We, as human beings, have a tendency to idealize personalities and situations. Thus, we always search in the real world for what we have idealized in our minds. The ideal woman, the perfect man, the perfect car, the most beautiful house, and so on. Naturally, our imagination rarely matches reality. Thus, there is also the myth of the ideal programmer.
This is the individual we have seen many times in movies or read about in books. The person who knows everything, who will write code without error, without debugging, and without having to look in any book or site for the 10,000 lines of code that can change the whole world. Sometimes it's the hermit with his long mustache, who, sitting on a carpet with nails, can answer every programming question with such ease and accuracy that even the Pope would envy.
However, none of this is reality. A programmer, despite all the experience they may have, remains a human with a human mind and questions. They might have been in your shoes a few years ago, feeling just as confused among endless loops and buggy code.
In reality, all programmers, regardless of their intelligence, have gone through the difficult yet rewarding path of knowledge. It may be tough, it may hurt at times, but it is a universal axiom that pain can bring greater happiness than its avoidance.
No matter how much we dislike it, we can never reach the ideal. A programmer can never become the ideal programmer but can only strive to reach it. And this can only be done through pain. They should never think they know everything and should always feel like they are learning for the first time.
How could they, after all? There are so many technologies out there that you couldn't master even if you had 30 lifetimes. Especially in computer science, every person with a good idea can create their own prototype. Some of these prototypes become more well-known than others, but even with this filtering, we have ended up with so many tools that no reasonable person could learn to use them all as easily.
And of course, because computer science has so many "brains" gathered, each individual programmer has their own way and method of taming the machine. Some develop their own methods, while others try to follow standards that are globally recognized and tested. So, each one will suggest their own way and might even mock you for still using an outdated method or tool.
But when are you a real programmer? When you reach the ideal? We've already said that will never happen. When you gain experience over the years? Unfortunately, years do not necessarily mean experience, but they are not a measurable quantity either. Then when? Does it really have value to say that you have become a programmer in order to put a stamp on your personal myth? If that's someone's purpose, then yes. You can choose to say that at any time. But the best way is... just to do what you love to do. To write code, to learn new things, and not to be concerned with labels.
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