Sure guidance is great. As much as I was a 14 year old know it all pain in the ass, my old highschool CS teacher taught me the most important lessons of develop

Sure guidance is great. As much as I was a 14 year old know it all pain in the ass, my old highschool CS teacher taught me the most important lessons of development: memorable variable names, syntax formatting, and saving frequently. However, there were at least a thousand programs I'd written before and after that involved huge if/else and case statements because I didn't know better or couldn't anticipate growth. Copy/paste code littered throughout. All of that 'bad' code was there because I wasn't worrying about making my code good (and barely knew what good code should look like), I was trying to make it work and solve a problem. That bad code made all of us who we are today- someone who starts their coding journey out only trying to write good code will never get finished, and probably give up. Hell, I'm 33 and have been writing code since I was 9 and am considered a 'rockstar' developer and architect by my peers (which is probably more of an indictment of their judgement) and I often still disregard the ugly for the path to the solution, then go back and refactor/cleanup/make portable after I have large blocks of code written. The only difference now is that my ugly is a WHOLE LOT prettier than my best used to be.