and get a vision of what was possible plus whatever details I retained. Then I could go back to the book for reference as needed when I went to do things. The amount of information available now is overwhelming and, increasingly, not collected into paper books. As much has I love my e-reader for fiction, I don't…
I agree, it doesn't really stick until you're working with it and running into/solving issues. I work with a young guy who is interested in programming and he was asking about html/css, python, test driven development, git, and then docker... I mean, holy crap what a tangled mess. Anyway, I gave him a VBA book and a couple of ideas for projects to solve business problems and he's been having a wonderful time. I'll show him git next week maybe...
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#33Stopping. Remembering to eat. Having to stop to sleep. But eventually you get used to the interruptions.
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#34Being frustrated about something that no one can help you with. Sometimes you get bugs that just are real headscratchers. This happens at the beginning of your career, at the end, and all the way through. There's some subtle thing keeping your code from working, even though you've gone through all the guides, stack overflow, and code review you can handle. Examples of issues like this are bugs in other people's code,…
I recently did a certificate signing application in Golang. This was my first Golang application. The app would send CSR over to a server which would sign and respond back with certs. For over a week of debugging realised the server had bugs and was not signing the certificate properly. The bug was very subtle. The bug in third party libraries can be overwhelming for a beginner.
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#35The hardest part was that I didn't have the hardware documentation (6502, POKEY, ANTIC, GTIA...) and my mom wouldn't buy me the assembler cartridge. I got delayed 6 to 8 years because of this. I finally resolved the problem via Peter Norton's assembly book and MS-DOS's DEBUG.COM when I got a hand-me-down with a V20 CPU.
The second hardest part was that edlin is a dreadful editor.
The programming comes naturally if you have documentation and tools.
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#36I started being interested in coding when I was 7 (in 1990). Our family was quite poor, and no way we could afford even 286DX, and 386DX was well out of our reach. Somehow my father found a half-broken Electronika BK-0011M, an old USSR computer that ran a stripped-down version of BASIC. It didn't have a memory chip, and we couldn't find any in our small and remote Siberian town. No tape either. And the power supply was faulty, so every 3-4 hours it would reboot, leaving me with a clean slate. We found some "books" that were badly translated BASIC manuals retyped on a typing machine. I was mostly coding various graphical and physical simulations then, drawing procedural images and such. Because of reboots, I had to write it in parallel on the computer and a sheet of paper, so I could type it again if power cycled before I could run and briefly enjoy it. At 11, I was skilled enough to land a first "job" for my mom's research institute: analyzing and visualizing some agricultural data. It paid enough to get a 2nd hand 80486, and my "career" went upwards from there. This whole experience taught me a valuable lesson: ignore excuses, stop complaining, make do with what you have, and move forward.
These days my biggest gripe is probably the state of the JavaScript world. I'm mostly a Python person, but having to deal with JS leaves me frustrated more often than not: new frameworks, tools crop up every year, old tools stop working, breaking changes are introduced at such pace that someone not fully dedicated to frontend has a hard time keeping up. If any JS framework had the same stability, level of documentation, and clear roadmap as Django, the frontend world would be a much better place.
I think the most valuable skill for a "real world" programmer is the ability to find and read the documentation. Also, curiosity to do that even without an immediate need. Read it like sci-fi. The more you read, the more you have the right mindset, and those "building blocks" that would come later when you're thinking about implementation.
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#37Probably when you just finished your first book, whatever that is, and realize you just barely scratched the surface.
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#38Being frustrated about something that no one can help you with. Sometimes you get bugs that just are real headscratchers. This happens at the beginning of your career, at the end, and all the way through. There's some subtle thing keeping your code from working, even though you've gone through all the guides, stack overflow, and code review you can handle. Examples of issues like this are bugs in other people's code,…
I recently did a certificate signing application in Golang. This was my first Golang application. The app would send CSR over to a server which would sign and respond back with certs. For over a week of debugging realised the server had bugs and was not signing the certificate properly. The bug was very subtle. The bug in third party libraries can be overwhelming for a beginner.
God you're bringing up my own personal PTSD. I also had a problem one time in production where my certificate code wouldn't work, and it was live, and everyone was freaking out.
Anything with security, encryption, passwords, certificates is extra hard, because a lot of times the error messages are just too cryptic (ha!) to get to the root cause. They are trying to not give away anything if possible, which can make even the most trivial errors hard to spot.
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason you can't just pick up a book today and immerse yourself into it to learn? What book would you recommend someone read, if they wanted to self study?
Question - do you consider yourself the type of person that functions better in short intervals e.g., 15 minute sessions or longer studying sessions?
Longer study sessions
Re: Ask HN: What's was the hardest part about starting to code?
#40The hardest part is the constant jumping around between tech just to get something simple working, it's overwhelming. First you need to learn HTML and CSS...easy, oh wait you need to learn Bootstrap too, fml. Then Javascript...no JQuery...Coffeescript, Typescript? Don't forget React, it's mandatory for web development now. Back-end, well you need to learn NodeJS. Actually, all that stuff is a waste of time - just learn Ruby on Rails.
There is too much stuff coming at you all at once - it's like trying to drink from a fire hose.