I to this day still have to Google tons of stuff, even very simple things; sometimes it's just hard to remember that function's name or whatever, it's no big deal.
Programming didn't click for me until I actually built something. Just a little command line game. Eventually after a certain point I realized: oh my god I can do anything! (with enough time)
You'll get there, but try working on something bigger with zero stakes where you can feel out how code you write in one place ripples out to other places.
Man, Unicode is one of those things that is both brilliant and absolutely absurd. There is so much complexity to language and making one system to rule them all ends up involving so many compromises. Unicode has metadata for each character and algorithms dealing with normalization and capitalization and sorting. With human language being as varied as it is, these algorithms can have really wacky results. Another good article on it is https://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/
And if you want to RENDER text, oh boy. Look at this: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/
I'm surprised at how negative the reaction to SO is here! It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn't work if you jump right in without lurking. If you ask questions the moment you run into trouble, you kind of project a disrespect for the answerer's time by not trying to solve it yourself first. If you ask as a last resort and list what you've tried, people are waayy nicer, even if your question sucks.
I think the real problem is that people's expectations aren't properly primed going in. The site could do a much better job about that. If you ask only as a last resort, you end up solving most of your problems yourself, and SO is REALLY good at helping you do that, in a way that leaves most other sites in the dust, in my opinion.
We use too many libraries. This may be an actual unpopular opinion though. I find that the more a library tries to do, and the more dependencies it has itself, the more hesitant I am to use it. It just feels like a tower of cards ready to fall at any moment.
I'm not a very trusting person and work alone though so this might just be an emotional decision. But it is nice having a project be composed of code that does just what is needed and nothing else. It makes it easier to fix bugs and especially to maintain the code.
I do use libraries, but only if they're absolutely necessary or if they're very focused and don't try to do a million things. It's not about size but complexity.
I to this day still have to Google tons of stuff, even very simple things; sometimes it's just hard to remember that function's name or whatever, it's no big deal.
Programming didn't click for me until I actually built something. Just a little command line game. Eventually after a certain point I realized: oh my god I can do anything! (with enough time)
You'll get there, but try working on something bigger with zero stakes where you can feel out how code you write in one place ripples out to other places.