Today I learned how to:
- write loops and conditional statements;
- format print statements;
- use the date and time modules;
and put them all together in version 0.2 to create a log file of the events I want to record.
Thank goodness for online documentation and Stack Overflow. In the process I also learned something of what it is that I'm trying to do. I also had my first spectacular crash, with a flood of tracebacks and informative warnings.
Thinking by doing, succeeding and failing is so much more enjoyable than just sitting and musing. I do have a little voice pricking up now and then, wondering whether this is worthwhile. It can shut up.
Next, I need to get it to act on the information that it is collecting and analysing.
Programming can be a life long journey with so many facets and skills. Do not listen to that voice telling you to stop and just keep going :)
You can lose days living in your thoughts mentally mapping data flows, that is when the real joy kicks in. Such a wonderful mindscape to visit :)
Keep picking different small projects and challenges and grow from there.
When you feel comfortable with one language pick another and keep going. Each language brings new ways of working and manipulating data and each will tell you different skills.
When you find the language that really clicks with you make it your home but keep learning others. For me C# is my home but I have fallen in love with F#.
The key languages to learn are
Hope that helps you fight against that voice and keep going. I am in 35 years deep now and still learning!
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Thank you. I've enjoyed just reading back through some of your posts :)
My degree twenty-odd years ago was in Computing, so I'm not a total n00b but my career took me into data analysis (which my grounding in Functional Programming helped a lot with) and then into working more with people and writing.
"The voice" is common to all my creative efforts, not just this one. I've a lifetime of battling it in many fields :)
I'm interested in the resurgence of FP, I hadn't heard of F# till I saw you writing about it, it always made much more sense to me than a procedural approach, something about how I naturally visualise data structures, I think - also years of hacking away at problems when the only tool available was Excel :D
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Glad to see that you are enjoying the process. Remember, understanding patterns is the most important thing when learning programming. Those patterns are found in almost all programming languages. Getting a good grasp of them now will help you pick up any language very fast.
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Thanks, I'm not entirely new to the discipline, but I've let it go rusty over the years and it's a case of digging out old knowledge and putting a new spin on it. I did get a good training in programming principles and you're right, it's served me well.
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What language are you learning?
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