The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Law

Just read this article, called "How I failed, failed and finally succeeded at learning how to code."

Many times, when my brain has been parboiled by journalism and its attendant -isms, I try to teach myself to code.  I've always felt, morally, that coding is something anyone should be able to teach themselves using only the Internet and pluck.  The author of the article apparently feels the same way, because the article's tagline is: "The programming website Project Euler provides a plan for how to learn anything in fun, discrete steps."

Let's be frank, I don't think of "coding" and "fun, discrete steps," as being related, even when I'm using the correct version of the word "discrete."  But it takes all kinds.  My ambitions are big: as a kid I dreamed both of hacking the world and of one day being President of the United States.  (I find campaigning to be a waste of time, so if I could hack the Presidency, I would.)

My adventures in coding resemble the author's: fits, starts and sputters.  I remember buying expensive, boring coding manuals.  I signed up for W3C's many, many lessons.  What appealed to me about coding is the same thing that appeals to me about video games, here, at last, is something that I can teach myself.  Or so the theory goes.

Halfway through the Atlantic article, the author prints this diagram and asks: how much of the box does the triangle take up?

So that's why the area of a triangle is one half the base times the height, I mused, once I got it.

The tagline for Project Euler's website is: "A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming."

Also, this glowing nugget appears on the FAQ page: "With newly released problems it is quite possible that a small error may have slipped through the net, or maybe the wording is slightly ambiguous and the problem has not been explained as well as it could. However, when so many people have hit the target and one marksman misses ten times on the run, he/she can hardly shoot his/her own foot and conclude that because the gun is working properly the fault must lie in the target."

I've been called many things in my life, but let "faulty target" never be one of them!

So let's take some fun, discrete steps together, shall we?  Here's Euler's first hurrah:

Ah.  This reminds me, oddly, of my high school multivariable calculus class.  One weekend, my teacher (a Romanian who had a very Soviet attitude towards education) set us something like the following prompt: "You have a spaceship of dimensions X, Y, Z.  Calculate the formulas to launch it into space."

Much like video games and open-ended calculus, learning to code is a great way for an intelligent person to slowly convince himself that he is stupid.  This is because it is really, really hard but it looks really, really simple.  If you are an "intelligent" person, chances are that your whole life, you memorized things in books and did really well at it.  And people told you that you were smart.  Learning to code is not for those kinds of smart people.  It is probably best reserved for people who have been told all their lives that they are idiots.

These people are immune to the perception of stupidity.  It doesn't break their hearts or tie their intestines in knots or make them rethink their previously held views about how they are too good to campaign to be President of the United States.  (All of which are thoughts that went through my mind after the first ten minutes of staring blankly at Problem #1)

In other words, perhaps the best way to save the children is to tell them that they are morons.

So with the understanding that I am actually a moron, I will start on this problem and let you know once I succeed.