• litchralee@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    I think you asked about how to improve a few days ago, so I’ll answer now about how to start learning programming. In a lot of ways, programming is describing what you want the computer to do, but in a language it understands. So half the effort is building an intuition of how to break down a task into individual parts which the computer can work on, and the other half is to actually write the instructions for the computer.

    The first part is common to all the engineering fields, but shows up elsewhere like in art (eg deconstructing a human face into drawable geometric shapes), daily life (eg navigating a car or public transit by making various left and right turns in a certain order) and other fields; familiarity with any of these will put you a step forward. Basic programming tutorials are useful in developing an awareness of what a computer can easily work on, and by exception, what it cannot.

    The second part requires learning the programming language and its grammar, which I think the general curriculum for programming courses or online tutorials mostly has covered. If you’re already familiar with an existing programming language, then a new language can be framed as a translation from the first, mostly. Some features don’t translate at all – eg explaining Rust memory ownership to a C programmer – so those will have to be rote learned.