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Learning to program is getting harder

allendowney.blogspot.com

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Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#41

Post by gameswithgo »

TimJYoung wrote: post #6

It's getting harder because it's become fashionable to shun IDEs that make most of these issues obsolete, and have done so since at least the 90's. It's ridiculous to expect newcomers to a language and/or programming in general to slog through a 20 or 30-step environment setup process. This idea that using an IDE will discourage someone from finding out the more detailed workings of the language, compiler, etc. is no…

> It's ridiculous to expect newcomers to a language and/or programming in general to slog through a 20 or 30-step environment setup process

Modern IDEs often require an hour long install, and then you turn them on and are faced with 10,000 buttons and 50 windows, they aren't simple either.

I have had good success with making beginners people sit through a 30 minute dev environment set up process, in video form. No complaints, everyone got it working, on linux, mac, and windows. I used VS Code + the Go language plugin. Once set up, you have a pretty simple IDE-like environment.

I do miss the days when every dos PC just shipped with QBasic, or when you could get a simple, quick loading IDE like TurboC++

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#42

Post by jonny_eh »

edmundhuber wrote: post #37

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 th…

> I think people have gotten lazier

My only response is this famous quote: "The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise"

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#43

Post by jonathankoren »

astrodust wrote: post #29
bitwize wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just some book, usually lots of books, from the fundamentals of BASIC to technical references with complete schematics for the entire machine. I had a Commodore VIC-20 and it certainly came with all these. And even then, experts and resources were available online, for suitably primitive values of "online". Think CompuServe. Another thing we had back then but less so today was magazines, full of programming and t…

The manual didn't tell you anything. The books didn't tell you anything. They scratched the surface, which if you knew nothing might have seemed profound, even mind-blowing, but if you were trying to do anything non-trivial you were left grasping for answers. I tried to build games on the C64 using BASIC and, while I had some success, the results were always limited by the fact that it was in BASIC, it was going to b…

Why didn't you just buy the Commodore Programmers Reference Guide[0]? It had an entire guide to C64 machine language, and circuit schematics. The book even tells you to buy the 64MON cartridge if you're serious about programming in assembly. This book wasn't rare. A friend of mine had it, we lived in the middle of nowhere. These programs and cartridges were not rare. I had multiple catalogs for buying these things as kid. The best programming books had code listings on page, and line by line explanations on the facing page.

[0] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commodore_64_Programmer%27s_Re...

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#44

Post by RawData »

I don't know...if you can't figure out how to install python on a local machine...maybe you don't have any business being a coder to begin with. I mean, come on...

edit: the downvotes from the delicate snowflakes crack me up...

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#46

Post by Lerc »

I seem to spend a lot of my time attacking this problem from one direction or another.

I'm currently writing a browser based editor/assembler/emulator for 8-bit AVR. I've made code-running MediaWiki plugins. I even got to the point where I made an entire client-side browser desktop environment.

At the same time as making tools to ease the entry cost, I'm also wary of making tools to conceal the complexity. Helper tools are beneficial, but once complexity is hidden it can grow unchecked. Being able to get a project set-up with ./configure or npm is great, but you have black-box that over time becomes more and more onerous to open up and have a peek.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#47

Post by edmundhuber »

jonny_eh wrote: post #42
edmundhuber wrote: post #37

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 th…

> I think people have gotten lazier My only response is this famous quote: "The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise"

Yeah, I realize how it sounds. Angry old man yells at cloud.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#48

Post by [deleted] »

sametmax wrote: post #39

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…

[deleted]

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#49

Post by mathgeek »

blackbagboys wrote: post #31
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 t…

> but just getting certain games to install and run on my parent's cheap Gateway PC would require a lot of fiddling around

Ah, that brings me back to memories of boot floppies in order to change the memory settings of the system.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#50

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

edmundhuber wrote: post #47
jonny_eh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people have gotten lazier My only response is this famous quote: "The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise"

Yeah, I realize how it sounds. Angry old man yells at cloud.

The quote you're responding to is also ~2,000 years old.
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