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Instructor at my night class in Cicero marked up my whole loop and the note said "too many things at once"
I'd been messing with Python for about 3 months on my own before I signed up for a cheap night class at the community college over in Cicero, and I was pretty proud of this little script that read a text file, cleaned it up, counted the words, and then spit out the top 10. Felt like a real programmer. Then the instructor handed it back with red pen all over it and one line at the bottom that just said "too many things at once, break it up." Honestly I was kind of annoyed at first, like what does that even mean, it works fine. But she sat with me for 10 minutes after class and showed me how she'd pull each step into its own small function that does one job, and suddenly the whole thing read like a list of instructions instead of a wall of code I couldn't follow two days later. I went home that night and rewrote the whole thing into 4 little functions and cut out maybe a third of the lines because I wasn't repeating myself everywhere. What got me was coming back to it a couple weeks later and actually understanding what I wrote, which had never happened before. So now when something feels done I go back and ask if it's doing too much in one place. For the folks further along than me, when did splitting stuff up start feeling natural instead of like extra typing?
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