Spent 3 months learning Python before I realized I should've started with JavaScript

Back in January I decided I wanted to learn coding from scratch, just for fun... maybe build some stuff. Everyone kept saying Python was the best beginner language so I dove into that hard for like 12 weeks straight. Watched hours of tutorials, did little exercises, understood loops and functions okay. But then I tried to actually build a simple webpage that does something interactive and man... Python alone won't help you there without a whole framework. So last week I finally switched to JavaScript and in 10 days I've already made a little calculator that works. Wish someone had told me to think about what I actually wanted to make before choosing a language. Has anyone else picked the wrong language to start with and had to backtrack like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

brianm274d ago

Wait, so you spent a whole season learning Python before realizing your calculator is just gonna sit there and look pretty? I feel you though, I did the same thing with C++ back in college. Wanted to make websites and ended up writing code that could only print "Hello World" in the terminal. By the time I figured out JavaScript existed, I had already memorized the syntax for pointers I never used. At least you smartened up after 3 months, took me a whole semester to realize I was basically learning how to hammer nails with a shoe. Did you at least build a cool Python project before jumping ship?

rivera.holly3d ago

I got stuck in that same trap with Ruby actually... spent a couple months building a command line todo list app that nobody would ever use. What finally clicked for me was just picking one tiny project I actually needed, like a script to rename my messy music folder. That one little thing taught me more than all the tutorials combined because I had to figure out file handling and regex on the fly. Sometimes you just gotta ditch the learning plan and let a real problem drag you through the language.