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Discussion on: An Example (On Environment and Learning cont.)

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leventel profile image
Levente Laszlo

As I see in the last few years every bootcamp and training site created ads and tried to sell you "programming" as an easy-peasy activity paved by beanbags, craftbeer in the fridge and unicorns, and you can be a codemonkey in 4 months or so and get 100k$
Besides I think these struggles which you mentioned in your 2 posts remain the same but you will adapt to it (of course as your experience is growing you can build more complex solutions without any help)

I don't read Eloquent JS, but I checked the reviews on Amazon, maybe it's not the perfect for absolute beginners... at the same time as a beginner you should resist the temptation to dig deep every unknown topic instantly rather just follow the "flow" of the chosen book or course.

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tttaaannnggg profile image
tang • Edited

You are right that it's probably not an ideal book to start with, but my point isn't that programming is supposed to be easy. Rather, it's that there's some kind of set of knowledge that you need in order to even start, and that it's often not articulated very well for self-learners.

Navigating convention is different than building functionality, and it's a sort of "learning" that has nothing to do with your ability to reason, just your ability to have prerequisite knowledge, or to have someone tell you. I don't see a good reason that this should be the case.

Neither is it really that I'm even digging deeply into a topic. I have a function and I'm supposed to think about how to use it as part of a larger function. In order to do that, I need to actually understand what kinds of arguments I can pass into the function and what it will return/what side effects it will have. I am trying to illustrate some of the difficulties that arose for me when trying to work through that process.

Perhaps as I get better at this, it's something that I could take up or start to document. I just wanted to put it out into the world while I'm working through it.