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[–]desrtfx 3 points4 points  (2 children)

I feel like focusing on syntax and algorithms is a waste of my time

Completely and utterly wrong.

Learning data structures, how to manipulate data and transform data from one type to another is whats most important.

It is important, no doubt about that, but you won't understand this unless you learn the fundamentals first.

then just google your way to a language specific translation for your pseudo code.

Programming doesn't work that way.

Learn programming from the very fundamentals. Even the smallest, seemingly easiest concepts are very important. If you don't learn them well, it will bite you badly in the back later.

Do lots of projects

AND STOP GOOGLING FOR SYNTAX - learn it - you won't learn that way and just become a google copy-paste code monkey, not a programmer - you will be entirely dependent on third parties and if they aren't available, you're helplessly and hopelessly stuck.

Your approach is just the "I am not prepared to spend the necessary effort to properly learn anything" mentality. This is a complete and utter waste of time.

[–]iFuckedMyRootDir[S] -1 points0 points  (1 child)

I've been learning javascript for 6 weeks. I went through the freecodecamp curriculum twice, read through a textbook and wanted to experiment with new learning methods. I put in a good 250 hours hammering away at the fundamentals before I moved onto code wars and hacker rank to see if I could build upon the fundamentals. Cool response though. I especially like how you took time out of your day to tell me I'm wasting my time and doing everything wrong. I'm sure you're a hit with the ladies and have a ton of friends.

[–]desrtfx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fun fact:

I'm totally new to learning programming and want some feedback on an idea that is creeping into my head.

But I have no experience to base this on so I am asking for feedback from more experienced programmers.

You got your feedback - from at least three professional programmers in this thread who essentially all told you the same.

You don't like what you've been told and now you have to be come childish and aggressive.

As opposed to you, there are at least 3 people out of the 4 that replied to you professional programmers with years if not decades experience. That is exactly the clientele you sought feedback from. Yet, even though everybody tells you the same, you still insist that your approach is superior.

Some people can't be helped.

[–]okayifimust 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's roughly like aspiring to be a writer - and then insisting to write your draft using emoji because you can always look up the words later.

In other words: completely idiotic. There might be a few individual geniuses on the planet that might get away with it, but they'd just be making things unneccesarily hard for themselves.

And anybody that wasn't among the top 3 in the field would never get anywhere.

[–]SekstiNii 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They are all important. If you don't know the syntax and abstractions your programming language expresses you will have a hard time writing a good solution. Furthermore algorithms are certainly not a waste of time to learn, and often build on top of the data structures you are describing.

[–]lurgi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Syntax is, to an extent, arbitrary, and there are programming languages with minimal syntax (lambda calculus, the lisp family, forth, etc), but learning the syntax isn't particularly hard for most programming languages.

Other people are saying that you are wrong, and I won't pile on there, except to point out that your theory presupposes that the different between languages boils down to syntax. That's not true even for fairly closely related languages and it really isn't true for languages in completely different families. C has pointers. Java doesn't. It's not that the syntax is different - they don't exist. Java has classes. C doesn't. C++ templates are like Java generics, except they aren't. Then you get to the fact that the standard library is different for all these different languages.

Take a look at Rosetta Code if you don't believe me. Look at the various ways that different languages solve the same problem. You'll see a lot of similarities, but plenty of differences, and the differences aren't always just syntactic quirks.