Really good discussion of what falls apart when these "anyone can learn to code!" tutorials leave you high and dry, and how to get past that next huge hurdle of self-sufficiency.
As someone who is currently learning how to code, the author gets it mostly right.
For me, the hardest parts of programming as a beginner - understanding OOP, data structures, etc. - didn't really 'click' until I stopped reading tutorials about them and start writing my own programs. The idea of 'objects' and 'instance variables' was mind boggingly confusing at first, but once I stopped worrying about how to make sense of them, the concepts somehow just fell into place.
I've also been trying to learn French simultaneously. The process was somewhat similar - taking a few Duolingo lessons and thinking that 'hey, I can do this!'. Then I read some actual French prose and everything seemed impossibly difficult. Things didn't 'click' until I started living and breathing French.
Indeed, you can only get good at programming by doing it.
As someone who learnt programming in the 90ies, one of the difficult things nowadays seems to be that there are so many languages, libraries, frameworks, hypes, etc. Of course, if you know your CS and have experience, most of it are variations on common themes. However, I can imagine that it can be very difficult to focus on one thing and learning it well. There must be many copy & paste programmers out there who never learn anything in depth.
At the beginning of the nineties things were much simpler. If you had a home PC (obviously without internet), you could get started with QBasic, or shell out some money for a compiler and get Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++.
I did quite a bit of Turbo Pascal programming at some point and it was all very understandable. A simple language, a small standard library that's probably all that you'll have, good documentation, and an IDE (which had a very nice debugger and profiler). And you just crafted tools with that.
I actually learned HTML, CSS and JS way back when I was in 6th grade. This was pre dot-com time and there were only a handful of resources. You could understand HTML and CSS in a day because there were so few HTML tags and requirements. 'Frameworks' was something that didn't even exist.
I somehow stopped my learning process before I hit 8th grade (around the same time I discovered that the opposite sex exists). When I picked it up again recently, the sheer number and complexity of frameworks and languages itself was daunting.
I can't imagine how hard it must be for someone who hasn't had a lick of coding experience. I could at least build a good looking website in HTML, CSS and simple JS before I started learning how to code.
It's damn tough and it has given me newfound respect for top coders. I work in marketing in my day job, and honestly, you could teach someone to replace me within a few weeks
I have been coding for a long, long time. Since the 80s. But I got started with the idea that I wanted to 'build' something...I think it was a randomized dice roll or something. Having something you are trying to actually 'make' will cause you to learn what you don't know, and keep going.
It's no different than saying 'I want to build a tree house'. as opposed to 'I'd like to learn how to do construction' or 'I'd like to understand how to build with lumber'. The first statement will drive you to figure out or learn what it takes to make something tangible, the second two statements are just nice ideas, easily discarded when things get difficult.
Yeah, that too. I have a humanities background, but I was always keen on mathematics. I know this is not true for a lot of my peers who studied the arts.
Really makes 'anyone can code' sound more like a marketing slogan than an evidence backed statement. If your math and logic game is weak, you'll have a hard time with anything beyond the most cookie cutter PHP code.
