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# Programming Anxiety

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Programming is one of the cornerstones of modern information technology.
It is what enables the entire Internet to deliver a myriad of services
and information to everyone at any instant. We live in an era where all
sorts of amazing programming projects exists, especially the Linux
kernel and the GCC compiler. These amazing programs are the product of
tens of thousands of hours devoted by legendary experts. I admire how
programs has helped humanity as a whole. So while most of my previous
posts have been about the progression of what I have learnt, this post
is not one of them.

I started learning about programming in the earlier part of this decade;
I don\'t really remember the specific date anymore. Learning programming
was fun. Reading blogs, articles, and disseminations about programming
was fun too. But what comes after those? The culmination of all that
knowledge and skills is to write your own program. To set your fingers
free and ultimately find their way to a creative product of your own.

Would it be self-sabotage for a noob programmer to have read
well-written articles discussing the pros and cons of incorporating open
source libraries in your project? Or the fastest/most-concise
implementation to sort and filter data structures? Or how should a
programmer write a program so that he can easily write unit tests for?
GCC or LLVM? Imperative or functional? The latest netsec update about
exploiting common bugs in poorly-written programs? These questions and
information weigh on me before I even write my first function. Would I
have done this better? Did I make the right choice using tuples instead
of arrays? Is it time to refactor this tiny functionality?

Most of the advice for beginning programmers have always boiled down to
\"Start small, start well\". But even with my best intentions, I would
not have known where does one draw the line at well. The fear of
finishing a program only to realize that it was never going to be
functional, and I have wasted hours of my time only to backspace my way
to Line 1. The disappointment after writing a program that I think is
somewhat decent, only to find that a similar open source library already
implements this with impeccable style and documentation. As a result,
even if they would have never taken off, dozens of my programming
projects have never left the drawing board.

What would have been the lesson of this post? I don\'t know. Perhaps I
should just learn to embrace the idea that the programming process
inherently requires a lot of rewriting and will inevitably be filled
with security issues. Thank you for reading.

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> "What is better: to be born good or to overcome your evil nature
> through great effort?"\
> - Paarthurnax