Keep At It

Topic: Programming, Varia

Expert: noun a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority: a language expert.

People have unrealistic expectations when it comes to programming (and this applies also in every other area of life). There are books out there with stupid, outrageous titles: Learn X In Y Days, with Y being anything between 3 and 10 and X being almost anything. I used to be a TA for an introductory course at McGill University, and it would aggravate me to no end when students would complain after getting a bad grade, stating that all they "needed" to do to pass the course was "read a 'for dummies' book".

You cannot expect to be an expert in a field the first time you enter it. True, there are some exceptions, but they are incredibly rare. Harold Ramis once said "It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything", and I couldn't agree more. And before you get good, you're going to have to be bad, and that's okay. Everybody starts everywhere.

What's my point? Well, people get discouraged when they're told they're bad at something, and most people quit trying to do it. And this is not limited to programming; learning to play an instrument, or learning to play a sport, or learning any field of study takes a long time.

So people, if you feel bad at something you want to do, just keep at it!

Stay cool,
Snowman