[ibebrett]

This may be thinking back on things with rose tinted glasses, but I learned to code in qbasic when I was 12 or so at a Boys and Girls club after school and fell in love. It was entirely effortless and fun to me. I think the difference is at that point I wasn't trying to program to enter some lucrative career and be a startup guy (where are these "coders" going to be once the market dies down and a new industry is hot? probably trying to do that). For me it was something I loved immediately, and while obviously there are really hard problems, the coding part was effortless

[parenthetically]

I first learned on a variant of BASIC myself when I was in elementary school, and it was effortless then -- but that's a profoundly different thing from learning the professional tools/design patterns/development styles to get hired in a specific domain. As somebody who picked it up again after a long break, the whole point was not 'getting hired in some hot new lucrative industry,' but 'god, please let somebody hire me to do this thing that is so much more mentally satisfying than the last few things I've done for a living.'

From that perspective, I absolutely understand the urgency here, and appreciate how this article talks about how the moment when the tutorials break off is when the real learning begins.

[svachalek]

At the time "design patterns" were somewhere in the distant future, development style was something you had rather than something you learned, and the list of professional tools was really short. I'm sure this is part of what made it incredibly fun.

I think today's students would also have a lot more fun if they ignored all the opinionated garbage about which flavor-of-the-month checkboxes they need on their resume. Figure out what you like and get really good at it. Many top employers are looking for passion, pragmatism, and adaptability rather than specific tools and libraries.

[ibebrett]

I may have been to harsh in my assessment. But still, how many of these people are sitting down and working on some puzzle/problem/project they find interesting vs saying I know I need rails, and angular to make web apps and then just going through tutorial after tutorial. How many of them are actually interested in it in and of itself. I learned how to program very far away from the concept of writing an app that I could deploy to heroku.

[bobbles]

I'd always thought that programming might be interesting. Picked up BASIC for dummies and basically built my career from that moment. It's crazy how stuff like that can happen.