Felt this. I had a C64 which came with BASIC. It was a struggle to get it to do what I wanted. Years later, I realized I was trying to things like write funct

Felt this. I had a C64 which came with BASIC. It was a struggle to get it to do what I wanted. Years later, I realized I was trying to things like write functions which you just couldn't do. Gave up. Years and years later I had a AMD K6 233, had opted to try Red Hat Linux because Win95 was awful and was obsessed with playing Quake which I knew was written in C. So, I tried to learn C. Several times. I never got to the "click" point. John Carmack, as I remember it, said to learn programming, do nothing else for 6 months. Eventually, years later, I did take that advice. It worked. I remember vividly when I finally grasped pointers. I wrote and expanded a dice roller to gloriously stupid proportions; it was threaded, had a very easy to use and flexible configuration file format and I was working on adding networking when the hard drive died. No backups. Yay. And a new problem appeared: I wasn't a rank amateur anymore, but for the life of me I couldn't think of any program I wanted to write. So the skills lapsed. Then I would have too many ideas and interests which resulted in the same conclusion, but would have to relearn first. I'd also be pulled in so many directions (robots! comic book timeline! starship emulator! UNIX shell idea, but in Klingon!), the result was the same: I'd accomplish nothing, despairing of ever doing anything. So, I remain a perpetual amateur.