Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#191

Post by blueside » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 11:46 PM UTC

For many years, I thought everything was very complex and would be difficult to learn and perhaps I wasn't smart enough to gain a full cognition on the subject matter

But I was able to take a big step back one day and realize everything isn't always complex, a lot of the times it is just over complicated and over engineered. Whether it's true or not, it has helped me immensely in my approach to look at new code from a more advantageous angle and more importantly, supply me with the confidence.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#192

Post by bnb » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 11:53 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #19

The hard thing about learning to program is that to create anything even vaguely useful you have to learn a million things in parallel. Say you wanted to build the simplest of Rails apps - you're simultaneously learning not only what the terminal and a text editor is, but how unix commands work, what an MVC framework is, probably a little of HTML and CSS, database migrations (maybe some SQL), asset management/pipelin…

> So you spend a month learning how to almost be able to write a for loop in JavaScript, and then you realize you have no idea why you would ever need to know what a for loop is, and even less of an idea of why it's useful.

This is a carbon copy of my life as a programmer right now.

I've made the decision to just fucking do it about 50 times, but each time I get barely started and get so frustrated with myself for not understanding and not knowing what to look for that I give up. I know that's another point where I just have to sit, searching, until I find the answer, but it seems that from my profound lack of understanding of the basics of the language (JavaScript; despite doing the Codecademy course, and the CodeSchool Node.js and Express.js courses) that I will have to do that for every minute step that I take in the program. It just seems so overwhelming that I become paralyzed in my desire to push on, but feeling that I know I won't make any progress.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#193

Post by peter303 » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 11:54 PM UTC

I never found it that hard, either back in the 1970s or now.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#194

Post by Eleutheria » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 11:59 PM UTC

No, it's not hard.

You can make practically any program with just four constructs: assign, condition, loop and function.

The rest is just imagination.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#195

Post by adamzerner » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 12:00 AM UTC

> Unfortunately, in later phases the density of resources drops off fast. Anyone who's made the jump from beginner to intermediate can attest that there is a BIG difference between the amount of resources available when you first start out versus when you're first looking for help building things on your own without too much hand-holding.

Scarcity = opportunity!

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#196

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 12:01 AM UTC

Eleutheria wrote: post #194

No, it's not hard. You can make practically any program with just four constructs: assign, condition, loop and function. The rest is just imagination.

[deleted]

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#197

Post by geebee » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 12:10 AM UTC

inDigiNeous wrote: post #73

ForHackernews wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon, all of those things you listed (brain surgeon, rocket scientist, lawyer) are WAY harder and more expensive/time-intensive to get into than software engineering. If you feel like your knowledge is getting flushed away with a new platform, then you've been learning the wrong things.

Really? How is being a brain surgeon more difficult than being a computer surgeon ? Understanding how a CPU completely works, on the assembler and even on hardware level is FRIGGING HARD. Computers are very complex and huge beasts of logic to really understand, and the best programmers have to understand a huge amount of technical skills and systems in order to get the wanted results. I have no idea how much stuff a…

I agree with you, and I think that programmers dismiss the complexity and difficulty of what they deal with far too quickly. I'm not saying that all programming is hard, but I do think that hard problems in software contain challenges that will take all the raw intelligence and hard work a person can have and then some.

There are plenty of other fields that do as well, but software absolutely belongs in the mix.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#198

Post by geebee » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 12:12 AM UTC

pflats wrote: post #89

inDigiNeous wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? How is being a brain surgeon more difficult than being a computer surgeon ? Understanding how a CPU completely works, on the assembler and even on hardware level is FRIGGING HARD. Computers are very complex and huge beasts of logic to really understand, and the best programmers have to understand a huge amount of technical skills and systems in order to get the wanted results. I have no idea how much stuff a…

>Really? How is being a brain surgeon more difficult than being a computer surgeon ? Understanding how a CPU completely works... Well, we know how everything about how a CPU works. We don't know everything about how a brain works.

Are there really no longer any open and relevant research issues around this topic? Is humanity's understanding of CPUs, how they work, how they should work, is it all wrapped up and complete?

Not really my field, so I truly don't know. But I'd be a little suspicious of someone who claims there's nothing new to learn here.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#199

Post by tokenrove » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 12:22 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #95

Here's where I disagree with other people - software development is special in that it requires focus, relentlessness, intelligence, creativity and I also find it interesting that many software developers tend to suffer conditions from the autistic spectrum. To me that's a clear sign that software development requires the mind to be hardwired in a certain way. And the thing is - I never needed handholding, which is w…

I disagree, and I disagree because I used to think this way (having lived and breathed programming since age five), until I started to meet people who had started to program in university (which I considered _way_ too late) and who had become excellent programmers. Not adequate-for-a-job programmers, but best-of-breed programmers.

In fact, often better programmers than "naturals" because along the way they had learned a lot of discipline that isn't necessary when programming is fun -- but as every "born programmer" turned professional finds out, programming isn't always fun.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#200

Post by SteB » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 12:29 AM UTC

Super interesting article. I used to be a big fan of Codecademy and other online website to learn to code. The author is right, at some point you need motivation, like in any new thing, and that's where I think most of them are failing.

Without a real project or a constant progress that you can follow, you easily end up abandoning that site.

I built CloudAcademy.com more than a year ago and even if we are focues on Cloud Computing platforms like AWS, one the things we are trying to solve is providing good, constant information to our students on their progresses. That's the most important thing. In our case they really need those skills to they have a very high motivation to complete the courses, but still, I see this as a priority for an e-learning platform.