Send More Paramedics

Learn to Program

Teach yourself programming in 10 years

Peter Norvig is absolutely correct in this essay. I’ve been programming almost daily for about 12 years (although I was writing BASIC and Pascal programs to keep track of neighborhood baseball stats and RPG character generation between 8 and 16 years old). For the past 5 years I have been doing it probably 50 hours a week. However, no matter how good I think that I’ve gotten I manage to always find a topic and/or programmer that kicks my ass. While it certainly is reasonable to think that after 10 years one might be considered an expert programmer, but the process never ends — its the nature of the beast.


As a side note, I should add that I find it ironic that it also takes at least 10 years to read and fully comprehend Norvig’s masterpiece.

-m