Comment by MrJagil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrJagil | Hacker News Reader

Classes in Javascript were really hard for me for some reason, and I've never really passed that point. Also, the fact that programming is not solving anything by itself, you need to know the entire stack. After wrestling with classes for a while it's really demotivating to realise you have to know DNS, server-side languages, http_S_ and all sorts of things before you can actually create your app/website. It was just a bit too much for me.

Codecademy did a good job though and http://www.theodinproject.com/ too.

EDIT: Also, the job prospects did not look too good because of the fierce competition. What motivated me was doing my own apps/sites (lego for grown-ups), or at least work on a startup, but the required resumes were really daunting. Sysadmin just didn't have the rockstar flavour to it (I think it's a fine job, just trying to convey the fact that a certain air of adventure needed to be present to lure me to stick with it- i.e. the same reason 13 year olds learn the electric guitar).

I got downvoted for this in a simallar thread, but it's my belief that you need to work backwards to start coding.

Use tools, apps, generators, scripts, whatever, to do as much of the work for you as possible. Use a yeoman.io fullstack generator to literally make you an entire webapp with login and security, and then figure out how to fill in the blanks.

Doing it this way, you won't get bogged down in all the technical bullshit to "make something appear on the screen". Let's be honest, you're not writing code for the space shuttle, you can take lots of shortcuts, and then correct your mistakes on a later project.

I think there's two approaches, and depending on what you are trying to accomplish as your motivator to program, the best approach may be different.

If you are looking to present something to others as an interface, using tools and frameworks can help tremendously. Your success is likely somewhat based on the perceptions of others, and this requires mixing a few disciplines (design and engineering), so getting what help you can to achieve that minimal level required for people to not reject it outright is important.

If you are looking to transform or create something for yourself, just learning the tool is often better. You want to spider some sites and present some stats on what you've found? Learn Python, Perl or Ruby and that will take you most of where you want to go. You want to write a small roguelike game? Learn whatever language you want and get to it. In many of these cases, learning the intricacies of a full stack and then how you have to tweak it to make it work for your needs mught be counterproductive, unless it's aimed specifically at your need.

One of the things that is weird to me is that Javascript is not necessarily the easiest language to learn. With the kind of odd function composition nature of Javascript, I think that Ruby and Python(or maybe Lua) are the much easier languages to learn, and Javascript gets all of the love because it can do front-end development well. I honestly think unless anyone is going for strictly web-development, that they should start with something other than Javascript.

Agreed, JS is more verbose than Ruby and Python and vanilla JS is a strange language for newcomers what with its prototypal object system and functional composition. It doesn't help that a lot of intro materials will try to shoehorn it into the traditional OO mold which it doesn't really fit well in.

Something opinionated like Ruby (which strives to be expressive and terse) or Python (which is very standardised) is a better starting point for new developers.

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