[germandiago]

I have been giving advice to a person, young also (16 years old) and he thinks he can go very far very quickly.

I told him to be patient, to insist, to commit time learning not only typical courses of how to code your website with a database. In fact I gave him advice against doing that first.

I adviced him to learn binary/hex, algorithms, data structures and structured programming as a minimum. Also how a machine works (at least the abstract model): memory addresses, data, pc.ñ, call stack... etc. Interpeters vs compilers, some OS basics (though at first can skip most of this). My advice has been to first learn with Python and later C.

Understand why or when to use functions, certain data structures, etc. Do increasingly difficult but basic exercises.

And specifically, develop a sense and taste, at the end, on how to figure out how to code a solution to a problem he never saw. Cost analysis also helps lots and must be learnt at some point.

This is what happens when you gothrough random courses, exactly:

> Maybe you’re still lacking fundamentals? Seems like your strategy so far has been to grind tutorials and crash courses. They will make you feel like you’re learning a lot in a short time but in the end you’ll still not know what you’re doing, and you’ll keep struggling when facing new problems that are outside of the scope of the tutorial.

That is SO true. You have to start from scratch. I mean it. Because when you see something like s stacktrace that goes from Python to your native library with memory addresses you will understand NOTHING when the time comes.

Programming is a discipline where you need a lot of practice.

[I_Am_Nous]

Something I have realized with my struggles in learning how to program is that it's as much a philosophy of how we get a computer to solve a problem as it is an experience learning the structure and syntax of a new language. Coming at it from a complete newbie perspective I don't even know what I don't know, so therefore I can't begin to learn what I should. At best, I can memorize how to do basic things but I don't understand the fundamentals of how those things work, or why they were designed that way.

To be honest, I don't have an objective reason to learn much CS as that's not my layer, so I'm butting up against my own ignorance any time I try to advance in something easy. And then my ADHD determines memorizing that information is unnecessary so I struggle to get concepts to sink in.

Recently I discovered Roblox uses Lua so learning that to make silly experiences for my son sounds wonderful. It's goal oriented so I can convince myself it's worth pursuing, and I feel like Lua concepts will help expand my toolkit for the future. But I'm also not starting from a blank IDE page going "geez how do I even know what to start building first..."

[imtringued]

You probably don't know how valuable motivation is. I learned that lesson only three years ago. It is so easy to simply do nothing both when you are motivated and not motivated. You don't need to know how write lua if you can inspire your son to build things with it. In the last three years, I have probably had more ideas of things that I want to do than in the two decades before that.

When I was 16, I had software skills but was clueless about what to actually build. Now I know what to do and don't have enough time to do it. The idea of grinding two hours a week just doesn't work for me. I want to do things in bursts. Like working 10 hours on it and then weeks of nothing.

[germandiago]

> I don't understand the fundamentals of how those things work, or why they were designed that way

The problem with not understanding things is that when you face a new problem or things crash or go wrong you get totally lost and do not know how to proceed at all.

Another recommendation if you want to learn is that you use a terminal and an editor. Nothing else. You will see things closer to how they work. You will be aware you are launching a script or compiling a file. You will see the output files, you will understand there is a compiled file to be run. You will see if it is native code you run it directly but if it is compiled to bytecode you need a VM, etc.

That is part of the details one must be aware of.