[j4pe]

Yes, granted, the title's intention is to inspire controversy, but it's still worth pointing out that the author's two concluding avenues to 'learning to code' - all-or-nothing desperation and irresistible intellectual attraction - are baseless. I'm confident that they're entirely false. Just more evidence-free platitudes dreamed up by a fellow twenty-something. I'd wager that these two extremes represent a very small percentage of real coders.

To answer anecdotal proof with anecdotal proof, I studied finance and taught myself to build web apps. I didn't do it because I had to. I didn't do it because I couldn't stop myself. I just forced myself to do it the same way I force myself to memorize Chinese characters, the same way I force myself out of bed every morning. Willpower isn't some mythical ability granted to the anointed few. It's just asking yourself, what am I doing right now? Is it what I want?

There's also a troubling perception of what 'coding' is behind this post and many others. I write code for a living and I'm under no illusions about my abilities. As James Somers pointed out in Aeon, I'm a kid playing around with tools given to me by adults. Nobody like myself or the author is going to build a Rails, a V8, an Ember, a Heroku. If I learned how to use a brush I wouldn't call myself an artist. It's fine that we're becoming more abstracted from the machine's reality - thank God DHH didn't have to use punchcards - but with that abstraction should come a bit of humility about what we've actually learned. Because for web development, at least, it's mostly syntax.

I'd better stop before I exceed than the original post length. If you'd like a tl;dr, it is: fuck the author's position, my experiences contradict it, and the author is confused about what 'real' code constitutes. (However, I wholeheartedly agree with his suggestion to learn by building something you yourself want.)