Am I the only one who finds it odd when I hear someone say "coding was never the hard part" I've been studying CS for 3 years at a college, and I'm slowly improving my programming skills, it's just mind blowing how much one has to learn, it took me weeks of searching and practice to fully grasp how promises and asynchronous programming really work (understanding the event loop, and so on) and more weeks of practice just to start to use it effectively. Learning a Lisp took me a couple of months of independent study, understanding closures, thunks and FP-related concepts (it helped me later in develop a deeper understanding of JavaScript.)

And there are more examples, to me it feels there is a lot to learn just to become a good programmer! remember Peter Norvig's on how it takes around 10 years to get the hand of programming, to me it makes so much sense. Right now I'm getting into test driven development (TDD) through Helsinki's new online TDD course, it's mind blowing how painful it is to get used to it, I hear it takes a year or two of deliberate practise to actually start to use it well.

I know this seems like a vent but I just don't get it! it's as if experienced people are blind to this, as if they forgot how much effort it took to get there. And what some people say like "it was never the hard part" does have a lot of impact on people starting out or those in the middle of the journey. And of course being hard doesn't mean it can't be replaced (either partially or completely) by AI tools. I believe that's a separate topic.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403687

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