Truths on Programming!

 

This fact understandably discourages many people. Whenever I recommend to people that they should start learning how to code because it’s such an amazing and useful skill to have, the objection that I always hear is along the lines of:

“but it’s so hard, but I can’t do it, but you need to think and be mathsy and all…”

So most people don’t end up trying. And the ones who do end up quitting when it gets hard. But the case that I’m going to make in this article is that yes, coding is very hard. But that is precisely why you need to learn it.

And I’m going to explain what I mean using a simple graph & some basic economics!The graph we are going to be using is from a book called The Dip by Seth Godin. It neatly describes how your motivation & how ‘rewarding’ you’re learning process feels as a function of time. 

I have learnt this along the way;

·         Programming is 99% self-taught. See all that stuff you learnt in that Python class? Yeah, you're going to relearn it all when working on a real project.

·         There's no such thing as a simple bug. A stupid mistake like leaving out a semi-colon or misspelling a variable name can easily take a week to find and fix and can cause significant loss of sleep.

·         The more code you write the more you shut up about what's possible and what's next to impossible. And the more you pity those newbies with that “Of course it's possible!” mentality.

·         The language you use doesn't matter. There's so much fuss about which language is better for x or y. At the end of the day what matters is can you solve the problem? As a company manager, I'll want to see a running system. Not a running (insert language name here) system.

·         Six months later, you wouldn't recognize your own code. Documentation and commenting are more of a survival tactic than niceness to whoever encounters it next.

·         Programming isn't sexy at all. Try taking that girl home by telling her your heroic tale of saving an entire department by rewriting a recursive function to take advantage of a feature in the new server Intel chips to scale up their online orders. Then tell me how it goes.

·         Programming can be addictive. I can't go through an app or a game or a site without mentally visualizing what that code must look like. I don't know if I'm alone on this one.

·         Programming is tons of fun. But the fun only begins once you “get it”.