I’ve always flunked at math; and knowing how intertwined programming is with math, I’m skeptical of my ability to learn how to code. Can someone be too dumb to learn programming? If it helps, I’m mostly interested in learning Common Lisp.

  • Nommer@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    I’m starting to believe I am. Been at this for a year and I still don’t understand how to use methods like .filter() or .map() despite reading and practicing, it’s all just smashing the keyboard until it works. I know some other devs will come in and joke they do the same thing but no, I feel truly lost when trying to figure this out.

    • halloween_spookster@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I have over a dozen years of experience as a software engineer and I started learning Scala and monads recently for a new job. I’ve come to the conclusion that monads are terrible and make things more difficult despite the on-paper description. Don’t worry about it, you’re much more competent than you think.

      • Nommer@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        I’d like to believe that, I really would but I can’t when it takes the better part of 2-3 hours of frustration just trying to figure out how to reverse a string before just doing a for loop and going over each individual character, only to find out all I had to do was something stupid simple like str.split().reverse().join()

    • mhredox@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’ve mostly reached a point where I’m not always having to go back a look up documentation, but for some reason array methods still get me.

      Every. Single. Time.

    • bnjmn@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      It will come in time, promise. I had a REALLY hard time understanding recursion until I started using it more