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by reneighbor
5649 days ago
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I also work in a non-tech role at a startup (I run support at Twilio) and am teaching myself to code. My sentiments are quite the same as James's; it's fun and rewarding but there's so much to learn before you even know what you don't know, before you know what to Google to get help. It's like being illiterate and you don't even know enough to look up words in a dictionary. I do think that knowing how to program and how computers work is a new form of literacy. Teaching kids programming is certainly more useful and stimulating than, say, long-division. One day people will (hopefully) say, "Wow, can you believe that in the past, only a tiny percentage of people knew how to program?" Until then, I show my programmer friends my learning-to-program blog (http://reneecoding.blogspot.com), and they say, "This is so cool! It reminds me of what I did when I was twelve." |
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One of my friends in college compared it to Japanese 101: you can't read a character like 鳥, you can't sound it out, you can't look it up in the dictionary, and you lack words to describe what it looks like to anyone who could rectify any of these problems for you.
There is a trick for Japanese for looking those up in a paper or online dictionary (outside the scope of this post). Relatedly, to learn that particular character, you just write it on a piece of paper until your fingers bleed, and put it in your journal of words with some sample sentences, combinations, etc.
The programming journal thing is a good way to learn programming. My suggestion: if you're learning Japanese, you want Japanese people to critique your characters. Find the guys you want to be like and ask them to critique your programs. (For example, the programmers you want to be like would probably say that your solution for isDivisible will function but it would be quicker and easier to use the XOR operator, and as soon as you know "XOR" you can Google how to use it in Java.)