why you should learn to program
Here's my top reasons why you should begin programming today!
Hi friends,
My name is Morgan and I’m on a mission to break down complex concepts in programming and computer science into smaller digestible pieces! My goal is to create the resource I wish I had when I started my programming journey, making it easier for beginners that come after me.
Enjoy the blog post!
Let’s start at the beginning.
I wanted to kick things off by starting at a high level. Like, at a super, super high level. And that means we’re going to start at the very beginning—even before you type your first command or even write your first lines of code. To start, let’s ask ourselves the question:
Why should you learn to program?
You might already know the answer to this question confidently, or you might not have any idea at all (and that’s perfectly okay). Having a passion for a particular skill or hobby—and pursuing it solely for that reason—is completely valid. I have many hobbies like that myself:
Surfing
Making Videos
Minimalism
Overlanding
But I’m here to share with you some of the reasons I started programming, which I believe are quite compelling, even if you don’t plan to monetize your programs or programming skills.
1. The Problem Solving Mindset
I want to emphasize how massively programming enhances your ability to think logically, break down large problems into smaller, manageable chunks, and tackle each one independently. The problem-solving skills (which I am personally still working on acquiring) have applications across many different disciplines.
2. Creativity
Oh yeah buddy—you heard that right—programming is ✨✨✨c✨r✨e✨a✨t✨i✨v✨e✨✨✨. Not only does programming enable you to create anything from websites and applications to games, but it also challenges you to take a rigid set of functions and apply them to create things that are often extremely fluid in nature. It’s like making a circle out of straight lines, a process that seems to require creativity (I’m trying it in my notebook right now).
3. Empowerment
And speaking of making things, doesn’t it feel good? I personally find it incredibly gratifying to build something and be able to point to it at the end of the day. There’s also a great sense of self-actualization that comes from taking a concept that lives inside your head and bringing it to life in the real world.
4. Automation
Even a basic knowledge of programming allows you to automate repetitive tasks, saving you time and energy. Here’s a story on Reddit about how someone completely automated their job and, at the time of writing, was a year in to their experiment. I don’t personally condone this application of automation, but it does a good job of illustrating just how powerful programming can be.
5. Interdisciplinary Applications
Programming skills are valuable in virtually every field. You can easily leverage your programming abilities in data science, artificial intelligence, finance, civil engineering, biology, and policymaking—just to name a few. So if there’s an industry you’d love to work in someday but don’t know how, programming could be a good inroad for you. Personally, I think working for a commercial spacecraft company would be really cool.
6. Career Opportunities
Admit it, everyone was waiting for me to say it. Yes, it’s true that there are some fantastic career opportunities for people who know how to program (or even have programming as a small skill among others). In short, programming makes you versatile and sought after by potential employers. It might not make you totally gorgeous and funny and always-say-the-right-things, but you get what I'm trying to say.
But…isn’t like programming like super, duper hard?
It certainly can seem intimidating. But a common misconception about programming is that you need to be exceptionally intelligent to do it. I’m here to tell you that you don’t. Anyone with the right attitude, patience, and willingness can learn to program. In fact, we can write our first program right now.
Yes, I’m not joking. So get ready to follow along!
We’re going to use a website called online-python.com (I am not affiliated with them), which will allow us to run our code without actually going through the hassle of setting up our developer environment. If you don’t know what that means, it’s okay. In short, a developer environment is all the infrastructure we set up (usually on our own computer) that allows us to read, write, and run code.
For this program, we’re going to be using Python 3. Python is a versatile language that’s a popular beginner language to learn. Don’t worry if you’re not sure which language you want to learn first, you can always research how to build this program in your language of choice.
Ready? Here we go.
First, you might need to delete a few lines of code that come preloaded in the main.py window when you open up the tab. For this program we’re going to be utilizing the print function in python which can be used like this.
print()So hop on over to Online Python and type the word “print” with two brackets after it. Don’t worry about what’s going inside the brackets for now—we’re going to handle that on the next step.
Your screen should look something like this:
Now for the fun part. Between those brackets and inside a pair of quotations, type Hello, World! Just like this:
print("Hello, World!")Now you can run your program using the ‘run’ button at the bottom of the input window and your program will execute just like this:
🎉 Congratulations, you’ve just completed your first bit of code!
You’ve taken the first step into the world of programming, and my hope is that you’ll continue to experiment with other small programs even after you finish reading this. If you think I missed something in my compelling list of reasons to learn programming, let me know in the comments!
Have a great rest of your day. And remember, it’s always okay to start from zero!
Cheers,
Morgan