A short while ago a guy I was helping out on Code Project commented that “I have never been so frustrated in all my life!!!!!”. He’s just starting out programming, probably lesson 2 or 3 by the looks of the questions he was asking, and was naturally having some initial difficulty understanding the concepts being taught to him. Although I’m trying to be as helpful as possible it did take a lot of effort not to say something along the lines of “Welcome to the club” or “That’s normal, I’ve been writing programs for over 20 years and I still get frustrated by things on a weekly basis”. I said, hopefully encouragingly, “Yeah! But is is such a wonderful feeling when it all works out!”
NOTE: This was rescued from the Google Cache. The original date was Sunday 28th May, 2006.
Some of the original comments:
Yeah, I well remember that sense of bewilderment when I was starting out. It just didn’t seem to make sense that one had to move the contents of memory into the accumulator to perform an operation on it and then move the result back to memory. *shrug*
The move to message based programming was similarly bewildering. Getting used (in the Windows context) to the idea that not only did my program call into the O/S but that the O/S could and would call back into my program took a while.
Looks like he never had a stubborn girlfriend 🙂
Mmmmm… looks like someone else might need to learn about time out with a camera to repair the frustrated, overworked brain 🙂
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