It’s hard for beginners to choose a programming language when they first decide to learn programming. There are many things they start believing which are not really true. They get overwhelmed by the available resources to learn from. And In the end, they leave it without any satisfaction or motivation to continue further.
I recently listened to a conference talk by Andy Harris in which he talked about some of the things that every beginner struggles with at some point in their journey. I wrote down a few key points that are worth noticing.
We fear that we are not smart enough to understand programming
In programming we have to instruct the computer which is not as smart as a human brain. So you don’t need to be smart but stupid as a computer to instruct it in a language that it understands and that can be Python or C++ or any other language of your choice.
Programming is not about language
Choosing the programming language is also hard for beginners. But programming is not about language, you can start with the easiest one that does not require too much syntax to learn in the beginning.
Programming languages are simpler than SPANISH or Russian or Greek
There are a tons of syntax in the human languages. Whereas, in programming languages there are only a few set of rules on how the code should be structured.
code completion is not the problem
Most of us download various IDEs to write code. Because they provide us the ease of code completion which is not required at all. At least not for beginners. The code completion is only there to solve easy problems.
Programming is also not about banging on the keys.
It looks cool of course but the time spent solving the problem is mostly away from the keyboard. Typing the code takes only a few seconds if you have the solution in your mind.
Conclusion
These are the most common misconceptions that beginners have. And if you try to keep these points in your mind, your coding journey will become a lot easier.
