Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

I bought a copy of "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" at a CompUSA in 1999. The guy at the checkout looked at it, laughed, and told me about this article. When I was 16 I was looking at programming books at Borders and a guy handed me a copy of "The C Programming Language"; changed my life. So much of my career has been shaped by running into developers or just people interested in programming out in the…

>> Learn at least a half dozen programming languages I'm always surprised by how many people disagree with this; they're on the search for that one language they can use for every task. Or even worse, they think they've found it and their search is over, that's a tragic situation given how spoiled we are for great languages today. Clojure (STM / refs, vars, atoms & agents), kdb/q (non-loopy array code), Rust (ownership), Go (async done better, although i also…

When I was learning how to program, I asked the friend who was teaching me the rudiments "How long does it take to learn how to code?" He replied "Eight hours." "Eight hours?" "Yep, eight hours, every day. It's pretty much just like driving a bus. The hard part is keeping your ass in the seat." Fifteen years and a master's degree later, his advice remains remarkably accurate.

I can relate to it through the lens of Karate. I've been studying just about 10 years and I'm just beginning to see the depth of the art. Its almost like you spend those 10 years building the foundation before you can start building the house. One of the points in the article really jumps out and again, I use martial arts as a lens for comparison. Talking to other programmers extensively accelerates your growth. If I had tried to…