This article was automatically translated from Japanese using AI. The Japanese version is the authoritative version.
The thing I feel most strongly while learning to program is that I have no idea whether I’m actually getting any good at it.
For a long time I thought programming was something like English: that as I studied, I would gradually be able to write it as fluently as a language.
In practice, though, it never really felt like that was happening.
Programming feels like something you study when you’re forced to by necessity, which is to say you never really pick it up unless you use it.
In my own case, I had analysis results from DeepLabCut, but the data were so massive that I needed to find some way to turn them into easy-to-read graphs.
You can certainly make graphs in Excel, but with data this large it took forever just to open the file.
So I decided to use Python to process the data and plot it, and set about writing the program while learning as I went.
Once I started writing code, I found that writing the code itself wasn’t all that hard—what was hard was searching Google for the specific operation I wanted to do.
It was a constant cycle of figuring out what processing I wanted, looking up code that would do it, and typing it in.
Given all this, going back to my earlier point that programming isn’t quite like a spoken language: it’s more like always talking with a Japanese-English dictionary in hand. You can do just about anything if you spend enough time on it, but experience is what changes how fast you can look things up and how elegant your code becomes.
Also, the code you write yourself becomes an asset—I often find myself copying and pasting my own code and tweaking it slightly when I need to do something similar.
I’ve only just started programming and I’m something of a bandwagon type, so maybe I’m not really in a position to hold forth on this, but I hope it’s useful to anyone thinking of starting out.