Xylaria

@Xylaria

she/they
xylaria.vg/

🏳️‍⚧️🦊 34 / Gaming / Tech / Politics / Advocacy / Disability / Autism

Xylaria @Xylaria11/26/2022, 5:32 PM

Cohost makes me feel really stupid.

And 99% of it is just because, my expertise isn't programming. And there are so many extremely talented programmers here, and I'm not one of them.

And I mean, I know I'm not dumb. I can spout out PhD level analysis on any of like 500 topics off the top of my head. I work for fucking [three-letter acronym tech school you've definitely heard of but I'm not mentioning] and was fucking poached by them because I'm so good at what I do. I know, for an absolute fact, that I am a highly intelligent human being and should be able to keep up with all of you just fine.

...so why am I so bad at programming? Why is it the one obvious flaw in my armor, the one subject I can't breach because I just can't force my brain to understand it? I get the basics, enough to have a conversation and to understand algorithms, but trying to make myself actually do anything with programming is impossible. I can't come up with ideas, I can't string algorithms together, I can't make things work right. I can't get past 200-level programming, it's a wall in my brain.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Xylaria's post:

mint @mintexists11/26/2022, 5:45 PM

Programming is a fucking mess, being good at it just means you are able to wrestle 30 snakes and survive, not that you have more skill or are smarter. Those might help you wrestle snakes, but at the end of the day snake-wrestling is still snake-wrestling

Xylaria @Xylaria11/26/2022, 5:54 PM

I wish I could make myself understand that. But the modern world is built on that snake-wrestling, and I'm surrounded by nothing but snake-wrestlers, and even though I'm the greatest mongoose-herder in the world, I can't wrestle a single snake and in snake-wrestler world it feels bad.

remetheus @Remetheus11/26/2022, 6:17 PM

set those mongooses upon the snakes and delight upon the result (this is a metaphor for something i'm sure)

mint @mintexists11/26/2022, 6:19 PM

I do some snake-wrestling but always find myself wishing I could do some other animal-fighting like photography or painting, and it keeps coming to that meme of someone asking an artist how they get so good who keeps answering “practice”. I’ve been snake-wrestling since I was as young as I can remember, and it has been a long process to get where I am now. People have been snake wrestling as their main activity for their whole lives, it’s not fair to compare yourself to that.

gnar @gnar11/26/2022, 6:24 PM

i will note that lots of the Normal Routes to try and learn programming end up being really terrible. lots of online resources are just utterly unusuable or assume you are either a total beginner or very advanced with zero inbetween. college is expensive and is also often the same way. they teach you a lot of things to memorize but they often dont teach the skills that let you apply that knowledge.

i feel like the number one thing which let me learn the most was getting to write java code for a robotics competition when i was in highschool. it was basically the first time i had to write software that was 1. had a significant number of moving parts 2. had no explicit "correct answer" 3. there were still a bunch of "wrong answers". i ended up learning how programming projects basically "fit together"--this idea of translating some abstract goal like "drive a robot that can shoot some goals" into "here are the specific things i need to implement". none of it was really learning Which Algorithms you needed (the most complicated thing was getting the math right for mapping a game controller's joysticks to the wheels), but instead more about knowing what sorts of abstractions to make--how do you use functions/classes/etc in a way that makes it possible to fit the structure of the project in your head. i think it was more useful than any of the courses i took in college.

and like. nobody tells you this!! no one really teaches this! its just a Skill you have to develop on your own. I dont even really know how you can directly teach this skill. it really often is just "be Absurdly Patient until you one day Get It" as the learning method. even if you have a mentor or good friends you can ask (which really does help a lot), its still one of those "You Just Have To Learn It" things which can take a really long time to develop and is incredibly frustrating to try and figure out on your own

Xylaria @Xylaria11/26/2022, 6:36 PM

I've talked to friends before about this - I really wish something like programming apprenticeships existed. Give me easy little repetitive real-world tasks to work on and help me hands-on see and build bigger things without having to explicitly worry about failing.

I learn best when I can actually see what I'm doing and why, and just...none of programming education is built like that. None of it at all.

gnar @gnar11/26/2022, 8:12 PM

most of the programming projects i have ever done are primarily programming in service of some non-programming goal--ex: i want to make a Game or an Art Tool or a Cohost Shitpost Tool. hence i found it useful to join a hobbyist discord that also happens to be somewhat programming related. for example, one time i wanted to make virtual synthesizers for music making purposes, and i ended up joining the RustAudio discord. there was a decent number of people who could help me through a lot of the problems i ended up encountering that wouldve normally just stopped me dead from continueing (ex: "my vst keeps crashing in Ableton, how do I debug this"/"what are some resources for doing audio filters?"/"oh god how do i design a GUI", and other similar really hard to research questions). im not sure if theres a centralized place to find discords/forums/etc like this though (maybe reddit??)

Atanae @atanae11/27/2022, 12:07 AM

How are you with languages? I stink at languages. Programming is a language. Music is a language. Math is a language. I love language - linguistics is my jam. But I cannot learn another language if my life depended on it.

You may be hitting a similar dissonance.

Xylaria @Xylaria11/27/2022, 12:58 AM

I'm very mixed with languages. I love linguistics and word origins and etymology and all that, but trying to think in anything other than English is basically impossible. I can't do grammatical gender, I'm bad at most grammar stuff, everything is a huge struggle. Kinda the same I am at programming really - I can get started, but I can't get into it seriously.

Pinned Tags

Xy's rambling