Perhaps an odd question

Followers

October 10, 20187 yr

Do feel a bit daft asking this! But I'll go ahead anyway.

Wondering if others felt like this when first starting their coding journeys. I look at walls of code and the main thing that pops into my head is that learning code must be like learning and retaining each word of a few (spoken) languages. Like some sort of techy polyglot. I mean when I look at, what I call anyway, basic code I can see how it can make sense, how each component works together but when we get to stuff like this, it fries my brain how people can remember this;

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=php+code+examples&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJ147D3vvdAhXE3KQKHXzXD24Q_AUIDigB&biw=1408&bih=658#imgrc=5onW2SSV9Trg_M:

Is there anyone that can look at that and understand it's function? Really just looking to know what level of coding this falls under and how people found retaining so much information

October 10, 20187 yr

Even after all these years I still find myself on php.net checking for the right function for what i'm trying to do. The example you gave in the image link, not sure what the "malicious code in the middle" was doing but there are only 2 functions used, base64_decode() and eval().

I agree it's like a second spoken language, you start to learn the daily conversational aspects first and then your vocabulary grows when you can't quite find the right words, like what's Hungarian for "slacking off"

Code4Wyatt
1

October 10, 20187 yr

Your example is intentionally obscured because it's using encoding. Over time you'll be able to look at it and know it's Base64 encoding, but not necessarily what it contains. Knowing what it is, is usually enough.

You'll start to see patterns in what you learn, like knowing something is a function, an object, a built-in method, a variable, and it will become much easier to scan code. I had a couple of those moments when I was learning JS. When you see a dot, for example, you're dealing with an object. When you see someone's code with a dot in, you know you're just dealing with an object and nothing new or weird.

Most languages have standard libs with 100's of built-in methods, you don't need to know them all, you just need to know what the output should be, and where to start looking.