Thanks everyone for the comments on the blog post. I don't know how whoever submitted this found this one. This started as a letter to my junior in college who

Thanks everyone for the comments on the blog post. I don't know how whoever submitted this found this one. This started as a letter to my junior in college who asked me for advice on where to start. The number one problem I've ever seen with shitty code, over and over and over again, is lack of understanding of fundamentals. I humbly beg to differ and would stick to my words - "Initially, screwing the algorithms and data structures". I guess I should have written the word "initially" in all-caps. I feel that to be creative as a programmer, it's very essential that you can fuel your creative self by motivation. And that can happen not by reading too much about how to do it, but instead just jumping into the pool and checking it out (which a you, me and a lot others agree on). Later on, when interested to improve, the theory part can be learnt. The intention was not to scare away those who want to begin by telling them there's a learning curve to be followed and instead just say "here's what you can do, check these out, install these stuff and get started". How would anyone know which language to choose without using it first? Which is why I mentioned trying out some languages for a few hours and choosing something of personal taste + something with good docs (getting started, tutorials, etc). About backing up files by copy-paste, IMO, it's just personal choice. Whatever works for you. Since the post was targeted at someone who wanted to begin, I thought I should clearly mention to the reader that better tools existed. I prefer to build stuff for paying customers. Atleast to get to that point where you 'can' build stuff for paying customers, you have to start somewhere. First, finding paying customers isn't that easy for everyone. Second, when you don't know programming at all, and are trying to deliver something technical to a paying customer, IMO, it's just building castles in the air.