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Learning to program is getting harder

allendowney.blogspot.com

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Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#31

Post by blackbagboys »

socialist_coder wrote: post #2

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling. Younger programmers seem to comm…

I agree with your observation, but I don't agree with your diagnosis of the cause. I think it's mostly down to the increasing abstraction and ease of using software. When I was a kid, I wouldn't have described "computing" as a hobby, but just getting certain games to install and run on my parent's cheap Gateway PC would require a lot of fiddling around. My younger siblings have no more or less interest in computing than I did, but if they want to play a game they can seamlessly download and run it from Steam or the app store.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#32

Post by frankc »

There is a certain amount of systems administration knowledge you need to have if you are going to be an effective programmer. No, you don't need to be a sysadmin, but but source code doesn't live in a vacuum. I vote for face the pain.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#33

Post by sametmax »

gricardo99 wrote: post #12
socialist_coder wrote: post #2

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling. Younger programmers seem to comm…

I have not seen any age-correlation in what you describe. For sure there are "career" programmers who don't know much about computers beyond their narrow scope of expertise. You're admittedly obsessed with computers, which presumably means you spend a lot of your free timing tinkering and learning. You've picked up a lot of very useful knowledge, but surely there's room in a profession for those who are not obsessed…

Yes but computing is a very young field.

It's not like architecture or cooking.

Everything sucks. Most stuff breaks, are buggy, badly documented and poorly explained. Things gets obsolete fast.

If you are "just a programmer", you will be half productive and very dependent on others.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#35

Post by drenvuk »

This is why I recommend people learn how to program using javascript at first. There are no downloads, there is no setup and given some simple instructions you can mess around with fully formed pages just by typing into the console what you want to do. The modern browser has all the tools for a programming course that takes place almost entirely in the console.

I lean more towards the python/C++ side of things but for just diving in and seeing something cool for quick, colorful motivation to learn, javascript fills that need better than anything else.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#36

Post by bomb199 »

amasad wrote: post #14

To add to this, one other way programming is getting harder is that there is no incremental path to becoming a developer. In the past, you could easily become a programmer by accident. You wanted to edit your MySpace page, google around, learn some HTML and do it. You wanted to mod a game, you started messing around with the game, download other mods, and change them. I think this incrementally is gone in two ways. O…

I guess it depends on what you mean by "become a developer".

I think a lot of the increased difficulty is the skill of developers. At one point, knowing how to edit HTML would get you an interview. Now, I feel like I might need a successful Python library so I can get an interview...

Not sure if it's a bad thing or not, since the art is just becoming better.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#37

Post by edmundhuber »

I don't understand this viewpoint at all. There's a breathtaking amount of tutorials, Q/A (stackoverflow), forums, chats, that can get someone started with a fraction of the effort it took for me to learn programming 20 years ago. There are one-click installers for programming languages and for IDEs. There are entire free books online to learn specific languages or frameworks.

I think people have gotten lazier and they expect to be taught, rather than seeking out materials. Or perhaps the people wishing to learn, are not as interested in programming as they think they are.

That being said, yes, learning "cloud" is an enormous sink of time that requires some exposure to lots of different silos of information. Doesn't that make sense though? It's a complicated subject.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#39

Post by sametmax »

I disagree.

Creating a program that meets todays' users expectations is what's harder.

But learning programming by itself, is way easier.

We have Python, Ruby, Javascript... We have the Web as a platform and as documentation. We have communities and cheap, fast computers.

The hello world has never been easier to do.

What's hard is to make a real time offline first SPA with a beautiful responsive design that uses the same API backend as the mobile app while integrating with third party Saas and leveraging social medias.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#40

Post by xbryanx »

socialist_coder wrote: post #2

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling. Younger programmers seem to comm…

I think another big culprit in this situation is the IT department. I visited a research university recently in a computer science related field. The IT department wouldn't allow even graduate students and researchers to have admin access on their machines. Even if the programmers could debug basic issues, they often had to go track down and IT staff member to install some library or program for them. If this is happening at the computer research level it's happening even more in non-tech company business environments. How do we expect staff at non-tech companies to experiment with new skills in programming if they can't even use their computers at their full potential?
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