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I think the point of the article is that you are not a beginner forever. You are a beginner when you know absolutely nothing about programming. After years of e

I think the point of the article is that you are not a beginner forever. You are a beginner when you know absolutely nothing about programming. After years of experience, no one should be an actual "beginner", by the authors standards, because you understand programming conceptually. Being a programmer can be frustrating for a lot of reasons, but not understanding the basics of coding should probably not be one.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
The difference between a beginner and an early programmer is that the beginner has no mental model at all for mapping code statements to the things code statements do - because they have a limited to nonexistent idea what the latter are. The heart of programming isn't learning syntax, it's in learning how to translate solutions into sequences of symbolic operations, which can then be translated in turn into the syntax of a specific language. Beginners also need to learn to use a keyboard, an IDE, and a debugger, and probably also a package manager, a distribution tool or system, and how to look stuff up online. So the cognitive load is huge. But it's the mental model that trips people up. You literally can't do anything with code until you learn the core symbolic grammar for the most common operations. And even after you do that, there's always more to learn as you can go deeper into more sophisticated models like functional programming. It's not at all obvious to outsiders how that grammar works. (Which is why programmers tend to be so bad at UX - operations and relationships that are "obvious" to someone with programming aptitude are completely unintuitive to people from other backgrounds.)