Tales of coding from a beginner

One of the reasons I love Hartl's Rails Tutorial " rel="nofollow">https://www.railstutorial.org/book> is because he integrated a completely free c9.io account which (with the commands he gives you) is guaranteed to setup Rails and a shell environment identical to what the book expects. I have seen so many aspiring programmers stymied by things like installing a text editor, let alone the right version of Ruby or incompatible gems. And, people with less money are more likely to have a cheap Windows laptop, which makes configuration even more difficult. By contrast, anyone with a computer or even an Internet cafe should be able to get an up-to-date browser, and c9 is plenty good enough for getting started.

I've started taking my 9-year-old son through the book, and though it's crazy how large a vocabulary you need if you really wanted to understand everything, that's not actually necessary and he's able to follow the directions and make progress.

Thanks. You are right, the comparison is off probably on both sides.

As with critical civil/structural engineering projects, there are software development projects built with correctness in mind. I've worked on a few of those, mostly in aerospace and VLSI simulation in the late 70s til the early 90s, and the level of engineering was very high.

Fast forward two decades to the world of web development and corporate IT and, wow, the lack of rigour is simply abysmal. I can imagine the same been true in the housing/building sector.

Could part of the problem be that programming languages hijacked ASCII characters which partially hijacked typewriter functionality?

Pascal was always my least favorite language, because it never felt practical. For instance, its assignment requires two shifted keystrokes. Whereas the equal symbol requires one non-shifted keystroke.

In my ideal world, ISO would just standardize programming symbols. Then, languages could build around those common symbols, and then better input devices could be designed.

It amazes me that for as much money we spend on software (How many millions of programmers are there in the world?), we're still using a modified typewriter as our primary input device. Look at all the nicely designed specialized input devices we have for video games; surely we can come up with something better for programming.

Catch up? Catch up to whom? You will never really catch up to the people with a ton of experience today. If course at some point you might know something more in depth than them. And you will be ahead of people who start after you. Don't worry about catching up, worry about learning what your you are doing. That is all you can really do.