This article was automatically translated from Japanese using AI. The Japanese version is the authoritative version.
The thing I feel most while learning programming is that I have no idea whether I’m actually getting any better at it.
For a long time I assumed programming was something like English—that as I studied, I would gradually become able to write it as fluently as a language.
In practice, though, it didn’t really feel like that was happening.
Programming is something you study when you’re forced to by necessity; conversely, you never really pick it up unless you use it.
In my own case, I had analysis results from DeepLabCut, but the data was so massive that I needed some way to turn it into graphs that were easy to interpret.
You can certainly plot graphs in Excel, but with that much data, just opening the file took forever.
So I decided to use Python to process the data and generate the graphs, and I ended up writing the programs while learning as I went.
Once I started writing code, I found that writing the code itself wasn’t all that hard—what was hard was googling for the specific operation I wanted to do.
It was a constant cycle of figuring out what processing I wanted, searching for code that would do it, and typing it in.
Given that, going back to my point that it wasn’t like learning a language: it felt more like always speaking with a Japanese-English dictionary in hand. You can do just about anything if you spend enough time on it, but experience is what changes how fast you can look things up and how elegant your code becomes.
Also, the code you write becomes an asset. I often find myself copying and pasting my own earlier code and tweaking it slightly when I need to do something similar.
I’ve only just started programming, and as a bit of a bandwagon-jumper I may not be in any position to hold forth on this, but I hope it’s useful to anyone thinking of starting out.