#rollinglikethunder

Heya! The answer to your question is... not entirely straightforward.

So before I started my first CS project, I didn't have any experience with coding anything. What I did have experience in was symbolic logic, which made understanding a lot of what the code is doing easier than I think it might otherwise have been. That said, I don't think it was much of an advantage or anything, and there was a lot of fumbling around on my end, too!

It can take a while to find your feet with it, and so much of it is trial and error. But it is absolutely, eminently learnable. It won't feel like it for the first while, and there might be some setbacks when you test the first several times as well haha. Where you think you've gotten something but quicktest tells you you haven't. I still make little errors all the time that the tests have to catch for me.

But it does get easier! I've gone from spending literal hours debugging in response to those tests to averaging under half an hour of testing and retesting before a chapter is ready to go. So you'll get there if you keep at it, I guarantee. :)

Also, this may or may not help you, but one of the ways I set up somewhat more complicated bits of code is by just doing the code first with a few placeholder words so I know what text goes there. It can be a lot easier to see how everything flows if you don't have to scroll up and down for ages to find things and can just track the way things move from one part to another before "filling in" the parts with your actual text.