On why learning to program is hard

Re:On why learning to program is hard by anaphor on Saturday April 26, 2014 @07:24PM (#7653143)

It's all those things and the ability to see how very small parts form to create a larger thing.

Or in the words of Donald Knuth: "the psychological profiling [of a good programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large."

Note that he doesn't necessarily mean "low level" as in "machine code and system calls" just smaller parts of a system.

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Re:On why learning to program is hard by SAI_Peregrinus on Saturday April 26, 2014 @08:08PM (#7653265)

One of my favorite programming tutorials is "Write Yourself A Scheme." It's not "Here's the language, here's the API, etc" it's "Let's accomplish this task. Here's some documentation. Here's a breakdown of what you need to do. Figure out how to do it." There's no answer key to the exercises, either your solution worked or you need to redo it.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...

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