[scarecrowbob]

Just to a offer an alternate experience, many of my first programming projects were implemented in wordPress.

These projects allowed me the opportunity to work on smaller subsets of problems than implementing a full-on CMS would have exposed me to as well as exposing me to many, many patterns I never would have encountered if I had to invent my own.

It was much more instructive to me to have to fix a small bug or implement a small feature that it would have been if I had to implement everything from the bottom up. I was also frustrated by many things in WP, but I believe that I could have been just as frustrated at any number of things in any system: that's just part of learning.

That said, I have always really enjoyed programming, and so the bad patterns and poor design choices that I see in wordPress weren't a big limitation on my learning, and I have since worked on a lot of of different systems, many of which have added new idioms to how I express myself in code.

I can see how people I know and work with don't progress very far in their programming skills because they can rely on frameworks or other code that they don't understand. But I have learned a whole lot by copying other folks' idioms.