| A personal account of perhaps an old timer already. Entirely based on personal experience so probably less than representative. People are either able to code or not. Teaching does not work. Those who are able to code almost entirely pick all the skills by themseves. If a 'natural born' coder gets into some formal environment, such as university or something, suсh a person in two months surpasses the level of all the peers and the direct instructor as well. In the university I was trained for automatics. But I quickly learned that coding takes me no effort at all, as opposed to, say, understanding electronics. After reading Wirth, Kernighan & Ritchie, and Stroustrup I often found myselfs hinting students from the programming department how to perform their tasks as they were scratching their heads and I was just passing by. This has nothing to do with inteligence. I'm perhaps not very smart. When I starred at some scheme I had no idea if this an amplifier or something else, what is the role of one resistor or another. At the same time mates from my group read it as it was written in plain English (err, in plain Russian to be precise). But the very same persons were totally unable to code. It's very strange. For me coding is trivial and takes no inteligence. This is why I do it for living. The path of the least resistance. I'm kind of puzzled why persons smarter than me cannot code. Anyway, after reading some foundational books the only thing that helps is reading other people's good code. For me it was reading pieces of the old (around 90's) BSD and GNU code. I never met a person I'd appreciate for directy handing me over any useful coding skill. YMMV. |