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Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

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Re: Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

#11

Post by ch00ey »

fmstephe wrote: post #10

I don't know if it's the Aha moment you are after. But in my programming 101 class the lecturer outlined the maximum-contiguous subsequence problem (which sounds very boring). Solved it once and then solved it two more times each time making it more efficient. That was my 'aha' moment that I decided I wanted to be a programmer. I suspect that this is the most important learning moment - what is it in programming that…

>what is it in programming that excites you?

Not quite sure actually. I've always been fascinated with computers and the web from a young age. And I've gotten to a point where I have (at least what I'd like to think of as) great ideas and not being able to program is what's been "holding me back" from executing them. So, I bit the bullet and decided to start learning how to program.

Re: Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

#12

Post by ch00ey »

mikey_p wrote: post #7

Data structures. I could understand control flow, looping, etc, but until I took the time to understand data structures, I was always copying example code and trying to guess at what would work. You can self teach yourself alot by learning as you go, but until I took the time to specifically study data structures I hadn't made it over the hump, my 'ah-ha' moment so to speak.

hmmm... ok. I've been hearing a lot on how learning Data Structures (from creeping other Ask HN questions) helps.

Can you recommend a good source on learning data structures?

Re: Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

#13

Post by stevep98 »

When I was 12 I took the Commodore VIC-20 Programmer's reference guide to spain on vacation (!) for 2 weeks. I figured out how to program assembly and hand-assembled a short program to rapidly toggle the screen color from black-to-white.

Hmm if I try real hard I can probably recreate it here: 169 0 141 15 144 169 1 141 15 144 76 0 32

Anyway, when I got home, I tried it out. It changes the screen color, but then crashed because of a mistake in the loop instruction.

That was definitely an AHA moment - realizing how CPU's work.

Re: Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

#14

Post by babel17 »

I read this magazine called DOS, and after I bought (or, better, after my mom bought it for me) a used 8088-PC in, like, 1990, I spent about 6 months trying to get the programs in this magazine to run. I did this by typing them up into a textfile, and it just didn't work. Then, one day, it worked! It was a .BAT file. This was probably my biggest AHA moment in programming.

Re: Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

#15

Post by xcallemjudasx »

madhouse wrote: post #6

I've had a couple of "ah-ha" moments during my career so far. The first was when I noticed that "hey! I can WRITE programs myself!". That was one of the happiest weeks of my life: my father showed me how to write a very simple C+4 BASIC program, a dancing stick figure on the top-left corner of the screen. I spent the rest of the week drawing different things and 'animating' them. That was somewhere around 1987 or so.…

Learn You a Haskell is excellent. It probably taught me in an hour or two what my professor couldn't do the entire term. (He's a great professor, just not when it comes to teaching Haskell)

It's all available online currently here: http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters

Re: Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

#17

Post by nobodyspecial »

I had the Vic-20 manual - it included everything, schematics, assembly language, etc. But for some reason I just couldn't cross the conceptual barrier of op-codes to assembly instructions. I didn't understand. A small assembly program in some computer magazine showed the assembly code, then the list of POKES to load the assembly program (it was a keyboard organ): BOOM! that was all it took...

Re: Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

#18

Post by LarryA »

When I was learning to program in high school, I was thinking on how to do something ...to make the computer do subroutines, and and my brother told me about GOSUB (that hadn't been taught yet in the class), something clicked at that point.

After that moment I started looking for ways to do what 'I' wanted the computer to do instead of just what I was told the computer could do... and was then happily exploring stuff beyond what the teachers knew (which was not too much either, back then).

Re: Ask HN: When was your "ah-ha" moment when learning how to program?

#20

Post by tritogeneia »

I learned sporadically: I fooled around in Scheme and Java when I was a kid, and used MATLAB as a student doing research, and learned the modicum of Unix that everybody in a math department knows, but it didn't really stick. Until recently, when I realized that everything I care about scientifically needs a good programmer to implement it. So I started a learning project and quickly discovered that programming is not hard. I wish someone had told me this a long time ago. Programming is just, in essence, writing extremely clearly.
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