An open letter to those who want to start programming

q2009a06z22

　　First off, welcome to the fraternity. There aren’t too many people who want to create stuff and solve problems. You are a hacker. You are one of those who wants to do something interesting.
　　“When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability."
　　– WhyTheLuckyStiff
　　Take the words below with a pinch of salt. All these come from me – a bag-and-tag programmer. I love to get things working, rather than sit at something and over-optimize it.
　　Start creating something just for fun. That’s a great start! There’s no way you will start if you say you “need to learn before doing”. Everybody’s got to start somewhere. Fire up your editor and start writing code.
　　Here’s something important which people might call bad advice, but I’m sure you’ll stand by me when I’m finished saying why. Initially, screw the algorithms and data structures. They do not have generic use-cases in most simple applications. You can learn them later when you need them. Over a period of time, you’ll know what to apply in situations. Knowing their names and what they do would suffice to be able to pick some paper, dust it and implement it. And that is… if no library (other programmers' re-usable code) is available, to do it in the programming language of your choice.
　　Choose a good language. One that you think you can produce something useful in short time.

　　So let C not be your first language. That might give you the satisfaction of doing things the really old-n-geeky way. C was the solution to the problem Assembly Language was. It offers better syntactic sugar than it’s prominent predecessor – Assemble Language. But today, C (or C++) is not a language that you can produce something very quickly. I would suggest that you use a dynamic language – I won’t sideline any options. Choose a language whose syntax (and documentation) you think you might be comfortable with. For this, you might want to spend some time trying out different languages for a few hours. The purpose of choosing such a language is not to make you feel better and that programming is easy. Completing stuff faster and being able to see the output keeps you motivated. Don’t choose a language that requires a special heavy-weight>　　Choose a good editor.
　　An editor is to a programmer, like how a bow is to an archer. Here are some editors to get started with…
　　SublimeText 2 – recommended if you are just starting.Emacs – huge learning curve. Complex key shortcuts. And to be able to customize it, you’ll need to learn Emacs Lisp.Vim – used by many for it’s simplicity and the fact that it comes with linux distros by default. I used Emacs for 2yrs and then switched to Vim to run away from emacs’s complex key strokes and when my little finger on both hands started hurting. Knowing vim keystrokes is a must. When you work remotely and try to type out code on some server from your computer, you’ll know that the only editor available from the command line without any installs, is Vim.Watchout! Emacs and Vim might be really old. But they both have some features which even most modern editors don’t have.