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Thread: How long did it take you to learn how to program?

  1. #1

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    How long did it take you to learn how to program?

    I'm just starting out and I'm a little overwhelmed - so I'm wondering how long it took you to become confident with programming? If I stick with it every day for a few months, does it all eventually click?
    I'm starting out with Python, and eventually I'd love to learn how to program AI programs (inspired by recent movies).

  2. #2
    *squeak*
    Bat's Avatar
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    Personally, I don't believe that confidence or even aptitude comes exclusively from putting in time. Like any other creative process, you can become better with practice, but you have to provide the passion and the drive. It's nice to set your sights on advanced subjects like AI development, but please remember that you'll have to walk before you run. That particular field of programming is fairly grassroots and proprietary at the moment, so you won't be able to find a lot of help with it in the form of samples and tutorials.

    I'd highly recommend programming things that are particularly useful to you as you start out. Learning how to break down a problem, then coding a solution for each detail of that problem is very encouraging and rewarding!

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    Kaine (12-23-2019),omg.UFOs (07-13-2020)

  4. #3

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    What @(you need an account to see links) said. Stick to things that are going to suit your needs at present. Don't go out and say I want to program AI based on the inspiration of a movie, you'll definitely need to crawl before you can walk. I program mostly recreationally now. I built a couple of invoicing programs for jobs I work at to simplify peoples workloads (including my own). I still use and modify one of them to this day, almost daily.

    I took up programming some years ago partially due to places like cK when I was younger and played Neopets and these programs were more so about taking the load off myself when I didn't have time to play like I wanted to. I also wasted a good portion of my life at University for an IT Degree that is sitting on the floor in a picture frame. I can comfortably tell you I never took to Android programming when that was a software engineering class.

    The other thing is to probably start with simple languages and work your way up from there. I find Java to be a good, pretty universal language personally and its my current PC/MAC application programming language of choice whilst I also fiddle with PHP for my web-based applications as necessary.

    I personally find that things do stick eventually, but as you'll discover in time, 80% of programming is troubleshooting your code, 20% is actually writing your code. I was only trying yesterday to code a cK Auth in Java, couldn't workout for the life of me why it wouldn't work. Finally worked out I had left out part of the url, but you have no idea how much of a pain in the ass it was trying to see why it was failing. The only other issue I find, is when I try to pick up a language I'm unfamiliar with, I don't always have the patience to start it and successfully complete, hence why to this day I've never really embraced Python, it was a language I've never really played with. I have a friend who had no interest in Programming before going to Uni, and that friend picked up and loved Python all the way. All personal opinion I dare say.
    Last edited by Integra; 12-15-2019 at 05:42 AM.

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    Thanks for both of your responses! I appreciate the advice on crawling before walking before running - I'm definitely looking at doing that! @(you need an account to see links), I like your suggestion re coding things that are useful to yourself - maybe I'll try code some scripts for Neo (and take some inspiration/ideas from your scripts ) @(you need an account to see links), I've also heard that once you've mastered a language, other languages are relatively trivial to pick up as it's just a syntax change, although I haven't been able to confirm/deny that theory for myself...

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