22 march 2017
I am currently attempting to learn python, partly as just a creative exercise and wanting to know how computers work a bit better and partly out of a desire to be able to give myself more career options. I should focus less on the latter, because it makes the learning of coding feel a bit hopeless.
I am thankful for tilde.town because all of y'all seem to love computers and technology but in a way that is not alienating. It seems as I pursue this path more and more, the alienation and toxicity comes up more often as well. There seems to be two extremes in the coding help I can find online: it is either "this is rudimentary stuff and it is embarassing that you are even asking it. I am going to just paste what you need to do and use some obscure phrase to show you that I am still holding back knowledge" or "Did you know that an infant can learn how to code?! you are an infant! let's code! Look at this: + that is called "plus sign" write below what you think it does....that's right! It adds things together!!"
I am currently working my way through "Coding the Hard Way". I know that the author is meaning well, and wants to make sure people don't forget the fundamentals. And I can tell that he is trying to come off as a gruff sage that is secretly quite senstive...but he's just not a good enough writer for that. Instead he just comes off as a pedantic, confusing asshole. There's "additional fact!" sections at the bottom of each chapter that is basically him making fun of a person for asking questions....like the tone is just strange. And some of the stuff he recommends (reading the code backwards, saying each character out loud as you write it) can be useful, the graveness at which he writes that you need to do it just seems like such overkill.
I might just be sad that I am again learning about what a variable is, and the difference between strings and integers and did you know that you can add them together?
I am getting v. tired of typing print "hello world!" again and again as I try to find the lesson plan that speaks to me. It feels like I am in an RPG that constantly
resets itself to the first dungeon, but with a different narrator telling me exactly how I should kill a rat.
A computer friend of mine said that I should start with a project. And I have a project in mind that would get me v. excited, but I dont' want to just cut and paste code that I find online, even if it gets me to my goal. I want to understand exactly why each thing is there, and I want to understand the history of the terms we are using and such.
I am trusting my gut. I am in a new area that is uncomfortable for me(programming) and I am finding myself so embarassed as if I don't belong in this world, and it makes me self conscious. At the same time, I keep finding myself digging deeper and deeper. This evening I listened to a podcast about the command line called "Taming the terminal" The first chapter just explains what shells are, and has you not even open up the terminal yet(which is fine, as I was just listening, with no intent on sitting in front of a computer, I just wanted to hear someone explain how flagged arguments work). I don't know what compelled me to download and listen to this podcast, but I looooved it and should just not question why I love it. And later I was reading an article about the alchemical histories of visualizing data, and how you can trace neuromancer back to a man named Roman Llul, who in the 12th century tried to depict every fact about the world as a type of tree. He thought God could be symbolized as a tree, and so could every animal, or all sins, or the natural laws of the world. And through his strange book of info trees we can see the birth of information science. And I just loooooooooove that idea. I want a book that describes the forest of python, and the branches I need to rest upon as I shimmy up the trunk. And I want to be good enough at programming that I can actually build out these forests I see in my own head, and help other people understand a different way of looking at code. But until I find that perfect book, I will do free online courses where an angry sys_admin explains to me , again and again, that you can use python as a calculator.