Ask HN: Why so many people are struggling to learn anything? Right now, Internet is full of resources despite people are still struggling to learn especially programming. I see so many people asking for help on twitter while they as doing some course. what is missing here and why learning is still a problem when we are living in abundance? |
(1) The tools (and documentation, tutorials, etc.) suck. There are hundreds of ways that development tools fail in terms of human factors. One simple one is that floating point numbers are input and output in base ten but internally handled with a base2 exponent. What that means is that '0.1', '0.2' and '0.3' don't really exist in the floating point system, and thus 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3
Expose people to enough of those and they decide programming isn't for them. IBM mainframes had decimal point floating point math from the beginning. The rest of the industry is indifferent to the problem, I think it could only be woken up to it if it could be reframed like "this makes women and minorities feel programming isn't for them."
(2) You (all) suck. Programming requires a person to live in at least two worlds, one of which is the world of other people's requirements, one is the world inside the machine. Maybe that's a rare and special talent that neurotypical people lack.
Is there any way to filter the good content and tools?
and what about other subjects?
Don't search for things on Google or Stackoverflow if you're using a language with a good manual. Learn how to find things in the manual. Read the manual on your tablet when you spin at the gym. Learn it like the back of your hand.
If you use sites from the spamweb to look up answers you can almost never save time because your time will be wasted by spam, spamvertising, wrong answers, bad explanations, etc.
Unfortunately Javascript doesn't have a real "official manual" but
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web
comes close.