Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: Why Rushing to Learn Code Fails
Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)
I argue that true programming expertise cannot be achieved in 24 hours or even 21 days, but requires a decade of deliberate practice. Drawing on research from Bloom and Ericsson, I suggest that mastery comes from sustained effort, learning multiple languages, and working on real projects with others rather than relying on quick tutorials or formal degrees alone.
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
- primitivesuave
FWIW, Peter Norvig also gave an updated take on what programming will look like with LLMs around 2 years ago. It did give me some hope back then, but with the development of Fables and Kimis and Sols I think it's truly anyone's guess where the art of programming will go.
- axus
It'd be embarrassing if you have to spend $10 in AI tokens for it to fix one line that you could have fixed quicker yourself for free.
Not sure if the savings add up enough to offset the investment in learning to program.
- emmelaich
The Abstruse Goose comic mentioned: https://archive.is/HEHmt
- DavidPiper
When I was 11, I pulled a book off the shelf at the nearby library called "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days". I remember thinking the title was clearly nonsense, but if I could even learn a fraction of it, that would be pretty cool. We didn't have a computer at home yet, so I wrote out the exercises by hand.
I think I got about a third of the way through. I knew (debatably) what inheritance was, that a Dog is an Animal, etc.
School, university, and 10 years of career later across multiple stacks and companies, there's still a heap I don't know, but you can drop me in a lot of codebases and I'll figure it out.
> So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days.
True, but it DID change my life.
- dzonga
good thing - these articles keep getting shared so often.
yeah people's attention might be shot. but it's still a blessing to those who read it the first time, and the ones that re-read it.
the unfortunate thing in the 'llm' era - we seem hell bent on destroying the foundations of knowledge.
- FinnLobsien
I totally agree with this when it comes to skill acquisition and deep expertise, which I care about more with skills than whatever rewards I might get for that expertise.
It's just important not to conflate this deep expertise with the milestone you need to get a job or something. Especially when combined with expertise in other fields, even very little effort can let you advance a lot.
- yoyohello13
One of may favorite things to do was to spend some time tinkering around to learn a new programming language. I collected quite a few and it was fun to learn new paradigms and how to organize programs. But now since AI… idk I just can’t do it, it seems just completely useless in the age of AI. Like getting better at the technical aspects of programming just doesn’t feel important anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive LLMs for that. It really took away something I enjoyed.
- markus_zhang
From my experience, just to say the thing that many such articles never mentioned, because the author has the innate ability anyway:
Seek mental stability, or whatever mental state that can push you to programming for 10 years without completely burning you out. If you can’t even do some programming after a relatively easy work day, you are burnt out.
BTW ^ is my state nowadays.