Ask HN: What made programming finally click for you?

It's not programming per se, but what really made things "click" for me as a software engineer was to really be diligent about making sure I was very clear on the problem I was trying to solve, and making sure that I focused on actually solving that problem. That helped me get past not knowing where to start, not focusing my efforts properly, and building for the sake of building (unless that was the goal!).

Do you have any resources that make PowerShell intuitive?

I've been using bash for ages but PS looks like a verbose, wildly disorganized language, possibly optimized for Windows idiosyncrasies. I have difficulties remembering just the syntax for getting the list of environment variables.

> what other languages I might enjoy solving problems in

Clojure - as intro I had "The Joy of Clojure" by Michael Fogus

Teaching others.

Specifically, I learned to program in elementary school (2nd generation programmer), but when I was in 6th grade my school system had its first programming class. Unfortunately, the teacher didn't know how to program so I taught everybody including him. (It was the 90s in a rural school system). Having to explain things to others made me a.) think about my own thought processes and b.) think about why I was taught/learning to do things the way I was. It made me aware of the meta aspect of programming: It isn't enough to know how to program: It's also necessary to be able to think about one's own process.

For me, it was my first semester of university. I was infatuated with a woman who was a Computer Science student. I was an Electrical Engineering student. CS students had to take Pascal. Engineers had to take FORTRAN (with punch cards). In order to try to impress her, I had to learn Pascal while also trying to learn FORTRAN. She changed majors the next semester.

TL;DR - when I taught someone and did all her homework as well.

Here’s what it made it click for me: .addEventListener(‘onclick’, () => {})