While learning programming beginner or sometimes good programmer do lots of mistakes, consciously or subconsciously and we don’t give time to check this and fix it up. This in return makes you very unconfident in programming, you feel like you don’t know anything, your problem-solving skills are so bad, your code quality is not good, you are not for programming and should try something else, and so on. This decreases your hope and you end up praising others, that he is so cool or she is so genius.
So for that I have listed some most common problem a beginners does and he should improve it asap
Read more -> How to choose your first programming language in 2021
1. Planning an unrealistic goal
When we first start learning to program, we have lots of energy and excitement, we are like I will do 10-12 hours of coding and complete python in a week. And we will be in Google or Facebook But after 2-3 days our energy gets fainted and we are back on our regular track. I am not saying that you should not be excited and energetic, infact, it should be in every programmer and in other professions, it’s the one which keeps your dream alive. But never make a bad decision in excitement, like planning to code 10-12 hours of coding everyday learning too many things in a day, etc. Be practical and think will you really going to have 10-12 hours every day to code, will you be able to learn many things in a day.
Your plan should be like this
- How many hours you will code Everyday
- How many hours you will spend in practise
- What you want to achieve in a week/month/year and so on…..
2. Trying to learn multiple things at once
I have seen many beginner programmers who try to learn many languages, frameworks, or technology at once so that they can save their time, showcase, or maybe to impress the interviewer, I don’t know. What they do is they just learn a little about one thing and switch to another even before mastering it and they think like they have learned the thing.
Doing this kind of thing can seriously waste your time, money, and confidence. You are not an octopus right and you don’t have 8 hands you won’t be able to master anything, you may have multiple things mentioned in your resume but you won’t be able to use any of those skills perfectly and you will not have command over anything. You will end up having confusion, lots of confusion.
Look it’s not bad to learn more than one or many languages instead it’s a very good thing, but it sure is bad to switch your focus on a different language/framework/tool before mastering one, let me tell you a secret if you will master one language honestly, it will be a piece of cake for you to master other so, keep hitting until it’s got broken into pieces.
3. Ignoring the Code Quality
Writing code in proper formatting is too important, most beginners ignore this, as they think coding is just about getting the things done, they just write code to get the desired output and that’s it. Yeah, I agree it’s the things we run for, but suppose if you are solving something with your team or you just need some help in your code with other fellows, will you be able to handle your messy code to them, will they be able to understand your code. Your team is gonna throw you out once they see your messy code at production. So keep in mind writing neat code is very essential,
“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath
who knows where you live.”
– John woods
Here are few things you can keep in your mind while coding
- Proper variable Naming
- Proper Indentation
- Comment your code
- Don’t try to be a one-liner
- Don’t repeat yourself
4. Writing code without planning
When I was first learning to code, I used to make the same mistake. I used to think that coding is all about solving a problem with code, so whenever I had a programming problem, I directly jumped to my computer and started to find a solution, sometimes it works, sometimes not and sometimes it took me hours to find the solution just by doing trial and error. So just like me if you also make the same mistakes or used to, then it’s the time to change your bad habit. Just like in real life we solve big problems/small by first planning and then executing and then solving if it creates any issue and finally it has an optimized solution. So, just like that we also have to plan, execute and then do bug fixing(if any) in programming. Before you touch your keyboard to solve any problem, make sure you have understood the problem and what its solution is gonna look like. As a threshold, I would say solve 80% of the problem with pen and paper and then finally blast your computer.
“Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”
–Abraham Lincoln
5. Don’t give enough time for practice
Just like math, you need a lot of practice to be good at programming. Instead, I would say not only programming and mathematics require practice, anything you want to be good at requires some practice and effort. You won’t be a cool programmer just by watching lots of tutorials and reading a book, even if it makes you feel like you understand everything. After learning something, practice it right away, so that you can find out if you really understood it or not. Most of the time you will find out that you do lots of silly/big mistakes, and you will have to revisit the references and revise them again until you understand them completely. Also, practice doesn’t mean you have to do things that you just learned, it could be anything you learned before and you think you are losing grasp in it, Below I have mentioned some of the places where you can really polish up your skill
6. Avoiding math
Many programmers avoid math as they think it’s not important in programming. This is a big misunderstanding they live with. Math is a very crucial subject and it’s very important in many aspects of our life, even in programming. If you want to be an awesome programmer you have to learn math undoubtedly. It sure is hard to learn but worth learning it “good things are not easy to understand”. And again learning math doesn’t mean that you have to learn everything in math and became a mathematician next year. We only have few things to learn in math for example Linear algebra, Calculus, Statistics & Probability, graph theory, Boolean Algebra, Mathematical Induction. You have to learn all of these or a few of them depending on your programming field to learn more about this read this blog.
“Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer
mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians”
–Edsger Dijkstra
7. Comparing yourself with Others
Do you ever feel bad, when you see someone better than you, Do you feel like you are useless and you don’t know anything? It’s very demotivating thoughts, and this kind of thoughts destroy your progress, your self-believe. Instead of thinking, he/she’s is better than you, you can’t be like him, you are useless, etc., thinks something like how much efforts and the time he/she has spent into this to be good at this level, how you can improve yourself, how you can be better than him/her, plan your roadmap your goal and try to achieve it. And last but not least be a better version of yourself every day and be proud of it.
Conclusion
There are many mistakes we make while learning to program. But many of us don’t give enough time to review this or we ignore it as thinking it’s not important. Which in return makes us bad in programming, so it’s important to avoid it as soon as possible. In this article, I have discussed 7 common mistakes a programmer make,
Data Scientist with 3+ years of experience in building data-intensive applications in diverse industries. Proficient in predictive modeling, computer vision, natural language processing, data visualization etc. Aside from being a data scientist, I am also a blogger and photographer.