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A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#11

Post by nikhilalmeida »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #8

Very very good article, although the latter part is a bit too focussed on web dev and dynamic scripting languages. I personally think every programmer should know some C. Basic things like what the stack and the heap are. Edit: Ok, probably not in the case of absolute beginners, but after a year or two...

I think C is good to know and try if you are going through an academic program in school. For a lot of people just starting to learn to code (while juggling other responsibilities/jobs/etc), learning C upfront can be an overkill. Being able to implement your idea as soon as possible will be of utmost importance. Sure they can dabble with a little more deeper understanding of language internals and theory once they feel confident enough in the one toolset they have chosen.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#13

Post by BonsaiDen »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #8

Very very good article, although the latter part is a bit too focussed on web dev and dynamic scripting languages. I personally think every programmer should know some C. Basic things like what the stack and the heap are. Edit: Ok, probably not in the case of absolute beginners, but after a year or two...

There are a whole lot of things every programmer should know because they'll have a profound impact on their code no matter how far up they sit in the abstraction chain.

Even things like memory alignment and cache lines can bite you really badly if you don't know about them and order your loop the wrong way around :)

Date and Time Handling, Unicode and Data Structures are also a common area for many misconceptions and sources of error. Of course nobody needs to know everything, but have a lively thirst for knowledge always helps, especially one you got over the initial confusion of learning the basics. There's just so much interesting stuff out there and a lot of it will help you improve even if you don't end up using it right away / at all.

Even if you're just swimming on the surface, it's always a good thing to know at least the 1-3 meters beneath you, just in case something happens or you get stuck in some seaweed and struggle to get out on your own.

I've actually made quite some good experiences with teaching people a few things about ASTs right once they started writing code, even though I only gave the some very basic lessons about how the "text" is eventually transformed, it really helped them a lot in understanding why certain text does certain things.

In the end, it's always very hard to play the game successfully if you don't know the rules by which you have to play. And a little can go a long way.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#15

Post by notto11 »

The overall message of this post is great, I've wasted plenty of time learning a shallow amount of "cool" tools.

One thing I wish I knew starting out was how to create a basic VM. I shudder to think of all the time wasted thinking I was a sysadmin genius for dual booting Linux and later doing something stupid to my hard drive. VMs give me my Linux environment without the pain from those moments when I think to myself "maybe I want to be a kernel developer."

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#18

Post by bswen »

I've worked as the main developer and designer at an online publication using Drupal, then WordPress, among many other duties including communications and social media. I learned enough PHP and HTML/CSS/jQuery to write custom themes and a couple custom plugins. Recently I started working a side project as a technical cofounder (called SpareChair) and have been working with a design/dev shop to build the site with Rails. The TeaLeaf Academy has nailed the tough problem of learning to code with Ruby and Rails online. It's a Goldilocks combo of written and video tutorials and exercises, weekly live sessions and nearly instant responses to questions from students, the founders and TAs in their project forums. It's focused on producing a coder ready to sit in that dev bullpen and hang with everyone from day one of the job and accomplishes that goal. And it's very affordable, the ROI is amazing. Anyone looking to get into Ruby and Rails should check it out.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#19

Post by makmanalp »

dkbrk wrote: post #9

I think the author is correct in that he tried to learn too many things at once; starting with a friendlier environment and focussing on a small number of new technologies has obvious advantages. But in some other ways, the author is too self-critical: > I'd spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over thin…

This. I learned programming the "bang your head against the wall" way, and I think I'm much better for it. I'm much more familiar with the innards of my tools, operating systems and programming languages as a result, and I'm much better at debugging things and understanding what's going on when I write a certain piece of code. I also have a pretty diverse set of skills. I find that any information you pick up somewhere eventually ends up being useful elsewhere.

But I'm privileged in that I wasn't ever pressured to learn, it wasn't a point where my livelihood depended on it, so that's a factor.

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