A very good friend and colleague of mine once summed up learning to program very well: “Programming forces you to think in a brand new way.” Learning to think in a new way is required for programming, but it’s often why many people mistake it for being difficult. Anytime I hear someone say “I’m not smart enough to program”, I cringe, because I know for a fact that it’s simply not true. A computer is not only dumb, it only does what you tell it to do. The hard part is translating what you want into, literally, a language the computer understands.



There is another difficult part that is seldom mentioned, turning it off. It’s hard to look at a map of a mall, a stack of jelly packets, or even a potential lover without thinking like a programmer.



UPDATE:



So this post received the most negative feedback from any comic so far. Some came to my defense, and thanks to you, but I did want to make a statement:

