[musingsole]

Programming as a topic is a iceberg. Pick some flavor, find some tutorials, accomplish some small things and it's easy to think the rest of the industry is just that process * 10 every day.

In reality, it's that process * 1000 plus the addition of a few other processes those tutorials can't expose because they're only needed at the intersection of 50+ different applications. Plus an entirely unaccounted for process in the form of creative problem solving that makes up 90% of the work.

I've had a number of executives plop down at my desk, proudly proclaiming to be a python dev only to see their eyes glaze over and every other word fly above their heads only a few commands into the interpreter.

[tectonicfury]

When you have websites like hackingwithswift and you see Chris lattner (who is some genius because he made a new language) endorsing it with lavish praises, you tend to believe that it’s easy. But then every time I tried to make a 10% decent app, I had to look up the documentation and used to be confronted with (gatekeeping?) jargon like concurrency and background thread. I even paid for raywenderlich’s annual subscription but now I realise why these websites are so flashy and captivating.

There are also a lot of resources which sound as if they would be great as they have big name authors but they actually make you more depressed. I had many such experiences most notably with Stroustrup’s books. The one called Programming - principles and practice is a hopeless soup of complicated syntax and lousy pedagogy. It’s aimed at beginners but really anyone who’s read chapter 6 of the book where he seeks to teach ‘what programming is actually about” using a calculator program as an illustrative example, he really makes it appear as if recursion is some exotic and esoteric thing, whereas it is a recurrent theme in the domain of programming. I say this because before this chapter he never used recursion and it becomes very unintuitive, unlike SICP, where from the beginning this is identified as one of the central ideas in all programming.

I was fortunate I used to read e-books and didn’t spend too much on purchasing flimsy books, turns out, as far as CS is concerned, the best stuff is actually free (and accessible as pointed above in the link)

[ZephyrBlu]

For me programming is more like a Mandelbrot set.