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Comment by world32 | Hacker News Reader

A key take-away from this is that the author learned to code because he had a real incentive to do so - in order to create bots to get better at runescape and make lots of money as a side-effect of that. He quickly saw how knowing how to code gave him abilities that his peers didn't have.

Now imagine if he tried to learn java by attending a class for it - i.e. sitting there for an hour listening to some guy explain how a for loop works. Chances are he would be bored silly and never get anywhere with coding. I think its important for people learning how to code to have a genuine motivation behind it - have something you actually WANT to build. Don't just learn it so you can get a job.

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"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This isn't specific to coding. A properly motivated learner in any subject will vastly outperform an apathetic one.

Best comment ever for this topic. I've done the same to get in to programming via sub-game script path so I can relate myself.

Ironically, I always believed the importance of the schooling but recently started to think maybe learning by doing without the necessity is easy to forget. Maybe we need new education methodologies.

A lot of books on programming revolve around using them to make games. I remember the first coding book I picked up about Visual Basic was leading up to building a small game with it. I think there is a lot for classrooms to gain by following a similar structure.

This is a really, really ignorant comment. I learned to code in the classroom with no other motivation besides paid employment and wasn't "bored silly." I've made a very successful career for myself in the many years since.

Programmers are not different from other professions no matter how special you may feel.

Hence why I said "Chances are" - meaning "there is a high probably that".

There is absolutely a better way you could have phrased this. In fact, the easiest is to entirely remove your first sentence. You could make a counter-point, stating that not everyone is driven by external motivation, providing yourself as an anecdotal example.

Instead you provided an insult and then gave anecdotal evidence.

> Programmers are not different from other professions no matter how special you may feel.

I find it odd how offended you seem by my post.

I don't think that programmers are any different from other professions in this sense. But the subject of this thread is about programming which is why I commented about that. It is just like other STEM subjects in that - a lot of people study them at university, but only a few people actually go on to work in the field they studied. Some studies find that only around 25% of STEM graduates actually go on to work in the field they studied.

http://shortsleeveandtieclub.com/what-percentage-of-engineer...

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