Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

The "Aha!!" moment where things start falling into place and you understand really what it is about and now you can concentrate on breaking up and solving the problem at hand rather than worrying about the lagnuage, syntax or the act of programming. Because you know if you can solve the problem you can implement it in no time.

I started learning Python when I was 12 years old by reading books. I could understand the mechanics but I couldn't solve a problem I hadn't seen solved before. I tried to make a game of hangman, but I simply couldn't design it. I gave up on it.

Several months later, perhaps a year, I sat down to try it again. For some reason it wasn't so hard this time. I was able to get it to work.

I don't remember what my other projects were, but I remember struggling to design some more software. I couldn't tell where to begin or how stuff should work. So I'd just jump in somewhere and start somehow. I'd flesh out one component, and then when I'd go to write a component that integrated with it, I found my first design was wrong. I ended up throwing out drafts and restarting.

Through a grueling repetition of this I learned to have a better intuition. I increased my capacity to hold a large and complex program in my head, and to reason about it. I remember a job interview at 18 years old, when someone told me, "you write decent Python." I was quite proud.

I don't think they're was a single moment where it clicked. It was a painful teething process of repeatedly painting myself into a corner, throwing everything out, and starting again. I was very lucky to have supportive adults in my life who helped me out, along with kind strangers on the internet who looked at my broken code.

I'll tell you about one small moment of realization. Once I was asking for help online with a problem relating to my masking an import with a local variable, or something like that. After this was explained to me, Ned Batchelder gave me a command; "now, realize that importing is just a special case of assignment."

It legit blew my mind. It felt like a zen master had imparted special wisdom to me. It was a magical pedagogical moment I've never experienced again. Thanks again, nedbat.

This would suggest that you're free to choose your application model and interface design. But usually you're not.

A big part of todays programming work is spent on understanding what others have come up with about how the environment your app runs in is modelled and how it talks to your app and expects your app to talk and behave. This includes data models, process models, event handling etc.

So while there might be a big click when you discover that you need a place to store your data and have algorithms/code operating on that data, in common programming tasks it has to click again an again about others' ways of doing things and adjusting your code to fit that model.

And yes that can be fun and enlighting. Again and again.

Learning some Java when C++ was dominating. It seemed so much easier for the beginner to get a working program and think more about the problem space in a purer way. Also the fact it came with a great standard library.

The first thing they taught me in programming in uni was: "Divide and conquer". It took me some time to truly understand what that meant in terms of programming. I remember that when starting a software project, I always started to feel very anxious if I was unable to picture the WHOLE program in my head; after some time I understood that by dividing it into smaller problems, and solving each one of them one at the time (without thinking at all in the other parts), things will eventually be connected and work, like magic. By truly adopting this basic paradigm you start to think naturally about interfaces to connect these smaller parts of your program, and from there things just flow.