I think I severely stunted my learning for multiple days by trying to understand everything. Often times, a tutorial will just present you with a new element and tell you this is how it's done, and then I'll try and look the entire thing up to try and 'properly' wrap my head around it with all its silly intricacies.

Don't.

Much like how the default advice for people trying to write a story is that they shouldn't spend months studying the latest creative writing book or try and read Save The Cat! to find the next best Hollywood formula and instead they should just write and finish a story and expand their media literacy outside of IMDB's top 100, this is the same.

I think I was simply too caught up with old study habits. I don't even know why I approached this as an exam and tried to memorize everything from the beginning. When I was young, there was a famous story that went around trying to counteract the Asian rote learning education style that basically went:

Albert Einstein¹ was confronted and laughed at by another mathematician. The mathematician says, "Why do you always look up reference books, Einstein! Shouldn't a smart man like you have all that memorized by now?" And Einstein's reply was, "I don't need to memorize them precisely because they're written in books. I can free my mind to understand other things."

Now that I think back, @NireBryce (thank you for all your help:eggbug-heart-sob:) even told me I was too focused on the specific details of language and understanding comes naturally through execution. It's not that I wasn't listening, it's that I forgot about this piece of advice after I went to bed that night. :unyeah:

Also I highly recommend you don't learn coding while listening to Satori by Etienne Jaumet. I didn't understand why I was so stressed until I realized the music sounded like a countdown for a timebomb and I kept feeling like I was stuck in my uni finals. Jesus Christ.

GOOD SONG THOUGH.

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@noahtheduke posted:

I think I severely stunted my learning for multiple days by trying to understand everything.

What's a couple days? No, really, what's a couple of days? Things take a very very long time to learn, even the simplest things take time. Every day, my 2 year old puts on his shoes and every day he fucks it up in some small way and sometimes he gets it and sometimes he doesn't, but every day he's trying. He's better now than he was a week ago, but day to day the changes are so small as to be imperceptible among the regression to the mean.

I read Learn Haskell Fast and Hard shortly after it came out because I spent a lot of time on /r/programming and The Orange Website. At the time I was a hobby python programmer and common lisp dabbler. The haskell tutorial blew my mind and I spent hours trying to figure it out, unable to handle eta-reduction and the "functional style". I walked away from it after multiple evenings defeated and forlorn, hopeless that I would ever understand it.

Years later I got a job as a python developer and then went back to the tutorial on a whim and blew through most of it until I hit the section on monads. I took another break, and years later I was working in clojure and had dabbled in rust, so when I tried again, it all clicked. I don't think I like Haskell, but now I have the capabilities to understand what's happening and enough experience to map the new stuff to things i've encountered.

This is all a lot of words to say, "What's a couple days?" The road to learning is incredibly long, the paths circuitous and winding, and everything you read or try (even when you "fail") informs and interconnects with everything else you read or try. What is impossible now may in time become easy or understandable, merely through the weight of "I've seen this now 40 times, I still don't really get it but I have a felt sense of what it's doing and what I can do with it."

Congrats on getting this far.

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