I tried to teach my girlfriend programming once. She understood stuff that took me years in a few days.
When teaching, I remembered how hard concepts of variables and functions really are. It's really hard to explain it to someone.
When teaching, I remembered how hard concepts of variables and functions really are. It's really hard to explain it to someone.
Obviously none of these people were hardly into solving puzzles. I think novelty and lack of frustration in this field makes motivated people perform better. Take this with a grain if salt but there are neuroscience studies pointing to novelty as a good way to learn. It is easy to find studies about it like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3858647/
But yes, I'm not a very smart person. I had to learn things a few times till I understood them :/
For me, understanding what was involved with "installing" a library to use in Visual C++ took years even though it's not that complicated. I just followed magic instructions and if things didn't work, then I would just have to ask someone for help. Eventually I understood the difference between the dll and the header files, static and dynamic linking, etc. Someone could have explained that to me literally years before I learned it myself, but I spent years just assuming it was essentially unknowable.
Everything else is teachers and documentation and compiler errors being stupid.
For example when starting with C++ who starts out with the importance of semicolons, how you have to not leave them off, find the missing semicolon, and have a teacher watch over you pointing out your missing semicolons? Nobody. You get a stupid abstract sentence : "statements are terminated by semicolons" after some bullshit definition of a statement. You can spend 90 minutes looking at definitions of the latter without acquiring a skill that the former could show in - not an exaggeration - 17 seconds.
17 seconds : 90 minutes is 1:317, so 3 years becomes 3 days of someone actually showing you.
You know it's true. You've seen it!
your sibling comment (by andromeda__) gives a good example.