Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

I highly disagree. The author says one of the main reasons coding isn't easy is because setting up the environment is so difficult. The problem is that if you try and learn "iOS" using XCode then of course the environment has a lot more weight and cause more issues that you really don't need to deal with as a beginner. A better option would be to fire up a simple Scheme or Ruby interpreter in a terminal and watch them go (after giving them a copy of your favorite programming book). Heck, with things like CodeAcademy you can just visit a website and eliminate the environment issue completely.

I'd say the problem with programming isn't that it's difficult, but that it's intimidating. Writing a bunch of arcane symbols and words in a text file scares people off, while really it's just everyday logic people use in a different form (at least, the very basics are). I think that's also why programmers keep telling people it's so easy, so that they get over that irrational fear.

Though I'm a novice C++ programmer (working with templates at the moment), the only time I'd ever felt lost and stupid, which was just recently, was when it came time to write the end-of-chapter program in the book I'm reading.

Oddly enough, the program wasn't difficult to understand. I've even written it and got it to run before! I think what happened this time around, is I had read the chapter again, started writing more notes and had a better grasp on the material than before, that when it came time to bring all the concepts together, the example program didn't include them! For the first time in years, I actually felt stupid, borderline retarded (in the literal sense).

The example involved an abstract base class, Dragon, with 3 derived classes. The idea was to have a player fight a randomly selected dragon via Base class array and Base class pointer. At this point in the book, aggregation was discussed and shown in an earlier example, but wasn't implemented in the example. Mind you, no player class was created! So basically, arguments were passed to xDragon's defend and attack member functions via variables within the main function.

So I'd decided to create a Player class instead, and have the Player And Dragon objects interact with each other in the main function. Problem was, I hadn't learned enough to know how to do that, to which I didn't realize until error after error and trying desperately to get it running. I'd refrained from using Google and Stack Overflow for the most part, save for a few compiler errors I'd never received.

In the end, I'd decided to create a Game class that layered a Player and Dragon object. I had a feeling I should have written it that way from the start, but felt uncertain. The last errors that I was stuck on for a few days, I'd solved by way of "I wonder if this will help" lol.

Up until then, I wasn't aware that if you don't have a separate implementation file for a class, and should you decide to layer an object from that class, the class must be defined within the class declaration. Having defined member functions outside of the declaration, although within the header file, gave me: include\BlackDragon.h|22|multiple definition of `BlackDragon::calcDamage(short)', first defined here.

I will admit, it did put a damper on me. I felt like I was on a roll up until that. Perhaps I'll take a week or two break from programming get the feeling back again.

It means 'lots of money'.

When I see "programming is easy" I think "dirty, filthy lies!" When people say everyone should know how to program I think "why?" There's some weird nerd myopia going on with the programming literacy movement.

Programming takes an odd kind of thinking and is about as easy as anything else that takes a large amount of time and effort (read not easy).

Thanks for responding with a specific $ amount. I do indeed appreciate it.