I Feel Bad For New Programmers

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[techystuffs]

I have a different take on this. I am a seasoned programmer who has been in the industry for over 30 years now. I have a background in electrical engineering and that pretty much gave me an edge when I was starting out. I had an in-depth understanding of how computers worked from the basic circuitry. There are so many layers of abstraction even in those circuits and trying to understand all of them won't get you anywhere. The software industry is moving fast and companies are looking for engineers who are familiar with their stack. So I see no harm starting out at a higher layer of abstraction and moving on to lower layers when you get a job or after you get relevant industry experience. In the end people need to get by and it's okay if you want to start from a higher layer. Your value as an engineer is not measured by how much you know, but how you use what you know and what is available to solve existing problems. That's my opinion.

[ameer]

The bad thing is that after learning all these things, we don't become good at programming; we just become good at using those abstracted tools. We don't know how these things work internally, and the moment these abstracted tools become obsolete, we're thrown back to step one

[taelos]

On the one hand, having a solid understanding of the foundations is almost always beneficial no matter the field. On the other, the current state of many fields is so far off in space that if you stop to shore up that understanding, it seems impossible to catch up to where everyone else is in current developments.
One of my personal issues is a tendency to get obsessed with those basics and never moving on.

[hobbiesseriously]

As a new programmer, learning higher level stuff is kind of like watching family guy without knowing references. You kinda get it because the jokes work on their own so you just move on without much thought. Then when you learn about the references (or tools) you look back at the episode and you’re like “omg I understand everything now!”

[HiMyNameWaffy]

This is why I feel bad for people trying to change careers at React bootcamps.

[psyience]

I program as a hobby but I’m so happy I started with C. I learned programming because I wanted to learn about computers, not necessarily because I wanted to make anything. I was just fascinated with the technology. Went from c to c++ and took an assembly course. I switched colleges and they wouldn’t let me continue the CS curriculum because they were learning Java and I was learning c++. I was like, “you realize I bought a book and learned Java in a week, right?”

Like you said when you learn the actual art of programming learning a knew language is just matter of learning syntax and remembering how things work, you’re not trying to figure out why things work.

[grexpex]

dude my university doesn't even teach how MEMORY works, none of my peers know what assembly is, the lowest level language we're being taught is JAVA

[JT-mrdb]

The discipline required to peel back the abstraction layers is pretty overwhelming these days.

[binary_gaming]

At university, I see so many people with enough superficial knowledge to get by, and sometimes I really feel bad for them. As soon as things get complicated enough to go below theor comfortable layer of abstraction, they are lost.

[salazar]

As someone who is in Uni now, we still do all the things Primagen was talking about and haven't even sniffed in the direction of a GUI. Our intro to programming back in year 1 was in C (not C++), and one of our first courses which is compulsory involved how floats ints etc were represented in memory and we did lots of binary arithmetic and learned MIPS assembly there. I've been feeling somewhat down about not being able to make an actual application outside of a terminal despite years of programming, so this video really helped reassure me that I'm on the right path.

[binary_gaming]

I personally prefer the bottom-up way of learning since your knowledge never depends on things you don't know yet and the bigger picture usually just clicks immediately.

[salvatoreshiggerino]

This resonates with me as well. I got filtered by Ruby on Rails starting out because there were too many concepts too far removed from what I was trying to do. Then I went to bare PHP and wrote horrible, unmaintainable code, but at least I was learning.

[qwertyuiop]

Agree 100%. I got a CS degree almost 20 years ago now, and had impostor syndrome so bad I did something else with my life. I've tried to get back into it a few times. It's amazing that there's a library for everything and modern developer tools are voodoo magic. It's so easy to make a functioning one-off business logic project with infinite tech debt, but that next step is a doozy.

[aminallam]

As someone who started learning to program a year ago I felt this pain. The first thing I tried to learn was .NET frameworks and it was so overwhelming. I eventually pivoted to Js, though due to the level of abstractions in things like react and other UI frameworks, it just didn’t make sense to me, it felt like there was something missing to connect the dots. I finally got a grip on things when I realized the question you need to ask is why? Why is this framework abstracting this feature and what use is it to me. I found that I much prefer to understand how the cake is made rather than throw icing on it. Now I primarily only use minimal third party libraries as I found it is easier to understand what is going on if you build it yourself from scratch. It may sound counterintuitive but that’s really the best way to understand what is going on.

[adam]

Completely agree with this. Was talking to my friend about this yesterday... With how they try to churn full stack web devs out it feels like they are trying to take shortcuts... Its absolutely insane you are expected to be full stack in a few months with having to know THIS much. Saying that as someone who has gone down this route myself.

I'm grateful it's given me a door into the industry at least. I'd love to make Web plan b and get into something else like embedded systems, but it's going to take some time to get there for me.

[Thisone]

This is why i honestly think people should learn c as their first language. If you can build a data structure in c it becomes much easier to understand the abstraction in other languages.

[jdotseven]

As an electrician that enjoys programming as soon as you said electric motor underneath memory, I started laughing.

[fatgeekuk]

in 1989 I accepted a short contract to re-write an assembler system. my toolset was the databook for the micro, a pad of paper, an eprom programmer and eraser and the target board. I wrote the assember on paper, assembled it to hex by hand, typed the hex into the eprom programmer, and blew the chip. took the chip out and inserted it into the target board and powerd it up. Then worked out what was wrong with a logic probe and took the chip out, and into a uve eprom eraser and the cycle started again. no oscilloscope, no computer other than the target eeprom based microcotroller.

[onee]

This is why it took me so long to learn basic JavaScript. Because JavaScript used to be "simple" language to manipulate your website, but then it turned into, "We also want OOP, we also want array methods, we also want X, Y, Z" And now there are 50 ways of doing the same thing instead of just one or two. As a beginner that's super overwhelming since programming itself is already quite confusing for a total beginner. This is why modern JS is just a bad way to learn programming IMHO.

[ogpurpledaddy]

I'm 36 in the middle of my cs degree. They taught absolute basics of python, java, and C++. I've been deep diving C++ on my own since there's no more other language courses during the degree. I always like watching prime's videos and play the game of inferring definitions through context clues for all the different technologies that are mentioned on a daily basis. I know I won't learn it all, so I'm just making micro-projects that can perform a task that I didn't know how to make before. Things like monitoring keyboard/mouse events from the windows library, or using sockets. I always have this anxiety in the back of my mind like I need to learn specific things before my final year at school is up. For now, though, I just keep writing things like linked lists or exploring new ways on how to fill up all my memory on my system.