Something I have been struggling with is the non formal approach to computer programming. Lately I find myself more and more convinced that if I had learned Pro

Something I have been struggling with is the non formal approach to computer programming. Lately I find myself more and more convinced that if I had learned Programming in a more formal context I would have seen results faster than not. While I agree that seeing results is important to the learning loop I think that correctly learning is the way to do that. Programming produces code, solutions to problems produce results. So if you want to see results you will have to first find a problem and solve it without thinking on how to program it. Sure 'outputting text' is a valid problem, however not very useful. "Reading a text file" might be a bit more on par and will immediately give you several tutorials on how to achieve that. And the way to go is to solve problems and not to 'program' you will just find yourself in a corner, unsure on what to do next. One could e.g. search on how to pass over a parameter to a program, how c++ handles file inputs, I/O Streams.