foreword

I like to make my own bread. I make it more frequently, and more reliably, when I use my stand mixer to knead the dough compared to kneading it by hand. Maybe you’d say that’s lazy. I’d say it makes me more productive and more likely to actually make the bread. Maybe you have something that makes your life easier by taking over a tedious task, leaving you free to focus on more important or interesting things. Do you have a car that supports you in parallel parking? I recall when Gmail added spell and grammar checks in languages other than English. My husband’s German relatives were so excited that he was writing them longer emails—because the effort of remembering little-used German language specifics went away and allowed him to spend more time on the content!

Sadly, until recently, when learning programming, you had no equivalent of a stand mixer or grammar check to support you. And there are lots of tedious things to learn and remember when you start programming.