[bliti]

The great wall of China started as one measly block. Do we undermine the effort of the labourers that pushed it into place? It is just one rock. Not worthy of any praise.

But we may be missing the bigger picture. What you call a minor achievement is in reality a big step towards becoming a programmer. The biggest block to programming is being courageous enough to dig into the source code. Be it markup, or else. Who are we to criticize the achievements of others? When in reality we walked down the same path. Do you not remember the first time you were able to print your name to the terminal prompt? I do. It was 1984. I got the same jolly feeling when I did it with Javascript, back in the year 2000.

Who knows if the OP will turn out to be a great programmer?

[lobotryas]

The point is not criticizing the achievements of others, but putting them in context of a greater whole. Creating your own website is great, but it's a tiny first step in a long journey. If's up to the individual to see how far they want to stick with it, but we should never mislead people by telling them that their achievements are greater than they really are.

[beering]

I may be biased, but the amount of "putting them in their place" comments is disproportional to how much they overestimate themselves. I doubt Tiffany thinks that she's going to be debugging C++ for Google's [redacted] within the year, for example.

Others' accomplishments might seem tiny compared to where you are, but gradually realizing that there's always more to learn is part of the growing process. All of this "putting things into perspective" is perhaps unnecessary - when I got started, I certainly didn't (and couldn't) have had as wide of a perspective as I do now.

[lobotryas]

You're projecting onto my comment.

I wrote: "putting [the achievements of others] in context of a greater whole". This has nowhere near the negative connotations that you're implying.

>All of this "putting things into perspective" is perhaps unnecessary

Perspective is always important as it allows us to celebrate how far we've come and remain humble at how much remains.

Personally, I've seen too many CS101 students get an over-inflated ego after they are told that they've become "hacking Gods" after setting up their own blog and playing with customizing the CSS.

[ShirtlessRod]

Was anyone doing that here? Seemed like it was more of "good for you, here's some things to improve".