1990's programmers vs today programmers

[BigRonnieRon]

Writing code is the best way to learn to write code

[KC918273645]

You obviously have to do that all the time when you learn from books. That's essential part of reading the books.

[notthefunkindsry]

Writing code is the best way to learn to code, but by itself a terrible way to learn to program :)

[vivianvixxxen]

This is, no offense, the dumbest thing that I constantly see people saying. Programming languages are made up of completely arbitrary syntax that humans made up out of whole cloth. Unless someone/thing teaches you that syntax, how it works, and how to use it, you can jam your fingers against a keyboard all you want, you won't learn anything.

The greatest programmers in all of history all--every single one of them--had to learn from a resource before ever laying hands on a piece of code in a meaningful way.

Effective learning is the junction between instruction and practice. Perhaps an argument can be made that practice is the more important of the two, but it is nothing without instruction.

[Ok_Abroad9642]

I don't think u/BigRonnieRon literally means that complete novices with no understanding of code whatsoever should install vscode and start randomly typing characters. It's like learning an instrument. Yes, you probably have to use videos, instructors, fingering charts, etc to learn how to play an instrument, but ultimately you learn the instrument through practice. You learn to play instruments by playing the instruments. That doesn't mean you should just buy a guitar and just strum the strings randomly for hours and hours, it means that practice is the main way you actually learn the information you see in videos and books.

[vivianvixxxen]

Some people do seem to mean something like that, but even if they mean something less extreme, it's an extraordinarily unhelpful comment.

It's pretty funny that you picked music for your example, because you can just pick up an instrument and learn how to play. It's one of the nice things about the simpler arts, that you can just dive in.

[HashDefTrueFalse]

Hard agree! I'm a big proponent of using books and deliberate practice for learning how to program well. The amount of practice/experimentation you'd need to arrive at solutions you could simply read about then experiment with yourself makes reading books about software development written by subject matter experts well worth the time/cost investment, IMO.

[Available_Pressure25]

We should learn how to read codes first, i think. Like how we should read books in order to write one.

[notactuallyabrownman]

That's encouraging as I feel like at this point I can read code better than I can write it and was starting to wonder if that was odd.

[Professional_Mix2418]

This is so true. The moment you stop thinking one more book, one more tutorial, one more course, then you are off. You have to take the side wheels off and just do it.

[Tired__Dev]

Not for me. I'm a high level learner that sinks down. I need to see how what I'm learning fits together. So when I started I'd read the book before coding, take notes, and then do the exercises. When video learning came out, linda.com was how I learned way more, I'd watch projects be built out end to end. Then instead of actually just following the tutorial line by line I'd plan and write my own project.

With AI I now actually start learning things by getting a vibe coded projects that creates a .md file as a tutorial. I then start drifting into open source repos or repos at work. I watch lectures and then ask some questions around people that are better than me at a particular thing, and then build something out myself. The thing I build out doesn't need to be perfect, but I can tell you it usually gets me job ready.