Python programming

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 11:21 AM, ngangsia akumbo <ngangsia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please i have a silly question to ask.
>
> How long did it take you to learn how to write programs?

Well, let's see. I started programming a quarter of a century ago, and
I'm a lot less than a quarter of the way to knowing everything about
programming, so I'd say it'll take at least a hundred years :)

Seriously, you will spend your whole life learning. Just as a program
is never finished, but at some point you ship it, so also a programmer
has never learned, but at some point you start writing things that are
useful to other people. At what point does that happen? Varies
enormously. Lots of teenagers go through a school or uni course on
programming thinking, "I'm going to write a computer game!". That is,
IMO, a bad start to programming - a truly fun game that can be written
after taking a basic comp sci course is going to be a reimplementation
of one that already exists (maybe Othello - that would be within a uni
graduate's skill, I think), which isn't what most people think of when
talking about "writing a computer game". So what's your goal? Automate
some mundane task that you do every day/week/month? You could master
that fairly readily. Win at Jeopardy using a supercomputer? Try
assembling an IBM-level team of experts. :)

> What is the best way i can master thinker?
> I know the syntax but using it to write a program is a problem

As Mark says, mastering tkinter means picking up a tutorial and
working through it. More generally, I would recommend learning *any*
skill (programming or not) by having a need, and chipping away at the
problem until you've solved it to your own satisfaction. Don't learn
tkinter just for the sake of learning tkinter; learn it because you
want to make XYZ, for which you want/need a GUI.

(Until you're an expert programmer already. Then you might learn a new
skill just for the sake of learning it, but there's a difference, and
you'll know it when you get to that point. Sometimes it's fun to
create something under stupid restrictions that make absolutely no
sense - that's part of the basis of code golf, for instance.)

ChrisA