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Comment on Ask HN: With no CS degree, what was most frustrating about learning how to code?

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I do have a CS degree, but I first learned to code in high school. I was taught by a friend of mine who already had pretty significant programming chops even at 16. I think his father invented YAML. We did our programming on PCs that we built in the classroom and installed Ubuntu on.

Anyway, I remember the hardest part for me was wrapping my mind around Ruby blocks. It sounds kind of dumb but honestly I couldn't understand them for weeks. The first programs I wrote were those text-based adventure games, like, "You're on a path in a forest. What do you do? > Go left". I did those because you didn't need to ever use blocks for them, it was all just conditional logic.

Once I grokked Ruby blocks I feel like it has all been downhill from there, at least until I stated looking at Haskell...

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