To my fellow hackers/programmers out there: I worked as a mentor on a startup for a while that taught people how to program. One thing that's really frustrating to a beginner to hear is "it's really not that hard." Actually I would argue this is the single biggest deterrent to people learning, and it's completely avoidable. Hackers like to say this to encourage people to learn how to code, I've seen it happen in casual conversations, but it has the unintended consequence of making the beginner think if it's hard, then they must be stupid because this other person told them it's not hard. It's actually really hard to learn to program, we just easily forget about that. And we also forget that we had other people help us along the way, we didn't learn it inside of a vacuum.
If you're a hacker, you owe it to a beginner to let them know it's difficult but if they persist they can overcome the learning curve (for some people it's steeper or wider, but it's still not easy no matter how you look at it). We're very honest about how difficult starting a startup is, so we should be equally honest when it comes to learning to code. Hope this helps anyone out there interested in learning.
If you're a hacker, you owe it to a beginner to let them know it's difficult but if they persist they can overcome the learning curve (for some people it's steeper or wider, but it's still not easy no matter how you look at it). We're very honest about how difficult starting a startup is, so we should be equally honest when it comes to learning to code. Hope this helps anyone out there interested in learning.