Can anybody learn how to code?


 
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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Can anybody learn how to code?
# 8  
Old 06-10-2014
I rather enjoyed the "The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" reference from gandolf989 Smilie

Quote:
rather enjoyed
What a very British expression from me in the UK - a bit like Mr. Dent himself. Smilie



Robin
# 9  
Old 06-10-2014
Quote:
Originally Posted by Akshay Hegde
Don't worry about syntax, if you can develop / improve above things, you can easily start coding with the help of some manual / online resources / Forums
There is an old proverb: a dedicated programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language. ;-))

In principle you are right. To put it in theoretical terms: as long as a language is Turing-complete or Turing-equivalent it is possible to use any language for every problem. Still, most languages develop a certain "look and feel" about their specifics and it is in most cases suboptimal in the long run to try to force language As way of programming onto language B.

This reminds me of the people who go to a foreign country and try to pretend still to be living in the country they come from. Whats the point of going somewhere and then to demand that the cooking should be the same as used from at home?

bakunin
This User Gave Thanks to bakunin For This Post:
# 10  
Old 06-10-2014
_Speaking_ as a complete amateur I would say anyone can do simple coding.

But if you intend to learn coding then shell scripting is a good place to start as there is a utility for just about everything you would want to do.

It is easy to get into bad coding habits but seriously difficult to get out of them.

You do not need a doctorship in mathematics but a good approach to working out your logical intentions is a must.

To learn, (I started shell scripting in Jan 2013), I jumped in at the deep end with a project I was interested in.

Hitting hurdles was great especially trying to solve them, and, although I always solved them the big guns on here voluntarily provided often much better solutions of which I have been grateful.

If you show you have had a go at any piece of code and come up against a problem _we_ will help solve them, preferably giving you hints rather than actual solutions as you learn that way.

I have learnt a few languages over the years but shell scripting is now my language of choice.

Good luck...
# 11  
Old 06-10-2014
banunkin, Do you mean the "If those foreigners don't understand, just shout louder" brigade?

Seems a bit like trying:-
Code:
echo `echo Hello!`

I never quite understand that type of traveller. A least the pronunciation of "Beer" and "Taxi" are pretty universal (although it's "Tacsi" in Wales.)




Robin (quite close to Wales)
# 12  
Old 06-10-2014
Quote:
Originally Posted by rbatte1
banunkin, Do you mean the "If those foreigners don't understand, just shout louder" brigade?
Not exactly. What i mean is the "i want everything in a foreign land to be exactly like i am used to at home" - which begs the question "why go to a foreign land in first place". I live in Frankfurt/Main right now. At the corner there is a nice little italian restaurant i like to visit for dinner. The restaurant is run by a married couple: she - doing the service - is speaking some odd mixture of german and italian, which passes for "cute". He (the cook) is speaking no german at all. They have 3 daughters, all married to italians, they talk only in italian, they never spend their vacation anywhere else than Italy (precisely, they say "at home"), albeit already living for 25 years in Germany, etc..

I couldn't spend my life that way. I know not a single word of japanese, but if i would be forced to live in Japan, I'd try to speak japanese as fluently as possible. I would not dine exclusively in austrian restaurants and i would clothe myself like the japanese people do. If this includes kimonoes or something else foreign to me, then so be it.

It is the same with programming languages. For instance: of course it is possible to use C-like pointer structures in PASCAL - it is just cumbersome, inefficient and PASCAL is not really made to use memory like that. Of course it is possible to program around FORTRAN math functions (in fact i had to maintain such a program once - i still have nightmares from that) in a bid to outperform them: it is highly improbably, though, to succeed and there is a good chance to just produce tons of unreadable, unmaintainable and outright shitty code.

There are some tenets every programmer, regardless of his toolset should observe: simplicity, encapsulation, proper indentation, well-defined interfaces, .... But then, there are some innate strategies, structures, ways to deal with certain problems special to every programming language. One can argue if object orientation is a good programming paradigma or not - but if you think it is not, then you should not use Oberon or Modula 2 but stick to PASCAL, even if it is not well suited for large software projects. But I'd prefer to debug a well-written PASCAL-program over a poorly-written Oberon-program.

bakunin
# 13  
Old 07-22-2014
Hi
for my part , i learnt a bunch of programming languages alone ....
You will need logcical concepts but a good memory too ....
I think that it's possible with a good amount of work ...but beware of the headaches !!
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