Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

That's not beautiful; that's horrendous. A program that might contain syntactic (!) errors has no claim to being a sublime mathematical construct.

I'd say it's "beautifully simple" when I can tell you with 100% confidence that my program will never, ever, ever experience errors of a certain type. Even better if I can tell you with 100% confidence that my program contains no errors at all (which is possible with proof-based languages).

Saying a Python program is beautiful because it can have hidden failure conditions is like saying that a poorly maintained gun is beautiful because it can fire when rusty (but watch out for explosions!).

I wish, when learning to program, that I'd been taught to write universally correct code instead of "mostly correct" code.

I just don't know how to actually _do things_ with code. So, in essence, I think I know the language, and in a sense I do insofar as I know how to write an if else statement, a while statement, declare a variable, etc., but I _don't_ actually know the language, because I can't do anything with what little I do know.

Do you have any advice?

The thing is, after that job ready upwards slope there is the next downswing. You're able to get something done, but what you envision is not what the company needs. You also realise that to be productive you need a lot of skills you never learned in school time at all, e.g. packaging, shipping code to customers, versioning, and actually create a tool that another person can, reading code of other people, and finally using the tools your coworkers build which are only marginally more productive than doing it manually or writing your own tools, and only after learning the arcane ways in that they are designed (much like the tools of your design, and quite different from the billion dollar applications you are used to in daily life). Also you will really become slower, because all the meetings and compromises drain your energy more than the coding, but there is no way around it if you work in a team. Is there another high coming after that? From looking at my coworkers it seems this down swing will last.

tl;dr the job ready high is not the end.

Most any teen can take building materials and build a dog house. That doesn't mean skyscraper construction is child's play.

At that point, it was up to me to figure out what to do. I started with a single screen that showed some text and added a few more screens that had the same text. Then I added a button that triggered a change of that text. Then a button that displayed an image. And so on until I had a real card game that could even identify whether there were any legal moves available and if the player was stuck.

Every step along the way was not easy and I got derailed a couple times, nearly giving up. The hardest single feature to implement was dragging and dropping a card. It took a lot of cribbed code from a few useful blog posts, but the feeling when I actually got it working was indescribable. It was a Saturday morning and I was running around my house, dragging and dropping cards on my tablet like I was 8 years old and it was the greatest Christmas gift ever. That was the moment when I realized I could actually finish this if I was willing to put in the effort. The rest of that weekend was spent in blissful coding and my commitment to becoming a developer has never wavered since.

Now in my job, which I got an interview for because of the card game, I have witnessed other people with less self-guided (contrasted with CS class projects) experience than I started out with be unable to persist long enough or self-teach hard enough to solve a problem by themselves without asking for help to get over minor bumps. I won't ask for help from a more senior dev unless I have exhausted my abilities to understand the problem space and can enumerate the things I have tried. I refuse to be the person who simply "doesn't know how".

Never ever give up.