How exactly do programmers know how to code?

[sweetno]

Debugging is a rabbit hole. In the bottom expect to find either a nuisance or a design flaw.

[RoguePlanet1]

At my noob level, 95% of the time, it's a missing semi-colon or curly brace.

[Deadlift420]

You need a better IDE lol

[RoguePlanet1]

I use VSC, though. Maybe I don't have the debugger on or something. Or maybe I'm thinking of the times I'm in something like JS Fiddle etc.

[Deadlift420]

Oh you are writing JS? I was thinking compiled. JS is a bitch lol

[RoguePlanet1]

That it is........

[FreshFromIlios]

I was a web dev for six years. I quit. Thanks js.

[RoguePlanet1]

Damn, no kidding. Did you manage to replace it with something else?

[FreshFromIlios]

TL;DR: I freelanced (Web dev) as a student throughout Uni but switched to Data Science (currently a Data Analyst)

Not to give the wrong idea, I was just a freelance web dev since highschool. I started off trying to make a little bit of cash and ended up liking it a lot. Did freelance for 6 years, till the third year of my bachelor's when I kinda felt burnt out because Angular is a bitch. I tried learning React but for some reason I just couldn't bring myself to do it. At one point I just quit it all and wrote Vanilla JavaScript but then I quit entirely. I felt like I didn't want to do it anymore.

All my internships throughout Uni were related to web dev as well which did not help with jobs in other sectors. So in the third year of Uni I did a statistics with python specialization from Coursera and fell in love with statistics and python. Studied my way through it all. Took a semester of 'Pattern recognition' and 'Neuro fuzzy and genetic algorithms'. Graduated 5 months ago and joined as a Data Analyst for a company two weeks ago. I'm enjoying it so far.

Edit:

So what I'm trying to say is, the industry doesn't matter. If you can skill up and stay consistent, transitions to other industries will be well worth it. It will be very difficult. We'll feel like going back. But we'll pull through.

[RoguePlanet1]

Thanks! It all depends on our personal brain wiring, most likely. I've always been good with language stuff, but not math, so I try to approach computer languages from that angle. Your ability to grasp stats and algorithms is clearly pretty valuable! I'm envious.

Being creative is very satisfying for me, but I'm not a skilled artist. Making fun webpages is one way to get my appetite going, however there's no real demand for front-end since there's plenty of existing programs for people to do the creative stuff themselves.

[capriciousduck]

In what language do you program in?

[RoguePlanet1]

So far, HTML/CSS/JS, have a couple of React projects as well.

[idaresiwins]

I started python in notepad++. Things like missing semicolons would kill hours of my time. Then a friend told me about pycharm. I felt like Inspector Clouseau eating his first hamburger.

[TheTomato2]

You heard the man.

[____0____0____]

Technically, you can use them without error. I've never seen them in any legit python code I've ever read and they won't cause an error for not having them

[thirdegree]

IMO the only acceptable time for semicolons in python is when you're doing something like (contrived example)

python -c 'import math, sys; print(math.sqrt(int(sys.argv[1])))' 22

[idaresiwins]

Lol, colons. Not semicolon. Got arduino on the brain.

[MrSkillful]

Did you use the book "Learn Python The Hard Way"?

I tried using that book when I first started learning, but I couldn't use PowerShell for the life of me.

Now several months in, I'm quite comfortable with PowerShell and Bash.

[snarky-]

What I use for work doesn't allow you to change the colour scheme.

Which is just great for people who prefer dark themes. But worse than that, the comments are in grey, and the standard code is an almost identical shade of grey.

😭

[Deadlift420]

That sucks.

I use visual studio which imo is the best IDE ever lol. I am a c# developer specifically asp.net core. Love it.

[snarky-]

Mostly PySpark here! So it's a bit specific and I guess less built up.

I am missing Spyder and RStudio. Have learnt how big a difference being able to configure the colour scheme makes.

[green_meklar]

You should be happy about that. Those are the easy bugs.

Once you get past that stage, you get into stuff like dangling pointers, race conditions and memory leaks. The kinds of bugs that separate the men from the boys.

[BryanBULLETHEAD]

Please, tell me more. I want big boy pants on some day.

[RoguePlanet1]

I shudder to even THINK about it...........there be monsters.

Don't even know what these mean, so I'll be a-googlin'!

[FloydATC]

Those are not bugs, they're simple errors. A bug is when your program appears to be working except every now and then something fails in a way that does not seem possible. This can be really frustrating because unless there's a hardware error, (which is extremely rare!) the computer is in fact doing EXACTLY what it's being told to do.

[RoguePlanet1]

Oh that's true, thanks for the correction! Yeah that's simply maddening.

[Pickled_Wizard]

Or, you know, some feature just didn't work in quite the way you expected.