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Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

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Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#41

Post by pjbrunet »

shittyanalogy wrote: post #24

Motivation. If you don't have the motivation you'll never be able to do it. If you can't sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day reading documentation and hunting for syntax errors you're not going to be able to do it. If re-writing algorithms doesn't give you an intrinsic satisfaction, you're not going to be able to do it. No amount of everybody can code tutorials is going to help. They should all be, "how to f…

Not sure why you got downvoted because you're absolutely right. The hard thing is the commitment required.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#42

Post by parenthetically »

ibebrett wrote: post #25

This may be thinking back on things with rose tinted glasses, but I learned to code in qbasic when I was 12 or so at a Boys and Girls club after school and fell in love. It was entirely effortless and fun to me. I think the difference is at that point I wasn't trying to program to enter some lucrative career and be a startup guy (where are these "coders" going to be once the market dies down and a new industry is hot…

I first learned on a variant of BASIC myself when I was in elementary school, and it was effortless then -- but that's a profoundly different thing from learning the professional tools/design patterns/development styles to get hired in a specific domain. As somebody who picked it up again after a long break, the whole point was not 'getting hired in some hot new lucrative industry,' but 'god, please let somebody hire me to do this thing that is so much more mentally satisfying than the last few things I've done for a living.'

From that perspective, I absolutely understand the urgency here, and appreciate how this article talks about how the moment when the tutorials break off is when the real learning begins.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#43

Post by rcthompson »

When I was in college, one CS professor explained the difficulty of coding to me in terms of discreteness vs continuity. In the real world, things are continuous. If you accidentally build your structure with 9 supports instead of 10, then you only lose 10% of the strength of the structure, more or less. The strength varies continuously with the amount of support. But if you're writing a 10-line program and you forget one of the lines (or even one character), the program isn't 10% wrong, it's 100% wrong. (For example, instead of compiling and running correctly, it doesn't compile at all. Completely different results.)

Of course this logic doesn't hold up all the time. Sometimes you can remove a critical support and collapse a structure, and sometimes removing a line of code has little to no effect, but the point is that in programming, a small change can have an unboundedly large effect, which is the definition of discontinuity.

(I believe it was this professor, who was my teacher for discrete math: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jck/ )

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#44

Post by codingdave »

Many of the coders I know (which is mostly folk in their 40s) never learned from scratch. More often, we started in support roles, and slowly worked into the code. First, learning to read it to help troubleshoot issue, then making basic changes, and slowly picking up more and more of a specific codebase. Once the basics were understood, we'd start making basic apps on our own, often while still supporting more complex apps. After a year or two, we'd be competent enough to do things from scratch, and then we'd move into a full-time coding role.

I know that few people learn like this these days. I've heard extreme negative criticism when I tell people that a few years of 2nd/3rd tier support on a large codebase is actually a good start to a coding career.

But I also never experienced the troubles described in this article. There were hard times, which would have been eased with today's online content. But it wasn't hard because of a downturn in confidence, and resulting "despair" that is described - it was a slow, but steady increase in confidence and abilities.

So are people better off today? Maybe. They certainly are coding at younger ages... but I have no complaints about my path. I still was fully competent in my early 20s, did a startup at 26, etc.

So there are many paths to developing your career. I'd recommend people keep an open mind to all options, and do what works for them personally.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#45

Post by curyous »

Learning to code is not hard. At all. Not relative to things that actually are hard. Having trained as an electronic engineer, programming is by far one of the easiest things I've ever done, by an order of magnitude. You can tell by the number of teenagers that can code, how many teenagers can design a nuclear submarine? That is much harder to learn.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#46

Post by freehunter »

dccoolgai wrote: post #20

When someone asks me "How do I learn to code?" I always say "You don't. You just code."

And then they give up and do something else, with lower self esteem this time.

Seriously. "Just code" is the worst advice that everyone gives. It's trite. You'd be better off saying nothing at all. Do you think you can sit someone down with a C compiler and come back five years later to find they've written the Linux kernel?

Don't say "just code". It's not helpful. It's disparaging. You don't tell a child "just walk". You learn to code, you're not born with it.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#47

Post by Animats »

It's an ad. At the end: Our core program is specifically designed to bridge this whole process. ... Sign up below. Worse, the training just creates junior web developers. There's a glut of junior web developers.

The concept of Ruby on Rails was to make the whole process of web site development a tutorial-level job from start to finish. How did that work out?

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#48

Post by stevenmays »

codingdave wrote: post #44

Many of the coders I know (which is mostly folk in their 40s) never learned from scratch. More often, we started in support roles, and slowly worked into the code. First, learning to read it to help troubleshoot issue, then making basic changes, and slowly picking up more and more of a specific codebase. Once the basics were understood, we'd start making basic apps on our own, often while still supporting more comple…

This is exactly how I learned. I wasn't fully competent until my mid 20s, but there are many ways to skin a cat.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#49

Post by reikonomusha »

rcthompson wrote: post #43

When I was in college, one CS professor explained the difficulty of coding to me in terms of discreteness vs continuity. In the real world, things are continuous. If you accidentally build your structure with 9 supports instead of 10, then you only lose 10% of the strength of the structure, more or less. The strength varies continuously with the amount of support. But if you're writing a 10-line program and you forge…

That's closer to the definition of instability than it is discontinuity.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#50

Post by [deleted] »

rcthompson wrote: post #43

When I was in college, one CS professor explained the difficulty of coding to me in terms of discreteness vs continuity. In the real world, things are continuous. If you accidentally build your structure with 9 supports instead of 10, then you only lose 10% of the strength of the structure, more or less. The strength varies continuously with the amount of support. But if you're writing a 10-line program and you forge…

[deleted]
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