Month: November 2020

A software bug in a Therac-25 radiation therapy machine caused the death of five patients after receiving a massive dose of X-rays.

Knight Capital lost half a billion dollars in half an hour when a software bug allowed computers to sell and buy millions of shares with no human oversight.

These and many other stories tell how seemingly unimportant bugs can actually cause so many tragic disasters.

Software is becoming more and more important and that doesn’t seem to stop any time soon. 

At the same time, this comes with the increased responsibility for programmers who are supposed to be very careful and really good at what they do.

Not programmers who only spent 1 night learning a few lines of code from a book and have cold emailed hundreds of recruiters asking for a job.

Wait, is it really possible to learn programming in just 1 night?

As funny as it sounds, there was a similar question asked on Quora more than 5 years ago. 

Unfortunately, I cannot find that exact question anymore, but it stuck in my memory since then.

Maybe, the person who made the question was trolling, or had an exam the next day and was hoping to get encouraging answers to pull an all-nighter and study before the exam.

I don’t remember the other answers, but I read one answer in there, which was really wise.

The answer was something along the lines:

Take a laptop and go to the north pole. A night there lasts 6 months. That’s how you can increase your chances of learning programming.

We live in this time where we want everything in a matter of seconds. 

We want fast food, fast cars, six-pack abs in 6 days, etc.

That’s the mindset that we have most of the time and we expect the same thing to be in other areas as well.

However, the real mastery comes from a lot of work and dedication. 

You have Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google suggesting you to learn to program in 10 years because rushing isn’t going to be worth it:

“In 24 hours you won’t have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You won’t have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in a C++ environment. In short, you won’t have time to learn much. So the book can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.”

If you mention that to people, they may not like it, but that’s the actual reality. 

You cannot just jump from printing a few “Hello World” statements in the console and expect to build the next Google the other day.

I am not denying the fact that you could implement a really nice application in a few hours, but that doesn’t come that fast.

There is a developer who has already implemented 10 applications in 10 hours in one sitting, but that’s not the result of one-night learning. He learned a lot until he managed to pull that off.

It takes time to learn something really well.

The more you do something, the more likely you are at getting better at it, which results in an improvement of your performance, and the cycle repeats.

Now that you have read that, do not get too overwhelmed with the long journey ahead of you though.

Will Smith describes it really well:

“You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.”

Now, instead of asking yourself whether you can learn programming in 1 night, a better question would be:

What is one small but valuable thing that I could learn tonight?