I understand that this question could be answered with a simple sentence and that it may be viewed as subjective, however, I am a young student who is interested in pursuing a career in programming and wondered how long it took some of you to get to the level of experience you are now?.
I ask this because I am currently working on building an application in Java on the Android platform and it bothers me that I am constantly having to look up how to write a certain section of code in my application such as writing to a database, or how the if statement should be structured.
My question really is, how long did it take for you to become experienced enough to actually know exactly how your next line of code was going to look, before you even wrote it?
I have been a C++ programmer for the last 20 years. It has taken me that long to get to this expertise level. I’m mostly a Windows programmer, and I keep the msdn website up on one of my monitors all the time.
Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it. You will never know everything from memory. Don’t sweat it.