[tectonicfury]

Agree with the message, programming is really hard, and the earlier you realise it the better it is. Having “programmed” for the greater part of the last decade, starting out with ‘scientific computing’ in Fortran and matlab (I was doing chemical engineering), then spending precious time believing (and learning) that C and C++ are ‘the’ languages and having pop science ideas that Java is slow (‘it’s GC after all’), only to realise its much faster than C++ if you do ‘new’ a lot, I realised how less I knew about how hard programming really is. Just a glimpse of the hardships I went through. All this meandering was due to the belief that programming is easy (peddled around by legions of tech blogs and YT channels), and that there’s only a little more that CS students learn as part of UG degree curriculum.

Right now I am doing SICP and it’s giving me the essential ideas which all CS students learn but which hardly any programming blogs recommend to beginners. Learnt so much already (I am halfway though chapter 2), I now realise it was never about the language, it’s the ideas and techniques like recursion and FP that are the core of programming.

There’s no need to say that programming is easy, just tell people what they really need to do to be good programmers. And without a strong CS foundation it’s very hard.