I have been programming a long time, and even now I often feel getting the environment set up to start something than just writing the actual code to solve the problem.
Compiler versions, dependency injection configuration files (why yes, I am a Java developer, how did you guess?), build systems, source control, dependency management, library incompatibilities, setting up a test environment, setting up and configuring databases and web servers, etc.
Maybe I don't actually spend as much time on these things as it feels like I do, but I do know futzing with this stuff when you just want to write real code to solve real problems is soul sucking and demoralizing.
So I definitely relate to the hard part of programming, beginner or not, as just getting to the point where you can actually write some code and see what it does.
Compiler versions, dependency injection configuration files (why yes, I am a Java developer, how did you guess?), build systems, source control, dependency management, library incompatibilities, setting up a test environment, setting up and configuring databases and web servers, etc.
Maybe I don't actually spend as much time on these things as it feels like I do, but I do know futzing with this stuff when you just want to write real code to solve real problems is soul sucking and demoralizing.
So I definitely relate to the hard part of programming, beginner or not, as just getting to the point where you can actually write some code and see what it does.