Hey, It's Boring Stuff!

New Programmer; How to do it Right.

One thing I’ve realized through the years is that anything is possible. This brings me to the conclusion that you can be bad at being a rookie. How can you be bad at being a rookie you ask? The below list attempts to rectify (somewhat natural) bad habits.

• When asking for help, don’t act like you know more than the experienced programmer; in addition to getting nowhere, you will have burned all possible first impressions of them thinking you competent in any way.
  
  
• No programming language is too hard to learn, all mainstream languages have reasonable a syntax. They would not be mainstream if they were awful.
  
  
• Never assume you know everything about a language, or all languages. You (including experienced programmers) will eventually be proven wrong.
  
  
• When asking for help, be formal; do not use abbreviations for common words or phrases such as “idk” for “I don’t know”. You will be ( more commonly ) ignored or grilled for your improper tone. (Treat it as a classroom)
   
• Do not introduce a new standard into a sea of similar standards, instead of the sea of new standards disappearing to become your own, you simply threw another bucket of water into the sea.
   
• There is no age limit or educational requirements to become a programmer, but for the love of god; please learn proper English (or your main language) and basic algebra before riddling forums with help threads.
  
  
• If you don’t know what it does to its entire extent, do not call it an equivalent of “stupid”.
  
  
•  C++ is a very close brother of C, if you find C easy, you will more likely find C++ about as easy.
  
  
• .net is alright with me, but I wouldn’t want it hanging around my kids; if you know what I mean.
  
  
• Use proper formatting when writing code; just because you can put all 100 lines of code into one line, does not mean you should.
  
  
•  There are extremely rare cases where any syntax in a mainstream programming language can be deemed “poorly implemented”, to the point where a newbie’s chance at being able to properly mark it as such; is less than teenagers who have gauges in their ears, removing them because they are awful looking.
  
  
• If you are having problems understanding what a pointer is; it is a reference to a memory address. Essentially a bookmark.
  
  
• Hacking does not mean stealing information or whatever the general public has rumored until it  became the big sticky ball of chewing gum it is. Hacking more commonly means an throwing together an unorganized or unoptimized  block of code. (you hack it together, get it? Like throwing it all into a corner until it works, but is still on life support.)

With the above list, and a bit of common sense, you can become a proper rookie, and eventually a successful programmer. The easiest thing to take from this is you need to stay humble.

No one wants a “know it all”, especially a “know it all” who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.