~17 years later that has definitely been my experience.
It’s possible to be very productive in a language after 6-12 months. The code might be decent, or with some talent and hard work, even good. It really doesn’t take all that long to learn enough to produce some cool things. However, I’m almost certain that if you look back at the code you write today in 12 months, 5, or 10 years, you’ll see many things you’d do differently. This is partly because In 10 years you will see many more problems, and solved them in many different ways. Personally, that’s one of the things I really love about this field.
24 hours is not even how long I had to file a metal block until I was deemed ready to use heavy machinery during secondary school. I filed it for 3 weeks, 5 days a week, 9 to 5.
21 days is not enough to master metalwork, even though I was allowed to use heavy machinery, I borked up more than one piece until I eventually got it right at the end of the school year (which was about 6 months of metalwork).
And I think I am still way of from mastering it, not that I want to.
Programming is, IMO very similar. Sure, you can get a hammer and start hammering on a metal sheet and that'll probably produce something in the right shape. But learning to program, mastering it, takes time, 10 years is IMO a good estimate. I've been at it for 8 years now and I still got very much to learn.
Of course people can become good with a programming language, just like you can get good at filing a metal block in 3 weeks. But it doesn't mean you've mastered all the tools yet.
Software development unites a lot of things from science, engineering and craftsmanship. I guess we should stop trying to cram it into preexisting categories and take the best parts of each subcategory.
An Electrician may be a master of his craft, but yet not an Electrical Engineer, who may be a masterful engineer but yet not possessing as deep an understanding as a Physicist, and so on.
That said, the scale tips both ways. A physicist may know why and how an electron behaves a certain way within a material making up a resistor, but not have the practical know-how to use that in an effective way as an engineer might. An engineer might be able to hack together a prototype, but lack the refined master skill and discipline of an electrician to employ the designs and put it into a real world context on a regular basis. It goes without saying that you'll much more rarely see a physicist out in the field laying cable for power distribution in a new train station, etc. There's an old aphorism that leans into this a bit: "the wise things confound the simple, and the simple things confound the wise". I'm abusing that a bit, but still kind of works.
I'm making a gross guess here, but maybe it's that science and engineering, in modern times, hold more of a lofty position and boast greater intellectual capacity traditionally, that so many would not want to be 'reduced' to a craftsman. We might do better to consider them just different aspects of the same whole.
At any rate: lately I've been having to interact at work with some folks from another company whose entire outlook of what "programming" is revolves around web CRUD stuff and some interactive-looking front-end... web stuff. So "I learned some new programming skills" to them is closer to "I learned how to make an HTML5 caroussel using jquery and Laravel" than "I learned how to calculate road distances using GIS LineStrings and Djikstra's algorithm". Their whole world looks like a CMS. There's a threshold of "meta" they cannot cross.
I think this is both why PHP is so popular and so despised: it attracts people who wouldn't be able to grok concepts at a higher level of abstraction (say, Python @decorators) so they don't need it. PHP -- and really, Laravel, whatever that is -- is all they need.
everything is running synchronously in the current thread on the same machine (or can be roughly abstracted as a single machine where all backend is simply 'invisible')
like a tv.
I’ve had to teach quite a few people the basics of HTTP: a user-agent makes a request and a server replies with a response, that both requests and responses are composed of a header and an (optional) body, and some of the important information that might be included in the headers (cookies, character encoding, caching information, etc.).
This is the reason lots of people learning programming try few months of Javascript/Ruby , then they got stuck to solve any real life programming problem. The reason is that they have not mastered the "basic core concepts" of programming such as traversing an Array backwards, nested loops, two indices one activates after another ete..
"but becoming this good programmer in first place will take years."
> Learning to program is not mastering a new language. A good programmer can wrap their head around any language in short time but becoming this good programmer in first place will take years.