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Coding academies are nonsense

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Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#41

Post by nstart »

JDiculous wrote: post #36
captn3m0 wrote: post #2

While I agree with some of the premise of the article (you can't become a great developer in a few weeks), it tries almost too hard to scare people away from programming. >Would I like to type text files for hours a day? The bulk of my time is spent thinking, not typing. >Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker? Programming is a creative job that the author is trying to sound so mundane and boring. Yes,…

Programming by and large is NOT creative. As a software engineer, I don't understand where this idea comes from. Sure if you're coming up with cutting edge machine algorithms or coming up with the product features or designs that you're then going to implement, there might be a great deal of creativity involved. But most programmers are simply solving technical problems assigned to them by a product manager. There is…

> But most programmers are simply solving technical problems assigned to them by a product manager.

Solving technical problems is a creative process. No technical problem that I have ever come across requires the exact same solution for it. You have to think about how you want to express the solution to a given problem. How complex or verbose do you want it to be? Sure there are patterns, but what design patterns can you use to solve this? How do you modify a design pattern to really suit the given problem.

Programming IS a creative process. It's a process where you cannot ever document how something must be done in a step by step manner which is applicable in every given situation that the document refers to.

If one's job feels like a job dependent on rote, then that's an issue with the job. The software industry does not encourage creative process in many ways, and that holds true even for the design industry. It's why so many people break away to become independent designers or developers. It's why there are so many sites and comics dedicated to highlighting the absurdities of clients. The discipline of programming or design both require creativity. We are however surrounded by corporations and people that believes that developers and designers should be moved to a factory line type process whereby any creativity you can express is effectively reduced to nil.

I totally get this. My day to day programming at work doesn't get me feeling like I'm truly exercising my brains. It's mostly handling instructions handed down to me. But when I get home and fire up my editor. Ah. It feels like I've just donned a superhero's cape and I'm embarking on an adventure. A superhero who can look at a problem, and with some lines in a text file can hopefully connect with another person in making their life better.

If that isn't art, I don't know what it is.

PS - If someone wants to make a comic around superhero devs, do make a husband and wife one. "Dev Dave and Dev Dana: Adventures in 4D"

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#42

Post by gaius »

fsloth wrote: post #34
gaius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day I worked with a project manager who would edit a spec in Word and save it, not tell anyone she'd done it, then be angry the next day when she launched the software and it hadn't changed. Because that's how plain English programming works: magic elves.

That's an amazing lack of skills on so many levels.

She was probably paid double what I was too.

I had another colleague at a different job, a chemistry PhD so (on paper at least) a smart guy, but he genuinely could not get his head around the idea that software was something that was written. Software was something that was found and the skill was like the skill of being a gold prospector in the hills panning for that program that would do what you wanted.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#43

Post by ploxiln »

JDiculous wrote: post #36
captn3m0 wrote: post #2

While I agree with some of the premise of the article (you can't become a great developer in a few weeks), it tries almost too hard to scare people away from programming. >Would I like to type text files for hours a day? The bulk of my time is spent thinking, not typing. >Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker? Programming is a creative job that the author is trying to sound so mundane and boring. Yes,…

Programming by and large is NOT creative. As a software engineer, I don't understand where this idea comes from. Sure if you're coming up with cutting edge machine algorithms or coming up with the product features or designs that you're then going to implement, there might be a great deal of creativity involved. But most programmers are simply solving technical problems assigned to them by a product manager. There is…

You could add one more line of crappy code to work around another line of crappy code, when explicitly asked to by your product manager, but that's a pretty bad way to do it. Even if a lot of people out there are doing it to make a living.

It does take creativity to come up with a better way to arrange the code, to balance robustness, performance, and simplicity. Elegance (and even simplicity) is subjective. There are different styles that can work, but you kind of have to have good taste to end up with a good result. It's an art.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#44

Post by JDiculous »

rubenbos wrote: post #32
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…

It's true that the 'dream' has been here for ages, but I do think that automation might force us to rethink our job in the digital industry. I recently published an extensive article about the current state of these 'code machines', if developers might lose their job to them and what our options are. If you're interested, you can read it here: https://medium.com/design-and-develop/code-machines-29b066b6... Bottom lin…

Right. It's not that software engineers are going to go away, just that more and more cookie-cutter software will be buildable by less-technical people (eg. like what Wordpress has done for basic websites and what Unity has done for game development). Advances in NLP and A.I. will probably make code more English-like (eg. like SQL), or at the very least abstract away all the syntax quirks and other tedious low-level bullshit.

Most software engineers are constantly reinventing the wheel (even if they don't realize it because that wheel hasn't been open-sourced yet), and that is the work that will be automated away. But of course the cutting edge will always require programmers (like someone above me commented). But don't be surprised if programming looks a lot different in the future than it looks today.

I think software engineers tend to glorify the act of typing lines of code into a text editor. Code is simply a means to an end.

http://www.jbernier.com/the-future-of-development-less-code

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#45

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#46

Post by anotherhostname »

i really didn't like the arrogant tone and the misleading content of this article. the author discourages curious people and potential talents with uncertain future self replicating apps that will replace programmers (anyway, aren't this apps made of code as well?) and shows his huge-complicated-6M-lines-of-code to cut enthusiasm once for all, forgetting to describe a process that take years and involves loads of people to end up with so much code in a complex application.

if you want to programm pick something you would like to build and work hard. the author of this article did exactly the same, the difference is that he did it long before you.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#47

Post by gaius »

JDiculous wrote: post #36
captn3m0 wrote: post #2

While I agree with some of the premise of the article (you can't become a great developer in a few weeks), it tries almost too hard to scare people away from programming. >Would I like to type text files for hours a day? The bulk of my time is spent thinking, not typing. >Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker? Programming is a creative job that the author is trying to sound so mundane and boring. Yes,…

Programming by and large is NOT creative. As a software engineer, I don't understand where this idea comes from. Sure if you're coming up with cutting edge machine algorithms or coming up with the product features or designs that you're then going to implement, there might be a great deal of creativity involved. But most programmers are simply solving technical problems assigned to them by a product manager. There is…

Well, being creative by and large is NOT creative either. Take the musician who spends days practicing their scales or playing sheet music, for every minute of original composition they do.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#48

Post by scotty79 »

phpnode wrote: post #3

> Who needs to code when you can use visual building blocks or even plain English to describe intent? Stopped reading there, despite predictions this has not happened in the last 20 years and I see no evidence that it will happen in the next 20.

Like good enough voice recognition? The fact that we dreamed about computers and robots since first mechanical automatons, perhaps earlier and for many years we couldn't crack it doesn't mean that we haven't and we won't.

I think the author is wrong but not because we won't have visual building blocks and flexible language interfaces. Rather because event if you try to describe what you induction cooking plate does for you using visual building blocks and English language you still end up with pretty tangled mess that only real programmer could have patience for.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#49

Post by dudul »

I thought I would completely agree with this post (since I do believe that coding academies are indeed nonsense), but it's so full of stupid comments.

The author seems to not understand what coding is (despite his 15 years of experience as being repeated several time, as if to make it true maybe). Coding is not just building a stupid app, coding is not translating English into some weird language. The language of choice in programming is just a detail, anyone can learn a syntax in a couple days. The real challenge is in the understanding and the modeling of the problems, the design of the solution to have all the pieces fit together.

Re: Coding academies are nonsense

#50

Post by AlbertoGP »

asdfzxc wrote: post #5

Writer quotes Scratch and NLTK , as state-of-the-art tools which will take my coding jobs way... How afraid should I be?

:-) I know that's a rhetorical question, but I can say that I tried Scratch briefly on a Raspberry Pi and not the slightest worry about keeping my job ever crossed my mind, and that from using NLTK the following blog post is spot on: http://spacy.io/blog/dead-code-should-be-buried/

I've tried teaching programming to friends with STEM university degrees that were doing it as part of their jobs, and the results are in almost all cases dismal. Maybe I'm a bad teacher, but otherwise it seems that indeed a tiny percentage of the population has talent for (or maybe interest in?) programming.

More and more substandard code is and will be written; the more people writes code the more work there will be for me to clean the mess at consultancy rates. I'm not afraid at all of losing my job, and welcome any and all interested learners into programming.

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