My master's degree is a 2 year period when I realised that regardless of the scale and complexity of a problem, if you have a systematic learning approach and resolve, you can overcome it.
Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
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Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
#12I think I personally enjoy the magic of languages, compilers and their tools. A lot of work and fields make us very dependent on programming. We can achieve almost everything we want through programming. I used to be a person using a programming language, but now I'm working on my own programming language https://github.com/KusionStack/KCLVM , design a programming language and implement it, which will eventually improve the efficiency of developers, stimulate the creativity of more programmers, and let them feel b, I am working hard to realize this beautiful vision.
Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
#13Having a goal. I started in my teenage years so it's been a while, but coding small programs that take a number, double it and print it out gets boring after a while.
Then my father asked me if I could write a simple app that talked through the serial port to control a project of his. Having a goal, and external motivators, is what turns something you learn into something you use.
Have a well defined goal, and unless you're one of those with great internal motivation, share the goal with someone else.
Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
#14Not sure what you mean. I was fascinated by the idea of telling a machine what to do before I got started. That's what got me started. I tried it out with the first programmable machine I could get my hands on, which turned out to be a calculator, everything since feels like a new and cool variation on the theme of telling a machine what to do. Data structures, OOP, functional programming, parallelization, web servers, they have the benefit of being fun to think about in their own right, but within programming, they're still just tools to solve specific problems (better). Initially I assumed that all problems had a solution like this, turns out there are some fundamental limits to that, but thinking about those is more math than programming (and a good reason to prioritize math and fundamental understanding over getting married too closely to any particular programming paradigm).
Perhaps the closest to an epiphany that I had was in an AI course, realizing that building machines that don't take instructions but rather examples of what to do is a full paradigm in its own right. But arguably that's separate from programming (and imho underscores why understanding the fundamentals is more important). When it comes to memorizing syntax, that's just a function of how long and how recently I've been using that particular tool, it builds up and also decays fairly quickly, that aspect doesn't feel fundamental at all.
Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
#15I can think of some specific things that clicked over the years , but getting acclimated to programming in general was a gradual process, rather than a "click".
Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
#16The title of the classic Niklaus Wirth book. "Algorithms + Data structures = Programs".
Rereading the Wirth's book 20 year later, I finally realize it. Every product I have been working on was a data structure indexed by a key, then processed to transform the data into other data.
Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
#17Not sure what you mean. I was fascinated by the idea of telling a machine what to do before I got started. That's what got me started. I tried it out with the first programmable machine I could get my hands on, which turned out to be a calculator, everything since feels like a new and cool variation on the theme of telling a machine what to do. Data structures, OOP, functional programming, parallelization, web server…
Exactly this. I remember the first time I saw a computer, just pressed a button and the letter appeared on the screen. It was magical. There was another “aha” moment later when I understood that it’s doing what I tell it to do but nothing else, so I have to be very specific.
Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
#18Learning 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.
+1, while not really a “aha” moment, it was definitely a “holy shit” moment coming to Java from C++.
Another moment was trying out Node.js to see what all the fuss was about (coming from Java/C#), I’m not a huge fan of JS but I was blown away by how easy it is to build stuff (npm was the real killer feature, unfortunately I never came across any other language that did it better).
Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
#19Programming a game made it click early for me. I however think the barrier of entry is almost too low today blurring the line of what programming actually is.
Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?
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