Well, put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about programming and googles what you described. They’ll be flooded with information that they can’t really make sense of. What language do I choose? I want to make games! So is C++ the right one? Can I learn another one?
Look at the questions in beginner forums. The naive, seemingly stupid questions. Many beginners struggle to understand what a language is, and how languages are related. To many a programming language is a series of magic incantations that make the computer do stuff. They treat it like spells.
Then, if you do manage to get over that hurdle, you’ll have to put in quite some time to get anything useful out of your code. You’ll have to bang your head at many hard surfaces, read tons of unrelated crap because, once again, you don’t even know what to google.
I don’t know, if you ever worked with complete novices. People who want to learn, but know next to nothing. Where I live, you can do apprenticeships for software development, and I had to guide a few of our apprentices. At that point I had been programming since 14, had programming classes in school, master’s degree in CS and several years of work experience. So I was very much removed from being unknowing. Being confronted with the utter incompetence and lack of any context of these guys was extremely eye opening to me. Those were bright, motivated younglings, but everything that seemed obvious to me, was completely beyond their capabilities.
In short: you may underestimate the difficulties to learn without guidance.
Well, put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about programming and googles what you described. They’ll be flooded with information that they can’t really make sense of. What language do I choose? I want to make games! So is C++ the right one? Can I learn another one?
Look at the questions in beginner forums. The naive, seemingly stupid questions. Many beginners struggle to understand what a language is, and how languages are related. To many a programming language is a series of magic incantations that make the computer do stuff. They treat it like spells.
Then, if you do manage to get over that hurdle, you’ll have to put in quite some time to get anything useful out of your code. You’ll have to bang your head at many hard surfaces, read tons of unrelated crap because, once again, you don’t even know what to google.
I don’t know, if you ever worked with complete novices. People who want to learn, but know next to nothing. Where I live, you can do apprenticeships for software development, and I had to guide a few of our apprentices. At that point I had been programming since 14, had programming classes in school, master’s degree in CS and several years of work experience. So I was very much removed from being unknowing. Being confronted with the utter incompetence and lack of any context of these guys was extremely eye opening to me. Those were bright, motivated younglings, but everything that seemed obvious to me, was completely beyond their capabilities.
In short: you may underestimate the difficulties to learn without guidance.