Threads like this are invaluable, but it's not fun reading – "modern programming" is a borderline nightmare for the uninitiated https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1522633160483385345

and a cacophony of explanations barrage my face like a bukkake of knowledge

I'll have to remember that phrase

I could write a long essay on everything I think is wrong with Python, but I have trouble thinking that fixing all of it would help with this part: "I don't wanna learn how programming building blocks work as I use them to build a lil rando pile, I want to learn how they work as I use them to build the actual house I want. If what I'm learning isn't connected to a payoff, then I lose the stamina to wade through the problems." I struggle to translate that into any other discipline and have it still make sense. It sounds like wanting to learn how to write a novel in French without any interest in learning to conjugate verbs, or wanting to race horses without learning how to ride them or care for them or even saddle them, or wanting to become an MMA champion without wasting time on all those pesky punches and kicks. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old fart, I remember when pop culture encouraged dedication and patience and learning to crawl before you run with things like "You must complete the training" and "Wax on. Wax off."

From what I gathered she started down that road to solve a specific problem. If the solution is not in sight, and the steps one needs to take are too abstract to even understand why they need to be taken, then it's fair to question wether you're still on the right path.

@Fabian Iwand I agree with what I think you are saying about the need for programming environments that are easier to get started with and in which it is easier to focus on your goals than how the computer works. I also agree that we need environments with a more shallow and continuous learning curve and with more discoverable capabilities. I struggle with what I perceive to be an implication (not sure if you meant to imply this or not, but I feel like it is in the air in this thread) that somehow it should be possible to write interesting programs without learning the building blocks necessary to do so. Logo and Smalltalk and Scratch can make it easy to do simple things, and easy to combine simple things into more interesting things, but at the end of the day figuring out how you want to combine those things into something interesting still requires knowledge of the building blocks and skill that takes time and effort to learn. And, I would argue, some time spent building a little rando pile instead of a house so that you can get a feeling for how those blocks are shaped and what they do. In designing a system, I think it's important to acknowledge what the system can provide versus what will still be needed from the user.

Maybe the resolution is: pick the tool/approach correctly. If you need to parse csv, there are many options, some easier, some harder. And people need help picking the right tool/approach. Python isn't the right tool for many people at most experience levels. Once you have a certain experience level, then it's an option. If I want light in my house, one option is to pull off an outlet from the wall, experiment with the wiring, and try to run wire to a fixture I bought online. For most possible experience levels I likely possess, this is not the option I should choose. If there's something this community can provide, maybe it's not more technology – maybe it's a map between experience levels and approaches+tools to try.

I think there's an important insight, here, about the difference between the inherent need to learn fundamentals first, and whether or not the person learning the fundamentals in the abstract can envision how those fundamentals are combined to do something that they want.

@Chris G regarding picking the correct tool, when I read that the author can "get specific info from various columns (count x in a column conditional to y in another column), how to filter columns, delete empty columns, and delete targeted columns" it did occur to me that a spreadsheet can do all of those things. Some spreadsheets can "generate a correlation chart" for some values of "correlation chart." However, I have no idea how much data is in play or how advanced of an analysis the author is attempting to perform, so I don't know if a spreadsheet could be made to solve the actual problems at hand. I see the value of creating a map of what tools to use when, but contemplating the number of dimensions in play and how to represent them makes my head hurt. It seems to me that "experience level" should be split into at least two variables, "computer or programming experience level" and "domain experience level." Other relevant dimensions I can think of include the size of the problem, the complexity of the problem, which form of efficiency is your priority (examples from the camel book include runtime efficiency, space efficiency, programmer efficiency, maintainer efficiency, porter efficiency, and user efficiency), other software you need to integrate with, and restrictions on acceptable licenses (for example, "no GPL allowed" or "all parts must be open source"). I'm sure I missed more than I thought of, so maybe we need a data model with an arbitrary number of arbitrary attributes to describe the user's needs? At which point this starts sounding more like a library catalog than a map. Or am I overthinking this?

Very close, yes, @Personal Dynamic Media. To strain the analogy a bit, the answer to your last question is you draw them an actual map, on paper. For your while loop to video games example, you say "video games show video. video is a series of pictures. to create video, the computer creates pictures, over and over again, really fast. Loops are used to get a computer to do the same thing over and over again." Loops -> do stuff over and over -> make pictures over and over -> video -> video game. It is entirely doable, just not usually done. Probably because the training materials are written by and for experts, who suffer from the curse of expertise and are unaware of what they understand that their audience doesn't, and/or because they are written outside of any context so as to be of general use, or use the context only to motivate examples, not the concepts themselves.

I notice there are already a bunch of task specific Python books out there. For example, on making games https://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Python-Master-Building-Games/dp/1718502060/ https://www.amazon.com/Invent-Your-Computer-Games-Python/dp/1593277954/ https://www.amazon.com/Coding-Games-Python-DK/dp/1465473610/ Or for system automation https://www.amazon.com/Automate-Boring-Stuff-Python-2nd/dp/1593279922/ Or for breaking codes https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Codes-Python-Introduction-Building/dp/1593278225/ Or for data analysis https://www.amazon.com/Python-Excel-Environment-Automation-Analysis/dp/1492081000/ https://www.amazon.com/Python-Data-Science-Handbook-Essential/dp/1491912057/ Or automating web interaction https://www.amazon.com/Web-Scraping-Python-Collecting-Modern/dp/1491985577/ Are you thinking we need more online tutorials like this? Or are you thinking about a different medium of some sort? Or something else?