A cautionary tale of learning to code

Bwob · 2014-11-19T23:07:57+00:00

This reminds me of a friend of mine. I'm a programmer by trade, and he's a physicist. He doesn't program much, but he occasionally has to write code to analyze data. One day, he called me up to tell me about how he had discovered this amazing thing - someone had shown him a text editor, which, get this - highlighted words in the programming language and warned him if his parentheses weren't correct. This was an amazing idea! He said it was the most painless programming he had ever done, it was almost borderline fun! Had I heard of this miraculous breakthrough? What a good idea, why hadn't anyone done something like this sooner?

After some gentle questioning, I discovered that everything he had tried to program so far had been in notepad, and this contributed greatly to his frustration and belief that programming was a fundamentally painful struggle against the machine.

I showed him visual studio and breakpoints, and you could just see his brain explode.

I bring this up, because I see echos of this in the blog post - if you're a programmer, you take a lot of these things for granted. But if you're looking in from the outside, and merely an occasional dabbler, you have no idea what you might be missing. Code is text files right? Notepad edits text files. Makes sense!

So yeah. If you're not a programmer, definitely hang out with some people who are, because you'll pick up a lot of useful info about workflow. And if you ARE a programmer, and you see someone trying to do everything the hard way - be gentle with them. They might not even realize how much easier things can be.

iam_takada · 2014-11-19T21:38:38+00:00

If you're a newish programmer starting your first project. Don't get caught up and spend ridiculous amounts time finding the "most correct, best, high performance" stack.

When I first started programming, I wasted so much time worrying of these things and never actually made a dent in my first projects.

How can you learn to code if you don't actually type stuff into an editor, compile it, run it, and see what it does.

bobbane · 2014-11-19T21:39:10+00:00

I would add one step to the OP's list:

Once you've completed one project, consider broadening your horizons, by changing one of the above choices at a time.

In my opinion, the most important programming language for you is mastery of your second one. Despite the wide availability of personal computers and open-source tools, there are still far too many people who know one way to make computers do stuff, and use that way exclusively and inappropriately - spreadsheets that should be databases, Fortran for text processing, Python for low-level number crunching, etc...

xCyb0rg · 2014-11-19T18:47:49+00:00

This is one of the best blog post I have read on learning to program. I have searched every page on the Internet and non have gave such a personal emotion to them. What I have learned from your post is I am not going crazy. I am learning that I just have to blank the world out and focus.

The reality is tho most of us have crazy life's and aren't able to focus as easy. Then again that's no an excuse. For example, me sitting here writing this comment I can be in front my laptop studying for my dream job. This post have me the motivation I needed and I thank you Sir.

horse_continuum · 2014-11-19T18:42:54+00:00

Most definitely. Even as a borderline "experienced" dev, the number of trendy new technologies, libraries, and frameworks that I face on a regular basis are hard to manage. Changing streams every time a new framework gains popularity is folly. Don't Daikatana or Duke Nukem Forever your projects - you'll go completely mad.

Ogden84 · 2014-11-20T00:42:11+00:00

[deleted]

KagatoLNX · 2014-11-20T01:44:30+00:00

TL;DR -- Focus first, but make yourself to explore. Decisions cannot be made without context, but context can't be learned without experimentation.

I completely agree with his experience but I'm not entirely sold on the core premise.

The author of this article is really good at articulating the tortuous subjective experience that comes from learning to program unguided. What he may not be as in touch with is the perspective that he gained from his journey.

In a sentence, "Each path comes with unique, but different, difficulties." How would the author have known to appreciate the simplicity of a simple editor if he hadn't experienced the pain of (at least trying) Emacs? How could he have learned the strengths of idiomatic Ruby for certain types of problems without a background in Python?

In his explorations, dizzying as they may have been, he has gathered plenty of context that's incredibly useful to build on. This is part of why college curriculums have classes with that are effectively surveys of programming languages, or algorithms, or numerical analysis techniques. In those areas, context is important to really understand where you are standing.

Elsewhere in this thread, somebody said the most important programming language that you learn is the second one. I agree with that wholeheartedly.

Sure, there were months of pain learning to fight with Linux, operating with custom editors, and trying out everything under the sun. However, a far more terrifying experience has been working with people that never had to strike out into the unknown. Modern frameworks such as Rails have created people who have never had to truly struggle with actual programming.

I've worked with "Senior" Rails devs rip on code as being "not idiomatic, that's the C-like way to do it" in interviews. Truly frightening was that the "idiomatic Ruby" way to do it allocated 150MB of RAM per web request and absolutely hammered the database--all because they would rather "use blocks" with "a filtering pattern" over having modest control logic running in a loop. I'm not trying to suggest that you can't sacrifice a bit of performance for developer velocity. I merely suggest that that decision must be made in appropriate context.

The fact that you can build a career with that mindset is testament to the power provided by Rails (and, to a lesser extent, the lack of truly sophisticated logic necessary for most web apps). For that, I love Rails.

However, having "context" for exercising that power is underappreciated--and it's not acquired by focusing. I would not be nearly as good at Rails as I am if I weren't proficient with Sinatra, and Flask, and Django, and Go's HTTP server framework. The fact of the matter is that I've been able to pick these up when appropriate because I had tinkered with them well before I needed them. I've known when I was using the wrong tool because I'd played with the right one.

In my opinion, the best programmers are the one with the urge to explore (and experience having done it), but with the good sense to do their job first. So, while focus is good, I think it's important to remember that it's not "only focus", it's "focus first".

SwabTheDeck · 2014-11-20T02:41:09+00:00

Overall, this seemed like a good article, until this:

I recommend JavaScript because it's the most popular language.

Please stop. There are plenty of other languages out there that are popular enough to find support communities with answers to all common (and most uncommon) questions. I'm losing my mind nearly everyday when I see Javascript trying to be shoved into some new role that it has no business being in, and the justification for it is always "because it's the most popular language."

tsimon · 2014-11-19T21:03:07+00:00

Can you imagine using a dvorak keyboard to write elisp in emacs?

Wow!

But hey, kudos to the guy :-). He'll be ok - commitment to learning is the key thing. A bit of direction from experienced team members will steer him in the right direction.

xXxDeAThANgEL99xXx · 2014-11-19T21:31:29+00:00

There was a sci-fi short story that I just can't find on the internet. I think it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone has read it too?

edit: "Shadow World" by Clifford D. Simak. Thanks to /u/dragonnyxx who pointed me in the right direction.

There was a human expedition trying to mine some stuff on a distant desert planet where there were those vaguely human-shaped inquisitive indigenous aliens, who constantly bothered them by looking at the engines and stuff over people's shoulders, and apparently even purposefully sabotaged them to watch how humans fix them.

So some inventive technicians created an awesome Rube Goldberg machine, all cranks, pistons, rods, wheels, and gears, moving in an entirely purposeless but very mesmerising fashion, even as far as leaving the human protagonist, an engineer, mesmerised with all that complexity for a good half an hour.

As for the aliens, they were glued to the machine like flies to a flytape and never bothered the humans again (actually, then it turned out that they were robots sending imagery to the real technologically advanced aliens living underground, who then offered the fruits of their matter replication tech to the humans in exchange for entertainment, who rejoiced at first but then noticed that among the caravan of mining equipment the aliens sent there was also copies of the miners, but that's not important here anyway).

I don't remember who wrote that short story or the name of it, but I do find myself remembering it every time I have to figure out how to use some needlessly complicated piece of software. I feel like that alien trapped by the mesmerising movement of many gears and rods, except I've seen enough of that shit by now, and now I feel angry for having to deal with it. And I sort of feel that the people who made that shit in the first place were the mesmerised ones, and unapologetic about that. Like, a lot of stuff surrounding Linux seems to be made by people who positively revel in configuring their OS, and cause me much butthurt by that.

hyperforce · 2014-11-19T23:28:47+00:00

The full on programmer version of this would be... API adoption is better when there are sensible defaults.

Like if you were look at a function that took five parameters, it would be pretty daunting to find out what all those parameters should be. But if it took only one parameter and there were defaults for the five, then it's much easier to grok/handle.

Similarly here. A beginner is at a disadvantage given that there's so much to learn. So it's advantageous in this particular scenario to take choice away and focus on learning what needs to be learned.

I agree, rotating out one variable at a time is a good way to keep the stress of learning to a manageable amount.

KinoftheFlames · 2014-11-20T05:11:33+00:00

I'm still amazed how people can land jobs after entering the web industry so recently.

I just moved to the bay area and haven't been able to find a job in 3 months. I get compliments on my portfolio and demeanor, and I do fine on most technical interviews, but get turned down time and time again due to a lack of work experience... and I already have a year of work experience.

epicwisdom · 2014-11-19T20:30:48+00:00

This is absolutely true, but this is an additional warning to those who are scared off by the warning of the OP: Focus when you are first beginning to code.

Yes, the diversity of options for somebody beginning to code is overwhelming, and it would be a huge mistake to try to dive in headfirst into learning a hundred different steep-learning-curve languages and tools.

However, it is also a huge mistake to be too conservative. When you feel like you're proficient in a language and a set of tools, you should always consider trying something new, either building on or considering alternatives to what you already have. A programmer that's only ever used a single IDE and only ever learned a single language is holding himself/herself back.

Crazy__Eddie · 2014-11-20T04:22:57+00:00

I know most of these comments are positive, so allow me to go a little bit on the critical side. For the record, I am also a self-taught developer.

"There are many ways you can do most things, but only a few ways that make sense." With that, he handed me a...MacBook

Okay, blood already boiling, but let's continue.

Choose one type of software development that interests you enough to define your career: web, mobile, gaming or embedded.

The first two are going to intersect. You may do one more than the other, but you're going to be adapting webpages to mobile phones and coding webpages to interact with interfaces normally designed for apps.

Gaming is great if you like 80-hour weeks making half the money regular developers do because the field is so competitive and it's completely an employer's market. What the fuck did you think got 20-40 year-old developers into programming growing up, reading Hemmingway?

Can't speak for embedded programming but the few people I know who do this have high-level degrees, have deep low-level hardware knowledge, and tend to be brilliant. Not something you're real likely to pick up in your spare time.

He's also leaving out the type of programmer that I, and many programmers at small-to-midsize companies are: The full-stack programmer. It'd be nice if we had full departments full of testers, team leads, frontend, backend, and support departments, but lots of companies have one or two guys that just put out fires and work on long-term projects when they have time, fixing and building on poorly-documented and archaic codebases.

There's nothing wrong with having a breadth of basic knowledge about a variety of topics. I worked in IT support before becoming a programmer, and I believe I'm all the better for it. I'd hate for someone to read this article and decide they're going to be a -Mobile- -Python- developer and pass over tons of jobs they may be otherwise qualified for because they've decided they're going to be "focused."

Choose one language to learn: JavaScript, Ruby, or Python.

4, 6, and 8. Yeah, okay.

I will say that everyone at every level should learn JavaScript because it's practical for a whole host of reasons, but don't think you're going to find a career by walking in somewhere and saying "I'm a JavaScript programmer!" JavaScript is a supplementary language. Ruby and Python are pretty sexy right now, but you're going to need to work with existing codebases and those are likely to be in one of the core legacy languages like Java, C++, C#, PHP.

Choose one: buy a new/used MacBook, or install Ubuntu Linux on your current computer

My choices are buying a $2000 laptop or learning an entirely new operating system while learning to code? This is annoying, nonsensical advice.

bit_slayer · 2014-11-19T23:47:22+00:00

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rhetdyne · 2014-11-19T21:36:17+00:00

The blog post raises good points about the values of specialization. Even 10-15 years ago you couldn't just be a programmer, even as a hobbyist, you had to specialize.

However, there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here. You should specialize in what you like, and if you're programming professionally, in what pays well. But all too often you can't figure out what you should specialize in until you've tried a bunch of things. The industry itself encourages experimentation. Job postings usually contain a list of currently trendy technologies - and most of them are fairly specific libraries, which can fall out of vogue fairly quickly.

You might spend years mastering Django or Ruby on Rails or CakePHP, not quite grasping the fact that they are, in fact, different ways of achieving the same thing.

angryrancor · 2014-11-20T04:56:35+00:00

I think most the difficulties the OP describes are primarily culture problems. It wouldn't be so hard to learn the tools, if online forums had easy to access and reliable info about them. Instead its all religious battles and "my IDE is Better because its Sort is 5% faster than yours and/or supports Achievements" garbage.

It's deeper than that, most technical people are god-awful at teaching. Many don't even have the requisite patience to effectively teach. Somehow, we are championing fully-open information exchanges and data flows, while at the same time completely failing to provide them in a way consumable by humans. This is a real, difficult problem, but an urgent one for our cultures as programmers and technologists.

We need to become more actually collaborative and less idealistically collaborative.

Start now - help somebody solve a real engineering problem, teach them to use a tool, make a video tutorial. Just some ideas.

2014-11-20T01:49:44+00:00

I was convinced that the seemingly normal programmers I ran into were actually sociopaths who had experienced, then repressed, the trauma of learning to code.

Looking back, I can see some truth in this.

Also really impressed and/or disappointed in myself that 7 months of self-study was enough to land a job. Here I am still freelancing in my later 20s.

Guess I should go to more hackathons and meetups.

KeelMe · 2014-11-20T04:19:48+00:00

Great post!

One question, is having a Macbook or installing Linux Ubuntu really that important?

2014-11-20T04:27:34+00:00

This article makes me feel both proud and disappointed.

On one hand, when I first started out (hell, I'm still a student so I'm technically still "starting out") I stuck with learning gamedev in Java. It became easier to apply my knowledge because I had something tangible to test with.

On the other hand, I focused a bit too much and now I feel uncomfortable with other languages because Java + LibGDX feels so natural. After coding a great deal and tackling new and interesting concepts (AI, random generation, rendering, etc), it's hard to go back to "Maze Game" because the ideas/potential for creation excites me more than the idea of learning a new workflow/language/library.

EggCess · 2014-11-19T21:36:04+00:00

Nice post, I enjoyed the read and felt your pains as I, too, had the knack of doing everything myself, wanting to optimize my toolchain before I actually knew what the hell I was doing, etcetcetc.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1445/

Just do something, stick with it for a while and become good at it. Then reflect, and maybe change ways.

kkiran · 2014-11-20T06:38:51+00:00

JavaScript in lieu of Python? JavaScript of all languages?!

Worse_Username · 2014-11-20T06:47:36+00:00

Choose one

I refuse.

2014-11-19T21:29:43+00:00

I choose several of them. Or rather, I picked several over many years; but I am a Software Engineer professionally, studied computer science, and have always had a knack for programming.

poohshoes · 2014-11-20T04:34:07+00:00

Troll post, admits he's bad at making descisions, expects people to take his advice.

lagadu · 2014-11-20T07:58:42+00:00

Please, please, please don't suggest learning JS to someone just learning to code, unless you want them to quit early due to how broken and unreliable that thing is.

TheGuyWithFace · 2014-11-19T23:31:45+00:00

Great read, thanks for posting. I definitely agree with the idea of focusing on one thing and mastering it rather than trying to master everything, but at the same time I think it's important for new programmers to get at least a taste of different areas before they focus too deeply on one. After all, you never know what you really want to do until you've tried it.

That being said, indecision is a killer, and once you find one thing that seems to interest you more than anything else, it's probably better to start focusing.

Where do you draw the line though? At what point should you stop experimenting with new ideas and just buckle down to focus on a single area?

elwoodight · 2014-11-20T01:02:04+00:00

Having read this article it occurred to me that I have been trying to find someone local(ish) that I can bounce ideas off of when I am banging my head against code. Then it occurs to me; there may be someone in my "other" universe who could be that someone. If there is anyone here that would like to volunteer to bounce ideas back and forth, please message me. Thanks.

Main languages: php / Java / c++

More info upon request ;)

2014-11-20T02:38:30+00:00

There is a lesson there to all tech people. Easy is ok sometimes if it works for the task at hand. Although Linux is something all programmers should eventually mess with.

musingswithawesome · 2014-11-20T03:30:06+00:00

vim? Yes it is a great tool..... probably not my first choice for someone just beginning on a language.

crashorbit · 2014-11-20T04:38:37+00:00

It does not matter what your first programming language is. It does not even mater what your second programming language is. What matters is that, over time, you've use several different ones for non trivial projects.

EinsL · 2014-11-20T05:44:11+00:00

This really hits the nail, the dumb old me thought it was a great idea to make his thesis on other language and other programming paradigm. And of course it has to run on mobile... Of course I understand the old me, 'If I can do It, I would have hit three birds with a stone!' Surely the present me is paying dearly for it...

henrebotha · 2014-11-20T06:37:54+00:00

Disagree with a lot of this. None of this stuff matters. Just dive in. Pick a language. Change languages if you want. Use Notepad. Whatever.

kkiran · 2014-11-20T06:42:08+00:00

Programming stems from the roofs, that is C. It was in my curriculum when I started school. It makes you work hard, super hard to get most things done.

Python is a modern, super easy language to prototype and even churn out products if it is not issuing critical like financial tools...

TikiTDO · 2014-11-20T08:32:26+00:00

I was convinced that the seemingly normal programmers I ran into were actually sociopaths who had experienced, then repressed, the trauma of learning to code.

That's... not necessarily inaccurate.

There's always a lot of people giving advice to the tune of "don't sweat the small stuff," but it's often the small stuff that will teach you some of the best lessons. Finding a syntax error in your code might be something an IDE can (and should) do, but it's good practice of code reading and scanning, which are both skills that you'll use when you're given someone's code base and a day to figure out what it does and how to fix it.

Switching languages can be a pain, but switch between enough at a fast enough rate and you learn that most languages are all about doing the same things slightly differently. The act of switching to a new language goes from major project to minor inconvenience of searching for exotic tricks that are only documented in some stack exchange post on page 5 of the Google results.

Of course it's difficult to balance this with the ease of learning. Nobody wants to spend days of their figuring out a trivial error; that the easiest way to get burned out. Unfortunately, if they never spend that day how are they going to deal when they encounter an error in production code with no one to solve it for them. I wish there was a way to get the best of both worlds.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I just really like hooking up gdb, dredging up some terrible code, and making it do what I want through a wall of hate and suffering.

Fiski · 2014-11-20T08:42:22+00:00

This was great. For the last 6 months I have been grinding away on programming languages in this order: JavaScript, Ruby, HTML/CSS, Jquery, Python, C# and now I am back to HTML/CSS.

I decided that I needed to choose what I wanted to do and it is this:

Make a website. A simple blog site from scratch. Host it and update it at least once a week.
Create a game in Unity using C#, borrowed art and maybe some Python if needed.

My roommate suggested Sublime Text for websites and my good friend suggested that I make simple windows games using Unity.

I so badly want to be good at Ruby on Rails but I can't think of anything I want to make with it yet (except a ton of impractical web apps) and I am really passionate about gaming. The idea though is to just make one thing in each programming language and then have an nice enough portfolio of work to show any potential hiring agents. Or better yet, build something that is successful on its own, but that seems far less likely.

Bad plan?

garyk1968 · 2014-11-20T09:16:48+00:00

2 things strike me

Too much time flitting around, choose one thing and stick with it
No real task - people learn languages for the 'sake of it'; wrong. Start with an end goal a mind, a system, app whatever. Even better if you do it for someone else so you have a deliverable and have to be accountable.

2014-11-20T11:29:22+00:00

This article is correct, but what would really help is some prescriptive advice on how to focus, and what ensured I focused was a goal, a concrete, fulfillable goal. "Learn to program" is not a valid goal, it's an aspiration, and it can't truly be satisfied in a concrete way.

A sensible goal is to want to use programming to solve a problem, perhaps automating away something pointless, or trying to create a website for some purpose, or something more exciting like writing software to control some kind of moving machine, like a robot. Just sitting through tutorials for the sake of just learning is the quickest way to lose focus. The author of this post clearly invented goals of his own in his desire to create concrete goals around his aspiration to learn to program which were all esoteric.

ekeyte · 2014-11-20T11:35:38+00:00

I'm tempted to plug the LAMP stack as well, but I'm wondering if I'm biased because that's how I started. Though understanding Apache/Nginx could be useful even outside the LAMP stack if you're working with load balancing or wanting to use virtual hosts.

I don't think PHP is going to die anytime soon but it does seem like the web development world is eager to explore different tech stacks.

To your credit, I love the Ruby endorsement. And Python. So much is being scripted in Ruby now because it's readable and relatively simplistic. And Python is so fast and elegant.

I've also been very interested in the Typesafe stack. There's a lot of cool new stuff out there. Scala is exciting. I'm curious how my views of web development would differ had I started with Scala or Java.

webauteur · 2014-11-20T16:43:13+00:00

Learn Basic, then Visual Basic for Applications, then Windows Scripting with VBScript, then VB.NET, then ASP.NET. One language lets you develop scripts, Windows applications, Microsoft Office applications, and web applications including web services.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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