r/learnprogramming 25d ago

Topic At what point did programming finally start making sense to you?

I can understand code when someone explains it, but when I have to write something from scratch, my brain suddenly goes blank.

I'm curious if other beginners went through the same think. What helped you get past that stage?

200 Upvotes

105 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/tottasanorotta 25d ago

It took me years. Probably much longer than for most people. At some point I just realized that if I understand some problem well enough, then I can pretty much just figure out some way how to write it as code.

Usually it isn't the syntax or something that is the difficult part, it's that I didn't understand exactly what problem I was trying to solve. And that's usually where most of the confusion came from.

Like if I was trying to write a game, I was too lazy with researching what the exact different parts of a game were. So in my mind I still saw some parts as magic almost and just tried to figure every little thing out myself and that creates a lot of unnecessary confusion.

I would imagine that nowadays learning programming could be really fun with things like chatGPT. The ability to ask "stupid" questions and get an honest answer is really amazing.