Programming is definitely not for everyone. Those that hate or failed math need not apply. Having tried to learn a few different spoken languages, I can say that learning a new coding language is similar but not as hard as learning something like Mandarin Chinese. It’s more like learning a language with a vocabulary of, say, 200-400 words instead of 100,000-400,000. Coding is like the inverse of solving an algebra equation, meaning instead of simplifying the equation you’re making it bigger and bigger while making sure it is still all true and equal.
I have a love/hate relationship with programming. I’ll start with the hate: debugging. Debugging is where you have to find the one character or line that is “breaking” the code or “making the equation unbalanced”. Sometimes (for me) debugging can take weeks. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack but even more complex because you have to understand all the hay to find the needle. Some coding projects can be 100’s of pages of code. Sometimes you can be debugging code that someone else wrote in which case it takes that much longer to find the needle because you have to learn the whole thing first. If you’re unlucky the code could be what is derogatorily called “spaghetti code,” which means there’s no structure or organization to the code and as you can imagine is that much harder to debug. I have not been that unfortunate though.
Then there’s the love: the payoff. Once the needle is found and removed or replaced, you don’t just have a needle, but something on the screen works, appears or is created that wasn’t there before. It’s like unlocking something secret. It’s like a celebration visualization built into the process, and for me it’s such a huge payoff. It actually makes all the searching, digging, testing and failing worth it. Inside my head I’m doing something like my own end-zone dance – and a party …… and a parade.
Another reason I love it is because, unlike anything else I can think of, you’re actually creating something responsive and active from seemingly nothing. God created the universe from nothing, and we’re made to be like Him. Computer generated programs and constructs are the closest I know to created something from nothing. If you can forgive my sentiment, it’s also kind of like a baby in the womb. You go from nothing to something small, hardly recognizable and yet alive. Over time it takes shape more clearly, becomes more active and gains more abilities until one day it is born (or launched), and when it thrives and does well it makes one proud Papa.
