New Student

Using Swift
1

I''ve been learning Swift with almost no background in coding at all. Does repetion of typing swift help reinforce where the punctuation marks go? How long did it take some other students to start typing code that doesn't throw xcode errrors you have to go back and figure out?

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This happens to even experienced developers. Just keep learning :slight_smile:

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I've been coding since 1977. Still type dumb stuff from time to time.

When will you feel you know the language well enough to stay in a flow state while coding? A few months to a year, depending on what other coding experience you have.

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These days, learning a new language is a relatively painless adventure, compared to 1970s. :slight_smile:

You no longer have to go to a computer center to punch your code very carefully onto cards, submit your deck of cards to the job queue, then wait anxiously for the print out, praying: God, no errors, please.

These days, you can do it all from the comfort of your home.

Your real challenge is going to be learning all the things that you need to be able to create something useful by using Swift. That means learning some math, computer science, reading documentation for the frameworks or libraries created by other people, and asking intelligent questions on these forums. Also, having some emotional intelligence makes the learning process easier.

Enjoy the journey.

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Hi Kelvin,

I teach programming to students like yourself for a living, and I'd say: yes, absolutely. If you're new to programming (or just learning a new language), you really need a lot of repetition to learn the basics. Two ground rules when getting started:

  1. Force yourself to never copy-paste anything, and type it out yourself.
  2. If your code has errors, fix them first before continuing. The more code you add on, the harder it'll be to find the errors.
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Man, I find the way a number of my compatriots wrote over the years to be perplexing. I liken it to trying to wire together a bunch of stereo components together blindly, then turning it on, and seeing what happens. Of course, some of them think I just run the compiler too often. I feel like LSP based IDEs vindicated my style. :stuck_out_tongue: