Following on from my last post, you might’ve decided you want to learn how to program, but now you need to work out how. First off let me make a confession, I am a massive Python fanboy, it’s got the ease of reading, the speed of writing and you can get some deep C hooks and exploit some speed that you might not think you could from an interpreted language. Yes it has its cons, not everyone likes duck typing, significant whitespacing or the fact that if you’re using Python for threads, you’re going to have a bad time (I/O threads excluded). Still despite its drawbacks, I’ve never used any programming language as quick and enjoyable to write.

So I’ll come right out and say it; if there’s a choice, use Python. You might not have a choice, your automation framework might be Java, Ruby, Javascript or even C or C++, without stepping into .Net shops where C# might rule the roost. You’ve got to learn a language that you can use regularly or you’ll learn slowly.

So that, right there, gives us our first method for learning to program, write programs. Sounds simple, but is harder than you think. You can follow along with any number of lessons from the internet that tell you how to write programs, you can do that and sure, you’ll learn the content no doubt. But if you want to learn it faster? You do the very basic lessons and then you start to write programs that matter to you.

Secondly, care about it. This is a very hard one to envisage yourself ever doing, but much easier to actually do. Get into your programs, when you learn something new you should stop for a moment and take pride in it. Every new method you learn to solve a programming problem is another tool in your tool box. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’ve got a properly filled toolbox, you can do a lot more.

Thirdly, learn to love failure. A lot’s been written on this subject, but programming always takes place on the very edge of your competence. If you know how a problem should be solved, it’s just rote work to get the job done and you’ll find your attention slipping, mine does. But when you’re faced with something you don’t understand how to do, that’s when it gets interesting. Suddenly you’re forced to learn again, learn more. And what you learn, sticks, because you take pride in your solution to a new challenge. You will fail. You will fail over and over. At first you’ll be failing at the small things, punctuation, capitalisation. Later on you’ll be failing because you’re reading from random memory or not checking your inputs for buffer overflows.

You might enjoy the early failing more. But if you accept it’s going to happen, you’ll enjoy all of it as a learning experience.

When I am in a new job/role, the first thing I do is look for things I can automate. Recently I discovered that I’d be spending a lot of time changing command line arguments in the product I’d be testing and then reinstalling and checking a new build. Fine, except that unless you do a complete clean uninstall, the config persists. Not optimal. It’s hard to remember everything you’ve changed every time, so the very first thing I wrote was a quick python script (less than 100 lines, including comments) which reset all the variables, set some debug flags, installed the latest licence…

I don’t file bugs because of vestigial configuration settings.

Did I learn anything from writing this? I mean I’ve been writing Python for four years now, surely I’d know everything there is to know about… Oh wait, no I learnt about the subprocess library and I used some nice dictionary walking techniques. I’m proud of it too. I am emphatically not a programmer, I write some programs and scripts here and there to help with my everyday life. I’ve had no real formal training in programming and I know maybe three or four algorithms properly (and that due to an edX course in Algorithms). So for me, every time I open Sublime Text and start to bash out a Python script, it’s going to be a learning experience. That’s why I love it.

Do I fail? I fail hard. I fail often. I sit staring at my program wondering why nothing works for ages. Then I walk to get a coffee, or start to go home and it comes to me. Ask anyone who writes programs, those moments of enlightenment are worth all the frustration and puzzlement.

Though there’s a lot more enlightenment and a lot less boilerplate in Python!