I did an small experiment once: giving typical logic puzzles to friends (generally oriented to exact sciences) and family (mother, grandmother, girlfriend now wife, etc). The family group performed faster. I review the methods of each group and the friends group tried to use more formal methods.

Obviously none of these people were hardly into solving puzzles. I think novelty and lack of frustration in this field makes motivated people perform better. Take this with a grain if salt but there are neuroscience studies pointing to novelty as a good way to learn. It is easy to find studies about it like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3858647/

Sure you're not just smitten? Really? Stuff that took you years took her days? Kindly care to expound?

I don't find this too shocking. First, they never said she learned everything that much faster, just that there were some things she did learn much, much faster. Secondly, a big reason to not "understand" something is that you never considered it one way or the other. It's easy to just barely get by without knowing what's happening because it works so you move on to something else and then suddenly one day you see it again and go "wait, why?" and then you figure it out. You learned it quickly the moment you realized it was something you needed to learn, but it might have taken literal years before you considered it was something to learn. This kind of stuff I think happens a lot if you're self-taught because programming often (particularly in older languages and environments) involved some weird forms of setup that the beginner could skip by just copy-and-pasting the correct "template" without considering what it was doing.

For me, understanding what was involved with "installing" a library to use in Visual C++ took years even though it's not that complicated. I just followed magic instructions and if things didn't work, then I would just have to ask someone for help. Eventually I understood the difference between the dll and the header files, static and dynamic linking, etc. Someone could have explained that to me literally years before I learned it myself, but I spent years just assuming it was essentially unknowable.

Perhaps he counts his years as a kid? When stuff seems magical, mystical or at least very very fuzzy.

Well, I started programming with 15.

But yes, I'm not a very smart person. I had to learn things a few times till I understood them :/

God's truth - the honest, God's truth, is that between a standing start with 0 experience and a senior programmer there is very little actual INFORMATION.

Everything else is teachers and documentation and compiler errors being stupid.

For example when starting with C++ who starts out with the importance of semicolons, how you have to not leave them off, find the missing semicolon, and have a teacher watch over you pointing out your missing semicolons? Nobody. You get a stupid abstract sentence : "statements are terminated by semicolons" after some bullshit definition of a statement. You can spend 90 minutes looking at definitions of the latter without acquiring a skill that the former could show in - not an exaggeration - 17 seconds.

17 seconds : 90 minutes is 1:317, so 3 years becomes 3 days of someone actually showing you.

You know it's true. You've seen it!

Perhaps between 0 experience and a junior programmer, but not a senior programmer; you need a lot of experience with different designs to gauge how to model and approach different problems appropriately. There are many working solutions to problems, but the space narrows drastically when you consider what's appropriate to abstract and what isn't, what can be maintained easily and what can't, what can be tested easily, what can be explained easily, etc.

But that experience, isn't exactly information. You can't really learn it in a book... My comment was about passing on the required information -- and how much of it there is (little) and how well it's hidden (very well, in a pile of things that will waste anyone's time.)

your sibling comment (by andromeda__) gives a good example.

True. Laravel is probably the best PHP framework I've come across but the error display page seems like the only thing I didn't like. It can be quite daunting at first; errors that are easily decipherable using PHPs inherent error message display can seem quite arcane using Laravel.