Working through the fear

There's one element of programming that I wish I had learned early on.
One of the things that programming books (especially beginner
programming books) do is try to make it seem like programming is fun.
They create cute experiments for you to tinker with in the hopes that
you'll become fascinated like they were and keep plugging away with
programming. That's all fine and good when you're starting out, but when
you start hitting harder problems the calm "you can do it" attitude
seems to melt away into the "why haven't you memorized this" or "why do
you need to head to the manual for this?" The expectations ramp up, and
it feels like weakness to try something and fail.

I think one of the reasons I glommed onto programmer post-mortems like
"Programmers at Work" and "Coders at Work" was to figure out the
emotions that these folks must have felt while they were working on
their amazing tasks. Unfortunately most of the time these books are
either humble-brags about how great it was that they solved the problem
that transformed them from a programming citizen to programming royalty.
Rare is the case when a programmer will admit that they didn't have the
answer, or how they tried several things that didn't work only to find
the one that sort of worked. I think our industry needs more of these
breakdowns of how a project came together. The one that I point to as
one of the best is the Source Code for Eastern Front
1941
by Chris Crawford. The reason this is so great is not because of the
commenting of the code, but more about the why of the code. It's not
just a list of "these were the technical decisions that lead to me
deciding to use this data structure" but also "this is how my design
process came together and what I found didn't work". It highlights that
game programming in particular and programming in general is more
iterative rather than prescriptive.

I wonder how many programmers have been fouled up thinking that they're
somehow defective because they couldn't keep the whole program in their
head, or had to keep referring to documentation because they needed to
find some syntax that wasn't intuitive to them. How many programmers
might have been helped with a mentor saying "no, this is exactly how you
should be feeling, and here's how to deal with that fear". How many
nights of frustration-leading-to-burnout might be avoided if we
acknowledge that we're human beings programming a machine and not vice
versa.

Learning to be OK with not knowing and understanding the fear that it
causes is one of those skills I wish I had been taught better. I think
it would have helped me get further along with my journey.

http://decafbad.net/2021/07/04/working-through-the-fear/

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