Re:Ask HN: What's the most difficult part of learning to pro...
by CM30 on Monday August 27, 2018 @06:03AM
(#17850482)
Okay, there are a few possibilities here, so I'll go over some of the ones I feel may be the more difficult aspects of learning to program:
1. It's much harder to read other people's code than to code yourself, so it's very easy to get put off by the apparent complexity of other people's work.
But you don't know why their work is like that. You don't know if their coding is actually good, you don't know what odd OS/browser/language version bugs are being fixed by the weirdness there, you can't see all the work that went into the program before... It can be misleading, and make you feel like you 'don't get it'.
2. Tutorials being very heavily slanted towards the beginner and expert ends of the spectrum. It's harder to go from intermediate to expert than from beginner to intermediate or learn more as an expert, because few tutorials are written for that level of expertise.
3. Similarly, figuring out why something may work the way it does on a fundamental level can be tricky. Tutorials often have a 'just trust us on this' attitude towards explaining tihngs, and don't really go into why different types of variables work, why loops work, why say Redux works the way it does, etc.
4. And I guess for some people, just the whole mindset can be difficult to get into. Programming is a very precision driven exercise, and for people used to the 'good enough' way that most of society works, that can feel jarring and awkward. It can feel like being the world's strictest dog trainer, with the computer or language or compiler or what not being a pooch that can't figure out what you want from it unless you teach it in the exact right way.
1. It's much harder to read other people's code than to code yourself, so it's very easy to get put off by the apparent complexity of other people's work.
But you don't know why their work is like that. You don't know if their coding is actually good, you don't know what odd OS/browser/language version bugs are being fixed by the weirdness there, you can't see all the work that went into the program before... It can be misleading, and make you feel like you 'don't get it'.
2. Tutorials being very heavily slanted towards the beginner and expert ends of the spectrum. It's harder to go from intermediate to expert than from beginner to intermediate or learn more as an expert, because few tutorials are written for that level of expertise.
3. Similarly, figuring out why something may work the way it does on a fundamental level can be tricky. Tutorials often have a 'just trust us on this' attitude towards explaining tihngs, and don't really go into why different types of variables work, why loops work, why say Redux works the way it does, etc.
4. And I guess for some people, just the whole mindset can be difficult to get into. Programming is a very precision driven exercise, and for people used to the 'good enough' way that most of society works, that can feel jarring and awkward. It can feel like being the world's strictest dog trainer, with the computer or language or compiler or what not being a pooch that can't figure out what you want from it unless you teach it in the exact right way.