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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

#3

Post by ndcrandall »

This was one of my biggest issues, even as an experienced developer with a CS degree. I always felt a step behind since I wasn't fluent in the latest and greatest framework. All of that changed when I mentally decided to focus on one language, namely Ruby. It's amazing how much you can do with any one language even though it's not fully optimized for a specific use case you need.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#8

Post by AlexanderDhoore »

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...

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#9

Post by dkbrk »

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 things as trivial as missing parenthesis.

All these things have value, and I doubt that this was time truly wasted. Although some people can get by for a while without it, becoming intimately familiar with the command line is extremely valuable. Also, although this is by no means a requirement for being an effective programmer, most good programmers I know use a traditional text editor such as emacs or vim.

Ultimately, I think the point is that expending time is an investment, and you should prioritise based on the expected future utility from your time investment. More often than not, this means finding the most important thing and putting almost all of your energy into it.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#10

Post by ryanolsonx »

I can definitely recommend your key point in the article: focus. It is easy today to lose focus since there are so many different frameworks and programming languages. Even if you just focus on Javascript, there are so many different frameworks here (ex. angular.js, ember.js, react.js) that it's easy get distracted and get to a point where you are only familiar with each a little bit.

Great article.

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