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Being 15 and unable to grasp the concept of an array whilst wishing I could somehow use a variable to escape my at the time a1, a2, … a11 variable naming conven

Being 15 and unable to grasp the concept of an array whilst wishing I could somehow use a variable to escape my at the time a1, a2, … a11 variable naming convention.

fire_lake 2y ago
A formative experience for me was learning to program and asking a peer “how I do lots of variables but I don’t know which one I need” - I had none of the terms to even ask for what I needed.
- kzrdude 2y ago
  That phrasing of the question is not bad at all, just needs an open minded person to answer it
martinald 2y ago
Haha, tell me about it. When I was first learning PHP as a teenager I also had similar problems. I did not know about SQL JOINs for at least a couple of years; which meant database querying was... overcomplicated to say the least. The other epiphany I had was when I started to realise HTTP was just a request string getting parsed. Given I had used FTP and web servers like Apache previously for HTML and files, I was convinced the directory structure in the URL was the directory structure on disk. It took me a long time to get my head around the fact that you could just grab the request URL from the HTTP headers and not have to have hundreds of physical folders to make URLs like /category/subcategory/page (I'd managed to approximate this with making folder structures that looked like this with index.php files in).
- amadeuspagel 2y ago
  > The other epiphany I had was when I started to realise HTTP was just a request string getting parsed. I've never thought of it like this, but I didn't understand for a long time that a webserver was just a function that run with the request as an argument.
xandrius 2y ago
I remember at 15 being annoyed that I couldn't figure out a way to have a textbox which I could use to input and run any arbitrary code while my own code was running to debug it. Like being able to type "println(x)" to get the value of x. Took me a quite few years to discover the intricaties of the so-called debugger :D

Being 15 and unable to grasp the concept of an array whilst wishing I could somehow use a variable to escape my at the time a1, a2, … a11 variable naming convention.

fire_lake 2y ago

A formative experience for me was learning to program and asking a peer “how I do lots of variables but I don’t know which one I need” - I had none of the terms to even ask for what I needed.

kzrdude 2y ago
That phrasing of the question is not bad at all, just needs an open minded person to answer it

martinald 2y ago

Haha, tell me about it. When I was first learning PHP as a teenager I also had similar problems. I did not know about SQL JOINs for at least a couple of years; which meant database querying was... overcomplicated to say the least. The other epiphany I had was when I started to realise HTTP was just a request string getting parsed. Given I had used FTP and web servers like Apache previously for HTML and files, I was convinced the directory structure in the URL was the directory structure on disk. It took me a long time to get my head around the fact that you could just grab the request URL from the HTTP headers and not have to have hundreds of physical folders to make URLs like /category/subcategory/page (I'd managed to approximate this with making folder structures that looked like this with index.php files in).

amadeuspagel 2y ago
> The other epiphany I had was when I started to realise HTTP was just a request string getting parsed. I've never thought of it like this, but I didn't understand for a long time that a webserver was just a function that run with the request as an argument.

xandrius 2y ago

I remember at 15 being annoyed that I couldn't figure out a way to have a textbox which I could use to input and run any arbitrary code while my own code was running to debug it. Like being able to type "println(x)" to get the value of x. Took me a quite few years to discover the intricaties of the so-called debugger :D