Programmers are the digital equivalent to Wizards.

Funny thought:
Just like a wizard manipulates the physical world, creating spells that obey his intentions, a programmer manipulates the digital world, creating processes and methods that obey his will.

There are quite interesting similarities.... Now where's my digital wizard cape!?

Today I had sort of a meltdown when I found out that the small, 20-something company where I work and where we should all 'trust each other' is working to stealthily enable SSL Inspection.

I'm done with doing anything other than what is stipulated in my contract such as helping out in other areas out of my own volition.

Management got control hungry and mad once they got their hands on a Deep Inspection Firewall.

Well, I'm not feeling sorry for the uproar they'll have to endure once colleagues find out they are doing this stealthily.

Serves them right and after this and other similar experiences my trust in this company is right through the floor.

These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.

Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.

I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.

I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:

1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.

2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!

For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.

Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.

3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.

4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.

I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.

I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.

Also, what has helped you when you first started out?

Thanks!!