The Ugly Side of Learning to Code

"Coding uses a lot of thinking patterns that I hadn't really used since my math and statistics classes in college, and even back then not in this intensity"

And

"I guess my point is, that if you want to become a programmer, you have to be comfortable with having to learn new things constantly for the rest of your life."

So many conversations around "but I want to be a programmer, do I really need to learn math? Really, really?"

Yes, you do. But more disturbing than the resistance to learn math is the resistance to learn. Period.

What i like about the article is that, all though the writter admits there are some challenges, he does not whine about them, but instead he overcome them. Because of that, he has a good chance at succeeding in programming, or anything else for that matter.

Maybe not in 6 months... But he will get there

Not necessarily if you want to be a brogrammer... watch the video, it from the first twilio conference. it's hilarious! :)

I have a real problem with this:

"I guess my point is, that if you want to become a programmer, you have to be comfortable with having to learn new things constantly for the rest of your life."

I really feel like this is the outlook everyone should take on life, not just programmers. Maybe the causality ought to be switched; good programmers are people who have a "learn something new every day" outlook on life. Hell, it could even be said that good people in any field are those who take that viewpoint on life.

I think this post touches on an interesting point about web development (might apply to other areas too, but the web seems particularly bad). A lot of things appear to be easy (Rails, Django, Heroku, AWS, JQuery etc.), but the number of different components you need to manage is still overwhelming. Furthermore, you often end up having to develop a low-level understanding of problems that someone else claimed to have solved for you. While this low-level knowledge is useful, it does add significant amounts of complexity for beginners and people who might not be committed as the hardcore full timers out there.

As we seem to push more and more for the "everybody should learn how to code" mindset, I think there is a big opportunity for someone out there to combined managed and protected environments with the ability to write your own code. I don't know if the solution is unifying languages across front and back end or a better set of abstractions, but I see way too many obstacles for 'simple' coding (although the situation today is without a doubt better than ever), and I imagine this is some of what the author of this post ran into.

I wish that the learn-to-code movement had a greater emphasis on code as a utility belt, rather than "here's how to make a social website!"

Web dev is exceedingly complex and involves a lot more memorization of arcane things than does general purpose programming. Whereas for a non-technical founder, the important thing to learn is how aspects of business and content can be handled in modular, abstract ways (something that is apparent after learning loops and methods).

Learn enough code to understand implications of such things as granularity of data, taxonomy, and automation...if a novice can generate a static webpage chart from mashing up multiple data sources, that is hugely useful