Logic, Effort and....Faith?

Day 90210: still shaving. My head's getting hot. The scariest part of following a tutorial is when it jumps from "hi just copy this stuff down, press some buttons voila" to "you're a big boy now go take a bloodbath on this one". Yup, half a month later Exercise 46 still stands tall and strong, smirking at my stupidity. "...you should be able to do this" -- no, no I shouldn't. WHAT am I doing wrong? What happened to the super useful 10+ entries in your Common Student Questions? Why stop the handholding now? At package distribution? Really? It's a relief to know -- with some Reddit surfing -- that package installation/distribution is renowned as the most tedious part of a beginner's journey into coding. Apparently, it's also one of the defining filters for "true programmers", and from what I gather, the best course of action is to accept the frustration and just slog it out. But the most intriguing advice I read was this: I’ve found that a big difference between new coders and experienced coders is faith: faith that things are going wrong for a logical and discoverable reason, faith that problems are fixable, faith that there is a way to accomplish the goal. The path from “not working” to “working” might not be obvious, but with patience you can usually find it.

I must admit I've never really liked the word faith, and the fact that IBO actually bothered to name it a legitimate Way of Knowing just made me raise my eyebrow higher. I thought computer science would be the one field where this word has no place in -- yet here it is. Thinking back though, I did face some major roadblocks when building my old platformer in Construct 2, and it was nothing less than sheer, unrelenting optimism that got me through some of the weirdest bugs. (That reminds me, some of the enemies in my game still have infinite HP. Screw them.) I hesitate to call that faith, but I'm hard-pressed to disagree. So, moral of the story...have a little faith? I don't know. For now, I'll stick with "optimism". Damn right I'm gonna get you done, package distribution. #FightOn *Advice quoted from this fantastic read.

#disaster #Python #learning #LearnPythontheHardWay #longpost