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Programming/Coding.

UberScout

Please Don't Be Mad At Me 02/09/1996
V.I.P Member
It was only 2008 when I discovered that there were free, personal options for creating computer programs. With an autistic mind, the idea of piecing text together to make functioning, working programs made me feel like I was an engineer standing on top of the world with an army of robots behind me.

THEN I realized how FREAKING HARD IT IS.

Do you guys dabble in the good ol' spam and eggs?
 
I learned some programming way back when, starting with QBasic, which is... old. Very old.

I didnt really keep up with it all that much as time went on as there was an awful lot of math and school kinda poisoned that subject for me.

Fast forward MANY years, and I've worked on 2 games and multiple expansions for those games.

There was a lot of agitated yelling on my part, and I'm still not quite sure why anyone else on the team put up with the hideous spaghetti disaster that I'd generally make out of everything.

There was one notable boss fight in said game where I made the bloody thing, and still have no freaking idea how or why it works. And it DOES work. I just... dont know how. Fortunately it never bugged out, so I never had to try to fix it.

I still dont understand hardly anything about math, though.
 
I'm earning a degree in web development and am currently studying HTML, CSS, and javascript.
 
It was only 2008 when I discovered that there were free, personal options for creating computer programs. With an autistic mind, the idea of piecing text together to make functioning, working programs made me feel like I was an engineer standing on top of the world with an army of robots behind me.

THEN I realized how FREAKING HARD IT IS.

Do you guys dabble in the good ol' spam and eggs?
It's not hard at all...you're learning a new language, but with this language, you're speaking to a machine. Once the switch flips and you start to understand what's is going on, you won't stop writing code...well, maybe for a coffee refill. :) Take your time and have fun with it.
 
Hi folks,

I am a bit of a antediluvian, in that the last programming I really did was in FORTRAN (which shows how old I am).

However, I am looking to pick this up again, but since there are better languages for programming nowadays I am wondering which language to learn, since I have accepted that I need to learn a new programming language.

All advice welcome
 
Hi folks,

I am a bit of a antediluvian, in that the last programming I really did was in FORTRAN (which shows how old I am).

However, I am looking to pick this up again, but since there are better languages for programming nowadays I am wondering which language to learn, since I have accepted that I need to learn a new programming language.

All advice welcome
Start with Python...powerful, easy to understand. :)
 
It was only 2008 when I discovered that there were free, personal options for creating computer programs. With an autistic mind, the idea of piecing text together to make functioning, working programs made me feel like I was an engineer standing on top of the world with an army of robots behind me.

THEN I realized how FREAKING HARD IT IS.

Do you guys dabble in the good ol' spam and eggs?
No. And I'm dreading the day I'll have to lol. I love math. Currently self studying Calculus 3 and Discrete math. And I want to major in Applied Math which will probably require coding. And I am horrible at coding. Absolutely horrendous. The few times I've tried to learn it I couldn't even get past "Hello World".
 
Just looking at the varied responses I think it's pretty clear that there is no "linear path" to learning programming. Autistic or Neurotypical, math-oriented or math-poor. That it comes down to an isolated sense of aptitude. Something you either have, or you don't.

An awkward reality for my own situation many years ago as a well-paid website designer for a major corporate name. Where I excelled at graphic design and manipulation, markup language and style sheets. When it came to scripting languages and relational databases, I just plain "winged it".

I made it all work, but without knowing exactly how. -And made sure to never tell anyone as such.


I could commandeer Java Script and alter it, but not create it from scratch. And complied languages like Java remained a complete mystery to me. Yet I could still create an effective server-side website using PHP and MySQL. I struggled with Macromedia Flash, but managed to make it work as well.

I always considered myself to be a designer- NOT a programmer. But in the "real world" there are a lot of jobs requiring one to dabble in a great many things. Making you a "Jack of all trades- master of none". Where at times you are over your head, and just "winging it". A success if you deliver the goods, and a failure if you don't.

Of course this all reflects a tech environment more than 20 years ago...when all of it was still so new that few people around me knew my job to any real degree. Even my supervisors. Not sure if I could get away with this in the present day. o_O
 
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My first attempt at programming was back during my teenage years. I was trying to learn source pawn, which is/was a very simple scripting language that was designed for making source mod plugins. To this day i remember how impossibly hard it was. It was like complete greek to me. I even printed out several tutorials and tried to really study them and i just couldn't figure it out at all. I was convinced that i would never be a programmer.

Fast forward to my first year in college, i tried to learn it again and found it remarkably simple. I started pushing out some plugins for my tf2 server. A couple years later i learned java, python then z80 and x86 ASM, now im trying to learn C.

I went from, "im 100% never gonna learn this stuff" to manually punching in machine language instructions into my homebrew z80 computer like its 1976 :confused:. It was like a switch got flipped inside my head, very sudden and bizarre change in understanding.

So if you don't understand it now, keep at it and if you still don't get it then think take a break and revisit it in a year or two after youv accumulated some more knowledge about computers.
 
Python 3 has been a part of my life for several years now. I've amazed my family with things I've learned to do in the programming language, and have received requests for several programs by Maddog, one for Poker calculations, another for automating some of his games, among others.

There's just one problem.

I KEEP FORGETTING HOW TO PROGRAM!

No matter how hard I try to remember, I can only keep the basics memorized. Every time I open Thonny (the IDE I chose), I start to think of a cool program, I see all these lines of code in my mind, then when I go to type them, I get nervous at myself that I'll mistype something or call the wrong variable or function or define something wrong.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can successfully ingrain the language of Python 3 into my mind so I can know it by heart eventually? I've wanted to learn this for years and it frustrates me that I struggle so hard.
 
Repetition.

Just repetition.

Seriously, that's the secret to it. There's no magic shortcut, no special trick. You repeat and repeat and repeat until it sort of locks in.

BUT. Keep in mind one thing: Python is not the only one out there. For many people, they may find that they have a ton of problems with one language, but they try a different one and it clicks for them. So, just keep that in mind for later.

But yeah... just keep doing it over and over and over. Dont focus on what you CANT remember. Focus instead on learning, and the successes that you DO have.
 
Keep Python references handy so you can refer to them for syntax questions.

(I have never programmed in Python, but that strategy has worked for the seven languages that I have programmed in.)
 
Python 3 has been a part of my life for several years now. I've amazed my family with things I've learned to do in the programming language, and have received requests for several programs by Maddog, one for Poker calculations, another for automating some of his games, among others.

There's just one problem.

I KEEP FORGETTING HOW TO PROGRAM!

No matter how hard I try to remember, I can only keep the basics memorized. Every time I open Thonny (the IDE I chose), I start to think of a cool program, I see all these lines of code in my mind, then when I go to type them, I get nervous at myself that I'll mistype something or call the wrong variable or function or define something wrong.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can successfully ingrain the language of Python 3 into my mind so I can know it by heart eventually? I've wanted to learn this for years and it frustrates me that I struggle so hard.

Oh hey, a thread that's not 5 years old!

I've been at it for only a year now and I feel pretty confident with Python, Processing, Lua, JS and a few other embedded scripting Lua variants (syntax-wise, at least). I can't exactly create anything I want right off the bat, but I can usually absorb enough information and put things together, even if it takes a few days. Debugging really obscure mistakes you've made is always tough, but I'm sure it gets better / faster over time. Reading code other people wrote still feels like staring at a wall and trying to make words out of the cracks.

For me, I feel like I've wasted way too much time on step-by-step tutorials, Udemy courses and the like. Everything started coming together over the past few months when I just decided to make a run for it and try building projects from scratch, even if they're simple scripting programs, fantasy-console dev or Processing sketches. With that said, I definitely still make beginner mistakes, because I'm self-taught, and I need to keep learning.

I think if you're interest grows, you won't forget how to make things work so quickly. Every day I feel like I create new aspirations for myself to mosey into, bigger projects I can build, and cooler things I'd like to do in the future when I get more fluent with certain frameworks and languages. Sometimes when I open up a new manual for some embedded language, it just looks like gibberish, and then slowly over time I'm actually using it like normal. It's so weird.

I don't really think anyone is born with a 'mind for it' though, and I'm certainly not. It's just tough at first.
 
learning syntax is 10% of the work, the rest is getting good at mathematics and algorithms/datastructures. Most people just think of processing quantities when they think about math, graphs and numbers algebra etc, but the amount of problems that have nothing to do with quantities and can be solved with discrete mathematics is huge, being good at discrete math is almost a semi-superpower in computer science. People who are new to programming aren't really aware of this, they think that all problems are uniquely solved purely with the reasoning and creativity of the programmer, but there are already developed abstract methods and tools out there that can be used to make these problems very digestible and easy to solve.
 
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the rest is getting good at mathematics and algorithms/datastructures. Most people just think of processing quantities when they think about math, graphs and numbers algebra etc, but the amount of problems that have nothing to do with quantities and can be solved with discrete mathematics is huge,

And this right here is why I entirely gave up on it all those years ago.

Honestly I wish someone had just pointed this out to me when I was still in high school. That would have saved a whole lot of time.

Went to college to learn programming, waste of three freaking years... well, okay, not JUST because of the math. That college also just was not the right place for it. Still, if it was the right place, still would have been a waste.
 
learning syntax is 10% of the work, the rest is getting good at mathematics and algorithms/datastructures. Most people just think of processing quantities when they think about math, graphs and numbers algebra etc, but the amount of problems that have nothing to do with quantities and can be solved with discrete mathematics is huge, being good at discrete math is almost a semi-superpower in computer science. People who are new to programming aren't really aware of this, they think that all problems are uniquely solved purely with the reasoning and creativity of the programmer, but there are already developed abstract methods and tools out there that can be used to make these problems very digestible and easy to solve.

You're probably way ahead of the majority of programmers out there, so that's awesome. I really want to get into DSP but being a beginner kind of limits me to scripting, gamedev, playing with art and things of that nature. I really hope to one day level-up these abilities, but I'm also aware that it's part of the journey to be at the bottom, too.

I guess with being a designer first and foremost, learning the small amount I know now has really supercharged those abilities by a huge amount already. A lot of beginners get turned off by the steep learning curve involved with all of this, but I don't think this is as true for those who can see the potential, use their knowledge daily, and make progress on their own, no matter how small it may be in the larger picture.
 
It was only 2008 when I discovered that there were free, personal options for creating computer programs. With an autistic mind, the idea of piecing text together to make functioning, working programs made me feel like I was an engineer standing on top of the world with an army of robots behind me.

THEN I realized how FREAKING HARD IT IS.

Do you guys dabble in the good ol' spam and eggs?
Professional programmer here. Programming is my limited and special area of focus. I would spend 16 hours a day coding for many, many years, learning everything I could about it. As with anything, presuming you have the aptitude, getting good is just a matter of spending the time on it. That's easy if you enjoy it and maybe the one area of life where I can say with full confidence that autistic traits have served me well.
 

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