is it true that programming is something you either 'get' or you don't? I've tried dozens of times to learn it, I took a college class on it, and I still don't know how the fuck to build anything at all. I've decided to give up on it, but I'm just curious about other people's experience.
Learning to program
Joshua Bell
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Jaxson Ortiz
I've never understood how you couldn;t "get it" becasue its just a language... you have a dictionary or code book and you follow instructions to compile , debug a etc.. what is there beside the kind of a mind that can focus for hours typing and reading characters on a screen to be able to do this.. I actually started a home Basic programming course in like 1994 I think but got bored with it.
Hunter Perry
It's not the language that's the problem.
There are a lot of people that just can't do logical or algorithmic thinking.
They don't understand how to break down a problem into manageable tasks.
Owen Martin
it's a learn-able skill though, but sometimes I wonder if people can ever improve some skills
I've remember one guy who spent hours trying to get good at a street fighter 2 and he still sucked at it, while his brother(who was raised in the same environment and same genes) never played as much as him, can beat him with no trouble
Nathaniel Edwards
user, everything is something you either get it or don't. But it's not a single hierarchy of diffculty, it varies a lot from person to person. I know extremely intelligent people who couldn't program because... dunno, it seems they couldn't think in terms of an algorhitm running over and over. I figure this could be fixed with some meta-knowledge, like explaining algorhitmic thinking, distinguishing linear logic from cyclic logic etc.
Adam Jenkins
it's definitely a skill that can be sharpened and honed, but I do believe that some people are just incapable of it.
This is purely anecdotal, but as a CS TA, I've worked with these people before.
I've tutored graduating seniors who told me that they get anxiety every time they have a programming assignment because they just don't understand how to solve problems.
Luis Bailey
I have no issue with programming
I just find it BORING AS FUCK
Jason Ross
Becoming a programmer is all about 'delayed gratification'.
If you can slow down and understand that you need to look at the big picture (design) and then code with a certain level of patience, then you'll get it.
The patience is the ability to 'work slow' and work on small units. You can't code fast, out of the box. Similar to building construction, you work slowly on foundational items. You have to delay gratification because you can't build it in a day. You can't demo cool stuff right out of the box. This is the mistake that young me always made.
Oliver Roberts
>i wrote some basic over two decades ago, here are my hot opinions on programming
based boomer
Landon Brown
programming is technically more than just shitting code in the designated street. You also need to be able to conceptualize and construct complex systems in your mind.
The brilliant minds who can do this are called "Software Engineers", and the retards who shit code all day, are called "shitting street pajeets".
Gavin Anderson
Literally just try making a game. I did that and now I'm a shitty developer... I'm probably in the bottom 10% of developers...
Programming should be project based. Programming itself was invented to solve the problem of the US census.
Jason Taylor
You actually have to enjoy doing it and have a passion for it to be anywhere near competent, if you aren't using multicarets and constantly cut and pasting code then you'll never be a good programmer.
Jackson Perez
>slow down
isn't there a lot of intense competition? if you;re slow someone else will get your work.. unless you're a one man developer if you're part of a team you can't take your sweet time when the rest of the programmers are banging their stuff out.
Michael Diaz
The competition isn't that crazy
in fact, the hyper competitive ones are usually not as successful as the cooperative ones (which is partially why the industry is so onions'd up)
Alexander Lopez
>but sometimes I wonder if people can ever improve some skills
The basic test is that at the start of the CS course you have every student do a short test
>a=1
>b=2
>a=b
>a=?
Those that answer a=2 are fine.
Those that answer anything else, or a=1, will nearly always drop out or fail.
You do the same test at the end of the course, and even with syntax like
>a=1;
>b=2;
>a=b;
>print (a);
and ask them what it'll print, nearly every kid who answered wrong at the start of the course with zero programming knowledge will STILL answer wrong after taking the class, even for a year.
They just don't "Get it", and while you can bang into their head how computers work, you give them a pen and paper and they'll just default to their normal way of thinking.
You can't change how these people think.
Fuck, you could tell them the answer is 2, but then give them
>a=1
>b=5
>a=b
>a=?
and they'll either go back to answering 1, or they'll answer 2 because all they learned, rote, is that a=2. They never understood WHY a=2.
It's the difference between a puppy learning to piss outside because it fundamentally understands what "Inside" is, and knows not to piss there, and a puppy pissing inside, you rubbing their nose in the piss, and them still pissing inside, but them never pissing in that exact spot ever again.
Sure you can rub their nose in everywhere else they piss, until there isn't a single space inside for them to piss, so they piss outside, but if they find a corner in a cupboard somewhere, then they're gonna be just as likely to piss outside as in that cupboard.
You'd like to think that when they've pissed in every corner of a house and had their nose rubbed in piss a thousand times that they'd understand the difference between inside and outside, but some people are just so fucking dumb they'll never learn. They're incapable of it.
Dylan Adams
Protip: Try different languages.
Download Unity, and do all the basic unity tutorials.
If you can't understand procedural shit like C, maybe object oriented will be more your forte.
Noah Cox
I think you're exaggerating
Hunter Powell
Oh, and I teach this shit to literal 10 year olds and they get it fine. If you still don't understand, then you're beyond fucked.
Remember, just because you don't understand how things work in the background doesn't mean you don't understand the language.
Ignore what's going on behind the scenes, it doesn't matter. So long as you know "This does this, then this happens" you're fine.
Don't overthink things. If you can see that doing THIS thing always means THAT happens, that's fine. Don't worry about the why. The why is because THIS happens, and when THIS happens, THAT always happens after.
That's all it is. It's totally abstract and arbitrary.
Unless you wanna get a 6502 trainer and read through
osiweb.org
, you won't totally get what's going on in the background. That's fine.
Jaxson Rodriguez
Competitive, yes.
However in some industries, code quality trumps pajeet speed. See medical, aerospace, scientific...
Camden Barnes
I forgot where I read this, but it's been heavily documented.
It is literally just as bad as I'm making it out to be.
From speaking with CS professors, they say this is their go-to test, because it tells them which students they really need to focus on helping.
Some even give an extra beginner class to all the kids who fail the test, delaying everything else by up to a semester if they need to, because they know without this everything else will be a waste.
In the good old days, everyone who went to CS knew the fundamentals and thought this way. Now every fuckwit and his dog will go because they think if they #LearnToKode they'll be millionaires.
Luke Perry
I'm majoring in cs right now, taking a bunch of prerequisites at the moment. I have a computing logic class that we use Raptor to make programs in a flowchart based setup.
I have a drive to make simple programs, and am attempting to learn python in my spare time, but I have a full time job, finals, and I'm getting married this week, so I haven't had time lately.
The first program I ever written in python was a simple mp3 player. That was like 40 lines of code it took me 3 hours to get that motherfucker to play one goddamn song. Still is fun, though.
Kevin Powell
>pajeet speed
Aiden Johnson
>thinks being a code monkey is some kind of elite intellectual status
Hi, I work as a program manager at IBM and we've been systematically underpaying all our people for a looong time now. Give them a bit of flexibility, a bit of security and a title like "Software Engineer", even though it's the indoors slave version of "Custodial Engineer" and they stay at the screen for years, generating more wealth than they earn by miles.
Yeah, I come to Jow Forums for laughs like you.
William Nguyen
I wanna learn to code so I can make an app aimed at kids' demographics so I can blast the fuck out of it with ads for that revenue.
Isaiah Hernandez
All that matters are the abstract fundamentals.
Bentley Barnes
Then see and Download unity, do all the tutorials, congrats, now you've learned C#, the basis for all modern iPhone and Android apps.
Fuck, you can even make regular "Apps" in unity if you're really lazy, they all work just the same.
Seriously, the Unity tutorials will be the best intro to object oriented programming you can get, because everything's fucking visual, references are drag-and-drop.
Just have a go. You'll learn everything you need to know.