As someone who recently started my coding journey (January 2022), I know what it feels like to hit the invisible wall between tutorials and actual coding. If you are wondering if programming is hard to learn or even possible to learn, you have come to the right place.

Programming can be hard to learn, but this often depends on where you start your coding journey. If you start with a more advanced or complex language you could find programming hard to learn. That is why I feel that the best programming language to learn first is HTML.

This article will unpack some of the challenges I faced when I decided to learn a programming language, if I overcame them and what you can do today to increase your chances of having a more successful coding journey.

Table Of Contents

1. Is Programming Hard to Learn?
2. Why do beginners find programming hard to learn
3. How I overcame the difficulties of learning to code
4. Breakthrough the tutorial wall
5. Stay positive and see learning opportunities rather than failures
6. Conclusion

Is Programming Hard to Learn?

The ability to code is effectively the ability to instruct computers to complete countless tasks flawlessly. This power does not come cheaply; hours pay for this skill. Hours of learning, hours of practice, hours of problem-solving and, depending on how skilful you are, hours of trying to figure out where that damn missing colon is!

The reality is that the fundamental principles of coding are not hard to learn. From my experience, most coding is made up of loops and if statements. Think about it: all any computer program does is perform an action x amount of times (in a loop) IF certain criteria are met. IF a criterion is not met, the computer performs a different action based on what you instruct it to do.

The question then becomes, is learning how to write an If statement difficult? Sure different languages may have different syntax to know, but the principle is the same. It is an IF statement.  You can do it in Excel.

So if that is true and all programmes are mostly IF statements, no matter how complex they may be, why do so many people struggle to find programming hard to learn?

All the established developers I follow on Youtube make coding look so simple. So much so that I feel pretty incompetent when watching their videos. Maybe the question is, rather, why do beginners find programming hard to learn?

Why do beginners find programming hard to learn

Find out why by reading the rest of this article here