Hit 1000 lines of code before my first app even compiled

I started learning Python about 8 weeks ago, just following some free YouTube tutorials. Last Tuesday I finally sat down to build my own little calculator app from scratch. By the time I got it to actually run without error, I had written 1,043 lines of code. That number blew my mind because I thought a simple calculator would be like 50 lines. The thing is, most of those lines were just me fixing mistakes and learning why things break. It made me realize that counting lines or milestones isn't the point, the process of breaking and fixing is where the real learning happens. Has anyone else hit a specific number that totally surprised them when they were starting out?

2 comments

2 Comments

linda3051mo ago

Man, that number is wild for a calculator app but I totally get it. I remember spending a whole weekend trying to get a simple "hello world" webpage to show up right and ended up with like 300 lines of HTML and CSS because I didn't know how to structure anything. Sometimes you just gotta burn through the clutter to figure out what actually matters.

aaronlee1mo ago

Found that the trick for me was just getting something ugly working first, then cleaning it up piece by piece. Half the time I realized half the code was from trying to solve problems I didn't even have yet.