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by ctdonath
4706 days ago
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Indeed; coding is akin to music, art, etc. in that it's not so much you learn to do it, but it's just what you do as a result of you being you. Sure, learning is necessary to grasp the tools and make them do what you want, but once you have enough tools to get started (editor/compiler, guitar, paint & brush) you just run with it. At age 10 Dad brought home a terminal and had me type in a 3-line program; ran it once, and immediately wanted to change it, already grokking loops and output formatting. Programming as "work" isn't so much a means to an end as someone funding my needs so I can do what I can't stop myself from doing: code. I half expected the article to consider the sheer scale of the programming stack: today, the conceptual layers from NAND gates & machine code to graphical resource editors are so numerous and complex that I can scarcely comprehend how any student of programming starting out these days any later than grade school can absorb the material in any sensible timeframe. |
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That's pretty easy to say for someone who's dad seems to have had the same interest. I was brought up by a mom that can't tell a bass guitar from a guitar and a dad who doesn't really have an interest in music other than a music 'collection' of 8 CD's from the sixties and who probably does not have a sense of rhythm. Thankfully I had some peers who played music and parents that bought me my first instrument, but actually practicing and getting good at an instrument is (to me) a very tedious and deliberate form of practice that can take a very long amount of time if you happen to be mainly interested in a type of music that happens to be challenging to play - like what I was interested in. Practicing programming for four hours is more fun and less draining than properly practicing an instrument for one hour, for me. To keep it short; low self-esteem, and especially a lack of social self-esteem, and lack of discipline when it comes to practice; if my so-called "passion" for music wasn't able to help me battle through those things, I guess it wasn't much of an interest or passion to begin with, eh...