On finally learning to program at the age of 40 (2020)

This article illustrates quite well what our industry is suffering from. (Apart from being 10x as long as needed and full of rambling that makes it hard to actually read fully.)<p>There seems to be the perception that you can just &quot;get into programming&quot; in a few weeks and then you are a competent programmer creating anything of high quality and value. It&#x27;s not the case for skilled carpenters, neurosurgeons or concert violin players. How come people seem to believe it&#x27;s true for the art and craft of software engineering? I&#x27;ve been a computer nerd since high school, studied a Comp.Eng. degree for 5 years, went to grad school for another 4 and now I&#x27;m in an industry job for 3 years, and I consider myself only marginally competent at my craft. How come my soccer friend thinks he can watch a bunch of Javascript youtube clips and take an easy distance course at a university to score him a high paying job 2 months from now? That&#x27;s not how it works, neither with carpentry nor with neurosurgery nor with concert violinists nor with software engineering.

Kudos to the author but I got the impression that they equate &quot;learning to program&quot; with &quot;learning syntax&quot; which, I think, is a mistake. I&#x27;ve noticed the article talks a lot about things like &quot;print&quot;, &quot;goto&quot;, dereferencing, enums, but nothing about algorithms, data structures, architecture, patterns, how to properly structure your code. That is, the author learned how to make small one-off utilities but there&#x27;s no mention if they went beyond that. I program since childhood and I&#x27;d say I&#x27;m still learning how to program because there&#x27;s so much more to it than just finishing a few crash courses and making your Rust program finally compile.

Learning to program is not some discrete event, some fixed point in time, where you could not do it before, and you can afterwards.<p>It&#x27;s a continuous process. Understanding the syntax is maybe the first step but this is easy. Understanding control statements like conditional code and loops, maybe recursion, is a next big step, if it&#x27;s all completely novel to you. At this point, you probably already can program a lot of basic things, when you are persistent enough to work through all the errors. So at this stage, you might say you have learned to program.<p>But then there is so much more, like all the relevant data structures, etc.<p>I&#x27;m know coding since 25 years and still I feel that I&#x27;m far away from really having mastered it, although I feel very confident in most things. Currently I think I could definitely improve my architectural skills. And there are many other things where I lack knowledge, which could have been helpful in certain situations.

&gt;&gt; So even up to then I had been keeping a distance from computers when out in public so that I could maintain the image of &quot;Yeah, I&#x27;m good at computers but I&#x27;m not a computer guy or anything&quot;.<p>&quot;Your time is limited, so don&#x27;t waste it living someone else&#x27;s life&quot;

At first I could not see the point of this article. Just his own personal experience. That is well… personal.<p>Then I compared to my own personal experience. Which is probably as weird and totally random.<p>I started « programming » with VHDL and then XSLT ;). And after similar completely random professional&#x2F;own experiences, aka trials&#x2F;errors (doing mostly Java. For GUIs, Eclipse plugins, Hibernate, pure functional framework, highly parallel data treatment, …), I switched to Javascript (thanks god, it was after ES6, and just when hooks arrived in React). While, in parallel, always trying to understand that book « Learn you a haskell for great good ».<p>Nowadays (46 years old here), I am now at ease with programming. I do all the things that amazed me when younger: reading code first (mild confidence in colleagues talks, or in documentation), organising projects ahead of time, no fear to PoC things&#x2F;break things&#x2F;repair things, refactoring as a foundation, testing all the time, choosing the right tools (Git-bash&#x2F; IntelliJ&#x2F;Obsidian for the win!).<p>I now connect with younger programmers, trying to exchange knowledge and methods. I realize what they do wrong or think wrong, and help them shorten the path towards simplicity.

The article title is false (deliberately clickbait). He clearly learned to program at an early age which is what he was doing when making those RPGs. Programming with BASIC does train on core programming skills and concepts.<p>He just stopped doing it and got stuck for a bit while trying to pick it up again with a different language many years later.

I started undergrad as an engineering major in 2005 and I remember [somehow] thinking very clearly that programming was fun and interesting but would be a self-indulgent thing to study since it was just for making fun websites and video games... going to art school to pursue a teaching job legitimately seemed like the more practical choice somehow. I had a blast and don&#x27;t regret the art part, and teaching was extremely rewarding, but I wish I had kept programming.<p>I started up again in 2020 in my mid-thirties with a newborn but it took a bootcamp and a lot of guidance &#x2F; help from friends to catch up with what modern development had become. I&#x27;ve loved every minute of it and I cant believe what a relief it is to be on a stable career path, even with the hiring freezes etc.<p>Anyway its aways great to see this kind of thing on the top of HN. The future of human labor is software, and we all really can do it. Maybe, like I know.

I like being able to build things myself<p>all the lucrative stuff requires a software engineer, other people have to go raise capital just to pay them for that person&#x27;s <i>one</i> idea<p>if you are the software engineer, you are six figures worth of value already and you just need to dedicate your own time to your idea<p>its also totally fine if you don&#x27;t have any entreprenurial aspiration and just want to go to work, the compensation package&#x27;s value is geared towards you being content having no aspiration to build something lucrative for yourself

Discussed at the time:<p><i>On finally learning to program at the age of 40</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24404628" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24404628</a> - Sept 2020 (161 comments)

Interestingly I also started with basic, having to manually write line numbers, but I’m in my early 30s. I’m wondering if I was exposed to some legacy stuff when young, or if basic lasted a long time. Btw it was on a very big and awkward calculator.

About his 80s childhood:<p>&gt; The key point is that he showed me something called BASIC that at the time I assumed was the only programming language in the world. I took to it and followed along with books like this one called the Mystery of Silver Mountain and Hunt the Wumpus, and pretty soon had picked up how to program. I began making my own small RPGs based on Steve Jackson&#x27;s Sorcery! books.<p>Why are these articles always about people who already know how to program and they just want to refresh&#x2F;update&#x2F;continue their learning?

The OP is not learning to program , he is just juggling programming languages. He dosen&#x27;t learn to understand the core concepts of software engineering . What he could learn better is by doing :<p>- Pick an opensource software of his favourite programming lang<p>- Set it up from scratch (no docker or GUI installer , build from source)<p>- Learn how it works by looking into the source code.<p>- Learn how it was engineered.<p>That would make him learn a lot faster and better.

The Coleco Adam was a kinda cool machine at the time, compared to low-end home computers. It had tape drives instead of audio cassette recorder&#x2F;cable, detached keyboard, daisy wheel printer instead of 9-pin dot matrix. IIRC, Forrest Mims had one.

I’m a few months pre 40 and currently going through CS50x, it does feel like finally things are clicking after years of dabbling into various attempts like the author, and more recently having done a ton with no code and low code tools.

I had a lot of conflicting opinions on this article. My upbringing is very similar (albeit 10 years later). But I did become a professional software developer. I even resonated with starting with wanting to make games as a kid!<p>I don’t think I agree with this destiny stuff, on this specific topic. I think maybe because in college I had a lot of people try to say that some people just will never be able to be a programmer, and that never sat well with me because it was a passion of mine even if I wasn’t as smart.<p>I’m glad the author learned it! It sort of reminds me of Paula Deen, a very famous chef who IIRC didn’t start her culinary career until her 40s!

Worth it, no matter the age.

Interesting that he learned Rust largely through binging youtube and online tutorials. I kind of have a theory that for learning large programming languages like C++ or Rust the chunking of 10 minute youtube clips is superior to reading a whole book chapter or watching a 1 hour university lecture. The latter is often too tiring and by the end I am tired and lost but the 10 minute format forces quick examples.

Off topic, maybe. What does it mean to have learned to program? Does a trivial program qualify? Anyone could in theory do that. A paying job? Does quality matter? I can (and often do) write crappy code. So, technically I can program. But have I really learned to program?

Authors fundamental understanding is already better than 80% of the programmers i work with

With computer science the interesting thing is thar you can start learning to program… but you will never end!…<p>I’ve been programming since I was very young, and I still learn new things all the time. Which is great. :)

What happened to the girl you had a crush on? Did your effort to distance yourself from computers bear any fruit in any way? Do you have any regrets with that part of your story?

Having an ADAM means you were probably far closer to 50 than 40 in 2020. That seems like a weird point to base a repo on.

Pretty cool.

Still on my list.