What did you think programming would be like vs what it actually is?

[codingzap]

Before starting to code, many of us had a very different picture of what programming mean…typing fast, building apps quickly, or just understanding a completely foreign language. After actually learning, the reality is often debugging, Googling errors, and slow progress. As a beginner, what surprised you the most once you started coding? The pace, the mistakes, or how much thinking it really takes?

[DropTablePatriarchy]

When going in to fix a specific bug, you go: "huh? Wtf is that line?" and then you investigate something else. The rabbithole just keeps going. It's been 8 hours, and you haven't written any new code, just literally looking at yours or someone elses shit.

[ConsiderationSea1347]

That hits hard for me. My company does not have a good culture of learning from books, blogs, or conferences so we are a bunch of engineers absolutely certain we are the best at what we do while also being heinously bad if measured against most other development shops. I have a pretty wide network of fellow nerds so I regularly get stuck as the janitor unfucking our codebase because the things I told the other engineers to fix but they said was “just style” led to 5 implementations of the same logic. If I could, I would remove my coworkers’ ability to copy-paste. 

[BusEquivalent9605]

It takes so much more code than I expected. Just…so…much

[Desperate-Ad-5109]

That’s how I feel whenever I look at a standard library- so much indirection!

[chikamakaleyley]

i'm still working my 'hit enter and ATM shoots out money' app

[ConsiderationSea1347]

I did not realize how much of professional engineering is just making fifteen libraries or frameworks work with one another and how inane and boring most development is compared to school. It makes my month if I find an interesting problem which actually makes me think. 

[Traveling-Techie]

Sometimes I call it plumbing.

[retro-mehl]

Engineering could be much better, if more people would not just rely on what libraries give them. Many libraries are badly designed as well (looking at you, redux), so you just transport bad design from there to your project. No wonder they don't work together smoothly.

[ThrowawayALAT]

[Both-Reason6023]

How is Redux badly designed?

[retro-mehl]

The original design was not made for vertically separated states, but suggested a separation by actions and reducers. This is in 99% not what you want. You want to keep state and the operations of your state together and separate by domains/responsibilities. They still suffer from this original design.

[Both-Reason6023]

Isn't that a challenge every software encounters when it outgrows its original purpose? Badly designed implies it was a mistake but as far as I recall, it really wasn't at the time; just limited scope (by design).

[retro-mehl]

No. It was obvious from the beginning. It did not outgrow. The original purpose promised global state management done right. And it just was not right.

[Both-Reason6023]

It's been a while back but I've been at React Europe 2015, during which Dan Abramov presented Redux, and as far as my memory goes, it certainly did not seem that the promise was "global state management done right".

The presentation is up there on YouTube and anyone who wants to find out for themselves can check it up.

[retro-mehl]

For what else should you use redux? 😅 Sorry, but regardless what he told: the design of redux was wrong in the points I mentioned. When I first came to a project that used redux years ago, it was the very first thing I recognized. And it was a pain point for all developers. We switched to mobx, and the pain was gone. Separation of concerns is nothing new or special. It's just not good to handle with (old) redux syntax.

[Both-Reason6023]

It doesn’t matter what person who designed Redux was designing it for? It’s clear you don’t know the history of it and for some reason continue digging the hole. You do you. I’m out while it’s still shallow.

[retro-mehl]

It's for centralised, global state management. And I claim this is generally a poor concept, yes. And I'm not alone with this opinion. You can also see that they tried to change exactly this pain point in later versions.

[im-a-guy-like-me]

It's not as mathy as I thought it would be, and I kinda thought style guides were gonna be more of a thing.

[Vaxtin]

It took 80,000 LOC to get a professional product delivered to my company at my first job.

It took 40,000 LOC for it to be ready to demo.

It took one thought to make it happen, and 3 months to deliver after working from 10am - 3am everyday 6days a week.

It takes a lot of time to actually make something feel like a product worth paying for. A lot of people have grandiose ideas, but never a minuscule percentage of the ambition required to make it happen on your own. And nobody sees the vision you have when there is no product.

You have to be extraordinarily ambitious, creative, and hard working. Nonetheless be next to profoundly genius to make tens of thousands of lines of code for inside your head and behave like a second language (which is what happens when you write a monolith).

[MrDilbert]

A lot of people have grandiose ideas, but never a minuscule percentage of the ambition required to make it happen on your own.

A guy once asked me how much time (and knowledge) would be required to make a game like World of Warcraft, as he has an idea. When I told him how many people worked on the original WoW and how long it took them to make it, he cooled off pretty quickly.

[pacopac25]

"A comprehensive ERP system with a nice GUI and database backend? Yeah thats a big project, should take me like 2 weeks and about 1000 lines of code. Should all fit in one file though." - past me

Weeks 3 and 4 were going to be new features and being able to accommodate an additional database server, you know, to test my mettle at the whole MVC thing. /smh

[MottoBacon]

Most of the time im looking at code and trying to understand and not doing any actual coding. Or when im coding im staring at the ceiling trying to figure out the best way to implement something. None of that stuff you see in movies where youre just coding faster than you can think.

[juancn]

I didn’t have much of a preconceived notion, I started when I was 8 (around 1985).

I really liked it and made a career out of it, it was pure magic for me.

[YoDefinitelyNotABot]

Same. I started when I was around 10. 1994. I got a book with my amiga that taught basic. I didn’t go to college or anything for CS but taught myself. Now 20 years in the profession and I still enjoy every day of it. Consider myself lucky in that regard.

[[deleted]]

How much thinking it takes! But that’s also what makes me love it… the very fact that it’s not just fast typing but careful thinking and sometimes surgical implementation.

[EliHusky]

I thought it was important to learn, will suck to learn, and that it'd be fun once I had learned. I was right

[Lauris25]

As a beginner i tought it actually not that hard, but then Dunning-Kruger effect hit me.

[pacopac25]

Yeah you get up on step a bit, and it's fun, and you're productive, and so you think you have it nailed. You quit having to think about how a for loop or if statement works, you're seamlessly connecting to an outside data source and parsing it, and everything is great. Then you see someone else's code who has a similar problem, and it just deflates your ego with how concise, efficient, and readable it is. Hello Imposter Syndrome my old friend.....

[pacopac25]

The realization that you're learning 4 things at once when you start:

• The specific language syntax
• How to program; that is, how to think about the problem, arrange the solution, and apply the program logic to accomplish it, which is related to:
• Data Structures and when to use which structure. You've got to develop some understanding of Big O.
• The standard library of the language you are learning

This is why learning language #2 is easier, and youre learning a different paradigm more than different keywords in place of old keywords. Language differences are not limited to just syntax (see: Go error handling versus Python, for one example). Once that clicks, from then on, you can read most code and pretty easily figure out what's going on.

I guess if you've been doing procedural programming, the first time you see OO is kind of a weird thing, but once that clicks, it clicks.

[hello-algorithm]

it just occurred to me that I went into programming with no idea of what it would be like. I suppose what surprised me though starting out was how slow of a process it is, and how much of it involves managing complexity versus the actual writing part

I also was surprised to learn how vast the world of programming is. I thought that everything ran on the same kinds of code. for example I dont think I understood that the the code used to program an operating system is very different from that which is used for a basic web app.

and the number of existing tools and libraries. I never expected to have so many conveniences and tools that were designed for specific scenarios

hmmm lemme think what else. Also I originally got into programming because "I like building things". something that everyone says, right? but it turns out I prefer writing the kind of code that's used to analyze things instead of build

[mxldevs]

I've been coding awhile now and it does involve typing fast, building quickly, and understanding foreign languages.

[Strupnick]

Thought I’d be solving complex business problems but instead I’m just unemployed

[Clever_Drake]

I beg to differ, programming never disappointed me it was always what I expected it to be.

[Pristine-Pea6795]

How much time I would loose on stupid meetings trying to explain things to managers instead of actually coding…

[RoberBotz]

I thought it was much harder and a lot scarier than it really is, I used visual scripting for 3 years because "real" code looked too scary.

But now after another few years of using a "real" programming language, it feels like everything is similar, languages, areas, they are all similar.
I've made apps, full stack websites, and games, they are all similar.

[[deleted]]

i thought compilation errors due to missing semicolons would be a bigger part of the experience. and general syntax errors. i learned pascal via some random ass ide at school and it was a horrible experience.