DISCLAIMER: PLEASE DO NOT READ OR SAY ANYTHING IN THE COMMENTS SECTION IF YOU ARE NOT CAPABLE OF READING AN ESSAY ONLINE OR ARE NOT IN THE MOOD TO READ ONE. I know this is the internet but this is a serious issue that has affected myself and a lot of other people. Please, please, if the only thing you have to say is “tldr”, “yap yap yapperton”, “quit yer yappin1!”, “holy yap” or anything else along those lines that is extremely common on places like discord then please just don’t bother. Please understand that I need to write an essay in order to have a proper conversation about this and to fully get my point across. Not listening to this disclaimer will make it hard for people who want to see this issue fixed and have a proper discussion about it. If just like me you are interested in seeing this issue fixed then please ignore anyone who does exactly what I have mentioned in the disclaimer above. They want attention, if they don’t get it then they’ll eventually get bored and go away. I hope that this isn’t that kind of community and this community doesn’t tolerate that kind of behavior. I’m just putting this here because this is my first post here and I have no idea what this community is like. It’s just happened to me so many times even on site outside of discord that I feel like I have to put this disclaimer up. Also this is an edit that could probably go without being added but I’ll put it here anyways. Please for the love of God don’t use ChatGPT or any AI to summarize what I’ve said and or write your response to what I’ve said. I know it’s tempting but if you do then it’s just mental laziness at the end of the day and that mental laziness is really going to screw you over when you get older. My generation (gen z) had a huge overwhelming problem with Mental Laziness.
I’m not sure where to post this so I’m just posting this here. Also, while writing this I was under the belief that freeCodeCamp is a place for beginners with almost zero programming knowledge to learn from. If this belief is wrong in anyway then I advise you not to read this while disregarding everything I have said below especially if you’re a member of staff. Additionally, if a member of staff tells me that freeCodeCamp is not a place for complete beginners to learn how to program then I will voluntarily delete this whole entire post if I can.
I have been programming since I was around thirteen years old and I am now close to my middle twenties. Despite starting my programming journey when I was around the age of thirteen, I am still trying to learn the basics and today I just learnt how to use the functions type() and isinstance(). I so far have not created anything note worthy without the use of AI to help me despite that I desperately don’t want to use AI and I want to be able to program without using it.
My personal programming journey started out like most other peoples programming journeys does. I was introduced to programming through a TV show and or documentary as a kid (can’t remember what TV Show or documentary) however, my child brain in it’s infinite wisdom thought “OOoooo, wow! Gosh Gollie! That looks so cool, imma gonna learn how to do it on youtube!” so that’s exactly what child me at the time did. Child me never realized how complicated programming really was at the time. So I finished the tutorial and wrote my first program. Only problem was is that I could only write that program that was taught in the tutorial I watched and after I had finished the youtube tutorial I felt like I had learnt nothing and it only took me a couple of hours to completely forget how to write that program. I tried again, same result, tried again and tried again until I gave up because it was genuinely beginning to make child me feel miserable.
Fast forward a few years later and I find out about a little website called Khan Academy or maybe it was a different site I’m not sure but I’m pretty sure it was Khan Academy. Anyways, I saw that they had a course on programming, it was revolutionary to me because in it they had a lesson about using documentation, Khan Academy had documentation that was clear, straight to the point, only taught what me what I needed to know at the time and there was very little technical jargon. It was perfect, finally I could make my own programs in this little Khan Academy Course without copying code from a youtube video and it was all because it taught me to use documentation. I finally thought I gained the ability to program whatever I wanted without having to copy line for line some program from a youtube video with very little room for creativity what so ever. However, that ah-hah moment instantly crashed and burnt the moment I searched up documentation for python as well as C# because it was either designed in a way where I would be spending 30 minutes to an hour finding a single built in function that I wanted to use or it was filled with so much technical jargon that I didn’t really need to know thus stumping my ability to learn what I actually needed to learn. Which overloaded my brain with information, information that my brain didn’t find stimulating was blocking information that my brain did find stimulating, without getting enough stimulation to continue learning I got bored and gave up. The end result of all of this was that I still learnt very little about programming and I just gave up completely on programming for a while.
Fast forward to the early 2020’s when AI like ChatGPT starts kicking off. Just like everyone I was curious, gave it a try, eventually learnt that it could program and tested its programming abilities. It of course wasn’t very good at programming and now fast word to 2024-2026. Now, AI is kinda really good at programming, to some degree you can actually use it in game development and software development but only to make really simple stuff still. If you just want to make simple games that already have simple genres that are well defined and well refined then using AI to code for those types of games especially Claude is pretty good. I could be wrong and from what I’ve seen it seems pretty good. I’ve also used AI to code however a problem began to rise that eventually made me unable to use AI. That problem was that when I used AI, programming really just became a waiting game, telling the AI how I wanted things and it never really felt like I was learning anything or doing actual programming. The whole appeal of programming is that you feel like an inventor and like your making some kind of machine out of words then when I used AI that appeal was taken away from me because I wasn’t really doing the coding. The AI was.
Fast forward to yesterday, I decide to solve this issue by asking Claude “Hey, I want to learn to program without you. Can you give me some good resources to learn from?” and it directs me to this site. It directed me to several sites and on the other hand this one was the one I chose for various reasons. At first everything goes great. I get to the type() and isinstance() section which began to become a little bit of information overload although not too much. I could handle it then I get to the one about string immutability and that’s just where all the information became too much. Even though 1-2 hours had passed since I gave up I cannot look at the one section about string immutability without my heart rate instantly rising, all the stimulation just disappearing from my brain and then my brain screaming at me to find something else more stimulating to do.
Anyways, now that I got my back story out of the way I want to explain my intentions here. I love programming and I would love to live in a world where most people are able to program because it’s easy to learn, it’s just that sadly, that is not the world we live in because the way programming is taught especially to beginners in most cases isn’t really helpful. Programming is not the issue, the issue is the way programming is taught even on this site. Take the introductory page and the immutable strings section as an example. In the introductory page, a complete beginner who has never even wrote a single Hello World script is most likely not going to know what Numpy or Devops is and explaining what it is to them doesn’t help because it just overloads their brain with useless information they can’t even use because they don’t even know how to use python. It’s like teaching a primary school kid how to simplify or find x in an algebraic equation then teaching them how to multiply and divide numbers. They aren’t going to understand how to multiply and divide numbers when you get around to teaching them that because their brain is already overloaded with processing information you just gave them that they’ll never begin to understand because they don’t even know how to multiply or divide a number which is crucial to learning how to solve for x or simply an equation. Learning Foundational Math’s is crucial to learning all other types of Math so therefore you don’t teach some other types of Math or even tell a beginner learner in math’s who doesn’t fully comprehend foundational math’s about it if they don’t even have a basic understanding of Foundational Math. Same goes with programming.
I have two solutions to this issue that would help myself and beginners who are just starting to program by using this site to help them learn. At the end of the day, it is up to the staff whether they want to do what I’m suggesting. Maybe the staff can even come up with a better solution then what I have to offer. I don’t know. As for the solution I have to offer, it’s very simple, at least just make a separate version of the python course without all the technical jargon and things that beginners don’t really need to know. That’s it.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day and reading this. I greatly appreciate it and I hope we can all have a productive serious conversation about this.
