How long did it take you to learn how to code?

22 comments

1. 18 months

2. Morse?

3. Hard to say. I did it on and off for so many years that it was more like learning to ride a bike. It was just something I did without thinking about it as learning. LIke you might just get on your bike and ride somewhere. Every time you get a little better at it, doing little tricks and whatnot. Programming is simlar. Except there are lot more programming languages than there are type of bike.

4. What language?

   * It took me a little bit (_1yr_) to grasp JAVA. I was kinda thrown to the deep-end.

   * It took me 3 months and an open book to learn php/mySQL … I’ve not used it in 10+ yrs.

   * I’m a noob at JS and Python and can work with the language but I will bomb any Leetcode/HackerRank question thrown my way … f**k those things

5. Remembering cheat codes for San Andreas took me not so long

6. Code?

7. Earning my living now for 8+ years with coding. still no clue what I’m doing…

8. Depends on the language, but at the end of the day all developers are atill learning, some have just got a head start on others. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the context for this question? You might be able to get some better answers if there’s something specific you’re trying to achieve by learning to code.

9. Like learning how to be a woodworker, you’ll never stop learning.

   You probably meant to ask something like how long did it take to get a programming job, which will be heavily warped by some kids writing programs in elementary school but not getting a job until their 20s.

10. wrote my first program 14 years ago.. Still don’t know enough.

    You learn constantly.

11. 8 months, although I code in c# and I don’t do insanely complicated shit. Most complicated thing I did was use quaternions. Just saying it brings back PTSD.

12. To really click 3 of my 4 college years? But unfortunately it’s one of those things you’re always learning. You can’t just pick a language and making a living off that. You have to learn new ones all the time even if you don’t move companies or positions.

    I was on DevOps for 2 years for our in house advertisement software. I think we had a tech stack of about 60 different technologies spread out in 18 applications. Needless to say no one person could cover all 18, but they sure did try to make it that way.

13. Hard to say for sure. I have a computer science degree and my introductory classes were taught in C++ so I guess you could say 1-2 semesters since by the end of that I knew most of the concepts and could use the language but I definitely wasn’t an expert. I also came into college with some experience with other languages like basic and Visual Basic so that helped but of course those are very different from object oriented programming.

    One of my professors told us that we’d likely have to learn additional languages and that the tend to get easier as you go since you pick up on commonalities and it’s mostly just learning new syntax and he was right.

14. It depends how dedicated you are. You can learn the basics in a month or two, but it’ll take longer than that to get proficient and know how to write software that actually does something useful.

    For me I’d say probably 3-5 years but I was in a unique situation.

    I started with C++ from a book when I was 16. I didn’t have access to a computer until I was 18 so I wrote my code in notebooks for two years. I learned most of the concepts in my C++ book this way but some just don’t make sense until you get feedback from writing it in an IDE.

15. 35+ years in. Still learning.

16. I think what I learnt after the fundamentals (which took 3 months at a bootcamp) was “how to learn to code”. I mean, every project or problem has numerous solutions and there’s not necessarily a “best” way of doing things as much as there is a “best for you/team”. I am constantly learning new stuff, and always improving on the stuff I thought I knew.

    So, to get over the first bump (where do I start) a week or so, the be able to follow tutorials and understand half of what they’re saying but not really understanding why they’re doing it a particular way, a couple months. To get past the “I have no idea how any of this works I can never be a coder” about 6 months.

    After that, you’ll still have no idea how any of it works, but you will be confident enough to figure it out and break the problem down into smaller chunks that you can code.

    Tech evolves fast, so you will always be learning and never really finish.

17. I work in web dev.

    You keep learning because new things keep coming out all the time.

    There’s all sorts of different code, some easier to learn than others. Most jobs require you use a mix of everything. Some ‘code’ is built off of other code, eg React is coded with TypeScript which is a shorthand version of JavaScript.

    Coding can also be considered different to programming. EG you can code up a ‘dumb’ website with HTML and CSS. But to build an app that does things you merge into the world of programming.

18. Some people just can’t code no matter how much they try.

19. I took a few software and firmware courses as part of my electrical engineering degree, then my first real job after college was as a software engineer for the Air Force. The overall degree took five years.

20. I was 5 when I learned

21. Thus far 41 years. Possibly because I’ve never tried.

22. Depends on your IQ.

    Before people downvote bomb, whatever you think of IQ, the reality is IQ tests are literally giving the person a problem, usually numerical or logical or pattern based, and with limited information, find the solution.

    That is how programming works as well.

    You have a problem and using logical operators and instructions, have to find a solution, and similar to IQ tests, usually the simplest solution.

    IQ is accuracy and speed combined. Hate to say it, but in today’s world, people want speed.

    About to hit a new market that could set patents and/or create new marketshare? Then you want people who can get the results the fastest.

    This means – unfortunately – very capable people can struggle. I have worked with some seriously switched on people being end of year assessed as average because literal super geniuses are in the same department. Sucks, but that’s today’s rat race.

    I have been coding for half a year now in Python, Pandas and SQL outside my STEM job. It is hard, and you’ll never learn even 10% of the entire software/library etc.

    Figure out what you want to do – web dev, software, data analysis, data science etc and learn the tools they use and only those tools to get the job.

    Then spend decades picking things up.

    Our tutor who has 20 years experience the other day said they learned something new from one of my questions – and it was only because I went deep into stack overflow Q and A’s and found an interesting factoid of how Python keeps something in memory for Pandas.

    You’ll never stop learning.