Programming
I felt like learning something new. This time web related. Eventually, I arrived at Kotlin. Between my background experience as a Java Web Developer and an Apple Developer, I thought Kotlin sounded like a good investment and fun to play with.
With Kotlin I should be able to bring forward all that Java EE knowledge I have while also learning a new language. Given that Kotlin is also used for native Android development, combined with the experience of building iOS apps, I could also expand to another mobile platform in the future.
Some combination of cryptic error messages that I had to decode before I could have a development environment ready, open-source plugins no longer supported, out of date documentation, buggy releases, patchy tools meant that I had to jump through hoops before I could write even a single line of code.
I won’t go into detail of every problem I run to. What I will say, is that it took hours of debugging, googling, reading through support forums, trial and error before I could finally focus on the task. Building something while learning a new language.
I have over 15 years of experience as a Software Engineer and it still took me hours to go through every issue. How would a newcomer deal with any of that? How accessible is programming today? How is it fun? What happened to:
10 PRINT "Hello, World!"
20 END
Related
- Coding - “It’s like the 80s all over again, where you plug in a machine, and you can instantly start coding. I for one miss that.”
- Open-source - “I am not sure what to make of open-source software anymore.”
- PICO-8
- GB Studio