The Programmers Mindset

Learning anything new is a challenge, especially computer programming. As with any good thing in life, it takes training and practice with a long commitment to follow through. This includes changing the way you think about your current world. Why? Because you will have to push yourself to be more creative in order to think about new ways to solve problems.

Most computers can’t understand or comprehend any human languages like English or Spanish. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Computers don’t care about your feelings; they can’t read in-between the lines. The sooner you come to this understanding, the closer you will be to knowing the “Mindset” of a true programmer.

As you may know at this point, computers don’t think like you and I. Computer programs must have a high level of detail and precision when trying to carry out a solution to a problem. That means you must be able to give those exact instructions without a single miss. Don’t worry. There are plenty of tools that we will use to make this process easier. Take the following list as an example:

• Designing – The act of creating a plan for the construction of a program.
• Testing – The process of measuring quality, performance, and reliability of a program.
• Debugging – Finding and removing errors from a program.

I don’t want you to be just a programmer; I want you to be a GREAT programmer. We will get to that goal by understanding the problems in front of us and translating them into something the computer can understand. The tools that we use to accomplish this will be the Scientific Method along with your design skills. Soon enough you will be off to creating amazing programs.

The rest of this series is dedicated to helping you learn how to think like a computer, be more of a creative problem solver, and learn to love or hate programming.