this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Programming
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In addition to what this guy said, don’t just use libraries to skip steps when writing small programs.
For example when parsing a file you will often use the split and strip functions in python, but learning how to implement these by yourself will teach you more.
To really learn fundamentals you should try and implement most operations yourself. It’s why in my opinion C is a better language to start with, because it forces you to learn the fundamentals.
I'd say it depends on the learning style. For some people, it's a lot less demotivating to start as just plumbing libraries together to get the end result than starting from the deep end. Same debate as starting with ASM vs starting with Python.
I see your point, but I would almost argue that starting out with all these shortcuts available in high level languages is ‘jumping into the deep end’ itself.
When a newbie sees obscure error messages in some of these libraries they might not have any idea what they mean or why they were triggered. My opinion is that having a smaller set of tools to start is actually simpler despite being able to do less with them.
I’m slightly biased because I started with C 😅
Started with C++, definitely wasn't easy. I ended up giving up and revisiting a couple years later and PHP/HTML was a fair bit less to take. I did end up revisiting C++ and making an archive format for my game engine. These days I definitely start by the low level, even libraries I jump to the low level features/long form before going to the nicer abstractions for the sake of understanding what's going on under the hood. It's definitely valuable too.
Just pointing out different styles of learning exists, OP can choose whatever fits better for them. I've known people that good completely demoralized because it was a bit much to take to think about how big an integer is in memory and arrays and whatnot. Especially if you approach it with making games, focusing on player moment and map scrolling can be more intuitive to learn the basics and slowly migrate to lower level things. I have friends that started with 6502 or Z80 assembly (good ol' Ti 83+ calculators) and they liked that way better because it made them appreciate what compilers really do better. Really dependent on the person.
I advocate for whatever works better for the learner, whatever makes them not give up and whatever keeps them going.
I made it about as far as
std::cout << "Hello World!";and couldn't figure out wtf cout was or progress from there.Eventually, nearly a year later, I started over with a simpler language (Basic) and maybe five after that I realised my IDE just wasn't setup right - so
coutliterally did nothing at all.