One of the big detractors that made programming very difficult for me was the fact that I couldn't find any practical application to what I was learning. As a result I felt unmotivated and dragged my feet for a very long time. Double clicking on Eclipse and following book instructions on how to make an array in Java for a class wasn't particularly interesting or fun to me. I always chucked it up as not bothering because I wasn't a 'math person', and this was probably something that only people who liked math would do. (I know I know)
It was only years later after I began delving into Linux and found a need to make something a bit more powerful than a bash script that I began developing an interest in programming again.
I'm sure there are many other capable and willing folks out there right now who feel the same way that I did. They want to learn but they don't see the point of it. Most courses at least don't really teach any real world applicability to what is being studied.
I had a similar experience, but from a slightly different perspective. I always found programming for the sake of programming to be sufficient motivation to spend time writing code. But when it comes to learning math, I have a really hard time caring about math in the abstract. Sitting me in a math class and having me memorize equations and formulas and operations, and solve a few word problems here and there (two boats leave point A, one going west, one going east, after one hour, blah, blah, blah) leaves me bored shitless for the most part. But if I have an application that matters to me, for the math I'm learning, I'm FAR more interested and willing to put in the time to learn the stuff.
Now that I'm trying to get deeper into Machine Learning stuff, I find myself motivated to go pick up books on Statistics and Linear Algebra and dig in, when I had very little interest in that stuff before.
Exactly. Programming is a means to an end. One of the great joys of programming is making something that is useful, especially if it is useful to somebody else (points 1 and 2 here: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/)
It was only years later after I began delving into Linux and found a need to make something a bit more powerful than a bash script that I began developing an interest in programming again.
I'm sure there are many other capable and willing folks out there right now who feel the same way that I did. They want to learn but they don't see the point of it. Most courses at least don't really teach any real world applicability to what is being studied.