Post #4247725
2026-07-30 17:14 UTC
@jscholes@dragonscave.space @matt@toot.cafe First, the prerequisite of doing anything meaningful, I suck at math, and when I say I suck at it, I mean, I don't honestly know how I graduated high school, it's so bad. Second, the learning resources. If I go through some tutorial or other and I understand everything up to a point, but that one thing I don't get, then the rest of it means nothing because it tends to build on top of what came before. This isn't a language specific thing either.
Probably my biggest pet pieve is object oriented programming. I hate it! I get the general concept, but it seems so unnecessary. I feel like I do a better job in programming Applesoft basic than I do any modern language. And I have actually made a utilities disk that never ran on actual hardware, but can run on an emulator.
I tend to want to write everything in one file, even if it spans thousands of lines. In languages like Python, if I make it modular, I tend to hit issues making sure a particular module gets what it needs from another one, or I hit circular import issues I don't know how to sort out.
then there's GitHub. I honestly can't read diffs. I don't know why, but I just can't do it. It's the same thing that makes me unable to deal with streams of numbers. And merge conflicts are even worse. without AI, I could never fix one myself.
Replies (2)
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@prism@infosec.exchange 2026-07-30 17:39
@bscross32@tweesecake.social @jscholes@dragonscave.space @matt@toot.cafe +1 to all of this
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@jscholes@dragonscave.space 2026-07-30 17:43
@bscross32@tweesecake.social Really useful, thanks! The only part I will strongly disagree with is the need for math skill as a prerequisite to do anything meaningful in programming. It is demonstrably false outside a specific subset of development work, and I know it to be practically untrue because I am likewise lacking in the math department beyond the absolute basics. This ties in nicely with your point about learning resources. A lot of them do introduce or demonstrate concepts via math-oriented examples. This is a problem with the materials, not a personal deficiency. @matt@toot.cafe