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Overview

Most people who aren’t programmers don’t think of programming as creative. In fact, it’s a very creative field that is similar to painting. Like artists, good programmers focus on creating great things and the possibilities are endless.

There are many misconceptions about programmers. For instance, they dress poorly and act awkwardly in social situations, but this is because they care little about what people think of them. They’re smart people who don’t follow the conventional rules of society. This rebellious spirit makes them great at programming, which can help anyone come up with innovative ideas.

This article will discuss the following: what programming languages are, why there’s so many of them and how they’re used, why computer hackers baffled the FBI initially and finally how you can learn to code if you want to become obscenely rich.

Big Idea #1: Morals are as fleeting as fashion; and nerds are unpopular because they’re unaware of both.

Fashion and morals are similar in that they’re both tied to a specific time period. If you look at photos from the 1990s, you’ll see how fashion has changed since then. If you look at images of foreign places like Japan, for example, even today there’s still a lot of different styles there too.

It may be surprising to learn that morals are not permanent. They change with the times and location. Morals affect how you treat others, as well as what values you hold dear.

An example of this is the moral compass of Germans during World War II. It was very different from that of modern-day Germany.

Clothing and moral fashion are constantly changing. What subgroups in society are oblivious to these changes?

Some people are nerds. They’re smart, but they don’t care about what other people think of them. Nerds spend their time and energy learning new things instead of trying to fit in with popular groups or being fashionable. For example, if you know someone who wears the same neon jacket every day for five years without caring that it’s not cool anymore, then that person is a nerd. Also, if you know someone who doesn’t follow moral fashions (like killing animals), then that person is also a nerd.

Since nerds are usually not very fashionable, they often don’t get much attention in high school. However, after graduating from high school, where being popular is important for getting elected prom king or queen, it doesn’t matter as much anymore. In the real world (after graduation), nerds seem to do just fine without being popular.

Big Idea #2: Computer hackers are like artists, in the sense that both groups want to make good things.

When you think about the word hacker, what do you imagine? Most people probably picture a person who breaks into computers by doing tedious work.

In the computer world, hackers are considered to be talented programmers. A hacker is similar to a painter in that they both solve problems by creating concepts rather than implementing them. For example, I was originally taught that I should work on my code until it’s perfect before transferring it into the computer. However, an artistic approach works better for me: just start writing code and solve the problems as they occur, much like a painter might just start sketching something and work from there without planning their work beforehand.

Both painters and hackers produce work that has value, which is hard to measure. The only way to determine if it’s valuable is by how well people like it. For software, this depends on how well the software pleases the user by meeting his needs, and for art, on how well the work pleases the audience.