Functions are the sentences of coding

Statements and functions are your tools, just as words are the tool of the author. Learn to wield them well.

Imagine your favorite authors, and the work they have done. Maybe they wrote some novels, poems, essays, plays, or other works that you enjoyed. And before that, they likely wrote and published many other works - long and short. They probably wrote many more drafts and studies that were never even published.

What do all of these works have in common? Sentences. Almost all writing is built on sentences, and paragraphs. Or similar ways of grouping words into meaningful units. Your favorite writers got good at writing by writing thousands - likely tens of thousands - of sentences. Hundreds of thousands of words. Thousands of paragraphs.

They likely studied quite a bit about the art of writing. They probably read tens of thousands of pages as well. But most importantly they wrote. A lot. So many sentences. There is simply no substitute for writing down words. Wrestling with craft and meaning. Editing, rewriting. Learning how to tell a good story, with words, sentences, and paragraphs.

The art of software engineering is no different. You can watch videos, read books, read code, and more. You can vibe code until you run out of credits (or patience). All of those things have value, in their own ways.

You will not truly understand software, however, until you have written code. A lot of code. Thousands of statements, functions, classes, modules. Until you have wrestled with combining them, untangling them, and recombining them. Debugging them. Breaking and fixing them. Testing them. Forgetting them and rediscovering them again.

If you want to understand software, write more code. Any code. By hand - with keyboard or even with paper at time. Wrestle with the raw materials of your craft.