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Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

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Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

#21

Post by dagw »

Two things.

One was Visual Basic. VB helped me go from writing fun abstract play things to amuse myself to actually writing something that solved a real world problem for people at a real world company. This taught me that focusing on boring, simple and 'ugly' programs that actually end up in front of people and save them time (and money) is far more valuable than writing really clever programs that don't, and that's what programming as a profession (as opposed to a hobby) is all about.

The second was learning Haskell. The way Haskell forced me to think about everything connected to programming completely changed how I saw things and helped my build up a mental model of the programming 'world' that really made sense to me and made solving programming problems much easier.

Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

#25

Post by LASR »

LOGO - it was this kind of graphics generation language where a cursor moved on the screen based on commands you put in. This clicked right away. I was 5 years old IIRC.

Then, during my pre-teen years, I couldn’t understand how games had several moving objects all at the same time even though it was sequential execution. Then the update-render loop clicked in as I discovered it. Together with that, all kinds of event handling, interrupts, context switching etc.

Then, with WPF, databinding really clicked in with any sort of retained-mode rendering. So then Angular, React etc as well.

Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

#26

Post by skydhash »

When I started learning programming – just when I was starting high school – it was a very mechanical practice. I read something in a book, tried it and the results would match most of the time. I could understand what the code was doing, but not how it did it. Until I learn assembly and memory models when I was researching rootkits – infosec was the most exciting thing for me at that time. Then it dawned on me that programming was about manipulating data in a specific way to get the result you want. That made everything easier, looking past syntax and tooling to seek only data flows and intent.

Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

#27

Post by replwoacause »

To add to this question: is there any language in particular that makes learning programming concepts any easier? I often see people mentioned Visual Basic but since that is no longer around, what would be the next closest thing? I suppose Python?

I use PowerShell for a lot of my scripting needs and have found it to be pretty intuitive, but am wondering what other languages I might enjoy solving problems in.

Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

#29

Post by anotheryou »

Getting started: flash

Actually clicking that I can build my own tools and everything I can imagine: processing ( https://processing.org/ ). Yet another language with a lot of visuals, but I actually started to do some simple data processing with it. Too bad the js copy's website seems down: https://p5js.org

Re: Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

#30

Post by Rayhem »

I don't know if this is what made it click for me specifically, but here's an interesting realization I recently came to about mental models in programming.

Somewhere along the line I conceptualized functions as a mapping from their inputs to their outputs, much like in mathematics, and I would later come to learn this is what's known as referential transparency[1]. Eventually, during a foray into functional programming, I discovered Lambda Bubble Pop[2] and thought it was brilliant because it was exactly how I had been resolving function invocations inside my own head pretty much for forever, and poof, higher-order functions just made sense. I recently showed it to a developer colleague of mine, though, and he had a very different reaction. In discussing with him, I gathered "replacing a function with its output" was rather alien as a concept; this was not at all how he thought about functions. I'm still trying to figure out how he does conceptualize functions, but I gather they're more lists of instructions than they are term replacements.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_transparency

[2]: https://chrisuehlinger.com/LambdaBubblePop/

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