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Coding academies are nonsense

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Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#21

Post by andretti1977 »

I agree with the premise you won't be a great programmer in week or even months. This is a truth for any skill, job, passion.

I think there is a common wrong way of considering programming among non-programmers: customers and people thinks programming is easy, extremely easy but the truth is the opposite. Just try to think how much time does it require to build a simple mobile app or a webapp and how many different knowledges you have to master to do that (front vs server programming languages and frameworks, persistence technologies, deploy tools and so on). And i'm not talking about the complexity of an "enterprise application".

I think this common and misleading sense of easiness is due to the fact that people thinks that you have a lot of work already done thanks to all those opensource libraries, thanks to the ready-to-go tools like wordpress, thanks to all those beautiful and simple programming languages that every child can learn...come on, there is always an easy "build a twitter like app tutorial" so it obviously can't be that complicated thing :D

The truth is that like any other job, you must love programming to do it very well, because programming requires a lot of thinking, designing, studying, patience and perseverance and all these skills are not for everybody.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#22

Post by eru »

trub wrote: post #6

putting 10g's down that the author isn't a developer

What odds are you offering? And do you mean `can't program' or `is not a professional developer'?

(And where do we draw the line. Is FizzBuzz enough?)

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#23

Post by apitaru »

The author neglects to mention the wonderful feeling of having your code successfully compile and come to life. For some it is a special kind of high that makes all the 'construction work' worth while.

There's also no mention of the thrill of the hunt for the right abstractions - which can be both intellectually and emotionally stimulating.

The less these two factors come into play, the less motivated one would be to sit in front of a computer and click those keys all day long.

If you're set on finding out, and if you require the structure that an academy provides, and you understand the financial implicatios, then don't let this article dissuade you from trying.

Discslaimer: I'm co-founder of http://kitchentablecoders.com and http://sfpc.io

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#24

Post by RyanZAG »

vegabook wrote: post #11
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true. The idea of visual programming has been around forever and there is nothing wrong with it inherently. It certainly hasn't quite delivered as expected. But even established visual programming environments (e.g. LabView) are a skill itself now.

While I agree with you on visual programming, I think another issue raises itself: we are used to linear text editors - write one line after another - because they fit the way the computer works. Even breaking code down hierarchically as we do (functions, modules) still breaks a linear process into many linear processes. Yet increasingly as problems become more asynchronous / parallel, I sometimes wish for a more sop…

Not sure about this. If we're writing a scientific study with nothing to do with computers, we still use the standard "write one line after another" to describe the processes and methods we use. Sequential lists and trees may be a natural property of our reality in the same way gravity is?

As you say, when problems become more complex it becomes more difficult to reason about when dealing with a linear flow. But as with writing a report, the key is in the layout. The solution to a problem like that may be simply defining your abstractions better in your code so that each logical block is contained and understandable -- the same as with a section in a report.

Basically it's the age-old programming logic: instead of having large chunks of code where you have to reason through complex logic, create abstractions so that the complex flow is defined in an obvious way. There will still be complex pieces, but they can be pushed to leaf nodes in other classes/files and can be backed by formal algorithms with logical proofs.

So, well, standard best practices from the 1960s and still standard best practices today. Why? Because it seems to fit with the laws of reality.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#25

Post by j1z0 »

this is an extremely self serving article given that the author sells a tool (for $29/ month no less) that writes the code for you. Wonder why he doesn't like code academy's. There is some truth to the fact that a lot of people don't make it through code academy, but I would take this article with a grain of salt.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#26

Post by marvel_boy »

apitaru wrote: post #23

The author neglects to mention the wonderful feeling of having your code successfully compile and come to life. For some it is a special kind of high that makes all the 'construction work' worth while. There's also no mention of the thrill of the hunt for the right abstractions - which can be both intellectually and emotionally stimulating. The less these two factors come into play, the less motivated one would be to…

I worked in a programming bootcamp and I can tell you that is a complete scam. Yes, everybody knows the wonderful feeling of having your code.... but this is related with a marketing scam where students pay thousands of dollars for nothing.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#28

Post by lordnacho »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #9
slavik81 wrote: post #4

> Visual content creation tools such as Scratch, DWNLD and Telerik will continue to improve until all functionality required to build apps is available to consumers — without having to write a line of code. > Who needs to code when you can use visual building blocks or even plain English to describe intent? Advances in natural-language processing and conceptual modeling will remove the need for traditional coding fro…

This is very true. The idea of visual programming has been around forever and there is nothing wrong with it inherently. It certainly hasn't quite delivered as expected. But even established visual programming environments (e.g. LabView) are a skill itself now.

The closest I've come to visual programming is various UI designers and a couple of DB designers. They work OK up to a point, but as soon as you're doing something complicated you have a mass of arrows crisscrossing the surface.

I think the problem is a visual designer is only a reasonable organising principle for 2D problems. You can get a nice global view.

As soon as you need more dimensions, you might as well use something where the connections are only locally visible. By that I mean eg in a complex codebase, you can only see a few incoming/outgoing connections depending on where you're looking. A codebase can be arbitrarily complex, so chances are on any problem that isn't quite small, you aren't going to be able to represent it nicely in 2D.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#29

Post by vegabook »

RyanZAG wrote: post #24
vegabook wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you on visual programming, I think another issue raises itself: we are used to linear text editors - write one line after another - because they fit the way the computer works. Even breaking code down hierarchically as we do (functions, modules) still breaks a linear process into many linear processes. Yet increasingly as problems become more asynchronous / parallel, I sometimes wish for a more sop…

Not sure about this. If we're writing a scientific study with nothing to do with computers, we still use the standard "write one line after another" to describe the processes and methods we use. Sequential lists and trees may be a natural property of our reality in the same way gravity is? As you say, when problems become more complex it becomes more difficult to reason about when dealing with a linear flow. But as w…

have to say - am not sure about it either! I'm simply intrigued by the question, namely, why do we still use linear tools for multidimensional problems? I think you have posited an excellent answer in that it's basically intrinsic to how we think and manage complexity, not only in CS.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#30

Post by apitaru »

marvel_boy wrote: post #26
apitaru wrote: post #23

The author neglects to mention the wonderful feeling of having your code successfully compile and come to life. For some it is a special kind of high that makes all the 'construction work' worth while. There's also no mention of the thrill of the hunt for the right abstractions - which can be both intellectually and emotionally stimulating. The less these two factors come into play, the less motivated one would be to…

I worked in a programming bootcamp and I can tell you that is a complete scam. Yes, everybody knows the wonderful feeling of having your code.... but this is related with a marketing scam where students pay thousands of dollars for nothing.

Yes, as in any field I'm sure there are scammers out there, or even just poorly conceived programs. So maybe what we need is a review site for these academies.
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