What It’s Really Like to Learn to Code
6 Lessons after a Semester at a Top Tech University
It’s just after midnight on a Sunday. I’m feverishly typing on my laptop to finish my latest assignment due the next morning. It’s an interactive gesture-based installation with LeapMotion. My eyes are red and itching, I’m exhausted, but I feel great. This is so deeply satisfying; to be in control, to make things and to understand this awesome inner world of computers. I take a moment to realize that just a couple of months ago none of what I’m seeing on the screen would make any sense to me. I started from scratch.
In early 2015, I was fortunate enough to be accepted to the PhD program in Digital Media at Georgia Institute of Technology. It’s a unique program that combines humanities, arts and technology in one of the top tech schools in the U.S. Prior to this, I had no coding experience so I knew this would be extra challenging. What follows are some of my most useful lessons about programming after completing just one semester of study (Fall 2015). I am by no means an expert in coding, but that’s precisely the point. I want to share a beginner’s view of what it’s like to learn programming (I use the word coding and programming interchangeably). To give you a sense of what I learned over the past few months, I’d like to mention some of my programming projects. I created a portfolio website using Bootstrap, composed music in JavaScript using EarSkethch, created a tower defense game in JavaScript using Phaser, created a Twitter poetry generator and an interactive installation in Java using Processing. And of course there were also hundreds of pages of reading on media theory, philosophy and technology. That’s just perks of being a PhD student.
1. Start At Your Own Pace
When I said that I started programming from scratch, I exaggerated, but only slightly. Prior to the start of the semester, I decided to take a free online course on Codecademy to learn JavaScript. The course is only 10–15 hours long but it helped me build a foundation and understand key concepts. The great thing about Codecademy, other than it’s free, is that you can learn at your own pace and not rush toward a deadline. But even with a well-designed online course, you will often have to Google something for an alternative explanation or find another example that can help you learn a concept. I don’t think online courses alone can help you reach a level of mastery required to build something truly complex and impressive, but it’s worth trying out. In my case, it saved me hours of time because I didn’t have to spend precious time to learn from scratch and could keep up with my classmates who had some programming experience. If you decide to invest in learning, it’s worth trying to understand the basics on your own.
2. Learning a Language Is Not the Same as Learning Programming
If you’re a beginner, one of the first things you will have to decide is what programming language to learn. Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, what are these things and which one is “better”? You will likely spend an unreasonable amount of time searching for advice on the web and looking at comparison charts, but very little of it will be either comprehensible or useful. The truth is, it really doesn’t matter. One of the most valuable lessons I learned at Georgia Tech was something one professor said at the very beginning: “Learning a language is not the same as learning programming.” What this means is that programming is a set of fundamental concepts and techniques that are fairly universal across many if not all programming languages. They include concepts like loops, “if then” statements, arrays, objects, data types, and many many others. A programming language is just a set of commands and conventions that implement these concepts in a particular way with its own intricacies. In that sense it is similar to human languages. Concepts such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, sentences are almost universal to many languages, but each language uses them in different ways. For example, the Russian language has gender which determines how a verb or a noun is pronounced. The Turkish language on the other hand doesn’t have gender but it still has verbs and nouns. The most important thing is to learn these basic structures and start recognizing problems in which you can use them. Once you learn that, learning a language is just an incremental step. Also, from what I’ve seen in my short time with programming, the differences between programming languages are a lot smaller than the differences between human languages.
3. Programming Is Like Mental Origami
I am fairly comfortable with math and spent a good part of my career doing complex financial analysis in Excel. Naturally, I thought that my quantitative training would make it easier to learn programming. What I didn’t realize was how much of it is about abstract thinking. The best analogy I can think of is origami. Imagine folding a square piece of paper into a paper crane or a boat using only your imagination. Can you follow through the end? Now imagine that instead of one origami figurine, you are creating a thousand or a million simultaneously. And finally, imagine that instead of creating many origami figurines simultaneously, you are doing it sequentially according to a set of rules. For example, every time you make one fold on every odd numbered piece of paper, every even numbered piece gets folded twice in the opposite direction and is turned 45 degrees clockwise along the the X and Y axis. Are you confused yet? This is what it feels like for a beginner to code. Unlike in mathematics, where the sequence of operations is usually transparent to you in advance, in programming it’s not, You have to imagine abstract objects, containers, groups and perform some operations on them in your head. Then you try to write it in code or something called “pseudo code”, a fake code that helps you sequence how you would actually program what you just imagined. This doesn’t mean that you have to solve the programming problem in your head, only that you have to think abstractly about logical problems almost all the time. It’s often a mind-bending experience.
4. Writing Code Is a Painful Stop & Go
This is one of the most frustrating things about learning to code. You get stuck and you get stuck often. And when you do, nothing works. Unlike making with physical material like clay, wood or paper, you can try things out, make shapes and stick pieces to each other with tape to create a prototype. You can create workarounds and continue to move towards your final result. If something doesn’t work visually or mechanically you can usually see the problem. In programming, it’s a different story. Usually, when you make a mistake, your code just doesn’t run and you don’t know why. Modern code editors are getting better at showing you where the error is but for a beginner programmer, that’s not enough. So you spend hours trying to find a mistake or Google a possible solution. If you’re lucky you find that missing semicolon or curly bracket that broke everything and you think to yourself: “I thought computers are supposed to be smart.” Professionals call this “debugging,” but you might as well call it “banging your head against the wall” because that’s what it feels like: painful and useless. The key takeaway is that mastering programming, like many things in life, takes patience.
5. Programming is a Time Warp
The good news is that when you’re fully engaged in coding and you’re not stuck, you warp into an alternative existence where time doesn’t exist. You stare at the screen working on some problem and making progress. Suddenly you look at the clock in the corner of your screen realize that it’s been hours and you should probably go to bed. The only other activity that had the same effect on me is playing video games. You’re in the proverbial state of “flow”, with just the right amount of challenge and mastery. So the next time you see a programmer staring intensely at a screen and typing, you can be sure that he’s (or she) is not simply a geek, but a geek who is an alternative universe. You probably shouldn’t interrupt. And when you sit down to code yourself, for best results, make sure that you have some uninterrupted time.
6. Coding Doesn’t Have to Be a Profession
This may be a strange thing to say for someone who is about to dedicate 4–5 years of his life to a PhD in Digital Media, but you shouldn’t learn programming only to be a programmer. There is nothing wrong about programming professionally, but it can also be about self-expression, self-improvement, charity, a hobby with your kids and just plain fooling around. And with the proliferation of affordable and open source software and hardware tools, there has never been a better time to learn programming. Tools like Makey Makey, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Processing, EarSketch, Phaser and many others, can open up a whole new world of possibilities in your life, even if you never intend to be a professional programmer. So go ahead and try taking a lesson or two. You might find a new passion.
Image Credits: Dmitry Baranovskiy
