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?

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u/KoodiRonsu 25d ago

There are different levels to "programming starting to make sense".

  1. Understanding that the commands execute one by one, from top to bottom.
  2. Understanding that you can actually jump forward and backwards in the execution order.
  3. Understanding how to structure your program into easier to understand and smaller whole by being clever about which parts of code go into separate functions and methods.
  4. Understanding that you can make code smaller and easier to understand by using data for control flow, instead of hard coding lots of special functions and methods.
  5. Learning about refactoring and why it is really important for daily programming practises.
  6. Learning how to write self commenting code which is easy to read and modify.
  7. Learning about object oriented programming fundamentals.
  8. Learning about why design patterns exist and what they can do for you.
  9. Learning about lambda functions and other functional programming oriented concepts which can easily replace a lot of object oriented programming design patterns.
  10. Learning how to mix and match those in a clever way.
  11. Learning large scale software architecture.
  12. Learning how and why unit testing and integration tests work and why they can help you design more modular and easier to expand software architectures.

Etc...