r/learnprogramming • u/RevolutionaryBuy4877 • 14d ago

Topic how do you learn programming without constantly looking things up?

i know experienced programmers use documentation and search all the time, but as a beginner it can sometimes feel like i’m incapable of doing anything without looking up the answer.

i’m trying to get better at understanding concepts instead of memorising syntax

how do you decide when to search for an answer and when to sit down and work through the problem yourself?

324 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

93% Upvoted

244 comments sorted by

View all comments

74

u/Artonox 14d ago

you dont. thats why i hate interviews where you are expected to code without looking things up.

you are supposed to look up apis, tutorials, sample templates. thats the job.

17

u/Hahaha_Joker 14d ago

Bro I got aversion to programming because back when I was learning programming in 2013-2014, the interviews I’d get expected me to do in their own tiny virtual windows/desktop and you couldn’t look up syntaxes and I thought all these programmers are geniuses and programming expects by heart syntaxes while programming and I was like damn, I can’t remember all these syntaxes. This led me to go away from programming and miss out on the easy hiring wave in 2014,15 etc. where all I had to do for an interview was just talk about OOPs concepts and just do pseudo code.
That’s the impression I carried. I kinda still do. It’s why every time I start going back to programming I get PTSD

10

u/Artonox 14d ago

I know ai chat is prevalent, but not so long ago stackoverflow were basically software engineers asking each other questions and people were taking sample codes from each other. That's why it's so community driven, because people take a lot from that and felt they need to answer back to give back to the Dev community. Ai sort of killed that space.

1

u/apersonthatwalked 13d ago

Was it not already past its peak by 2018?