Learning to program is getting harder • Hacker News Board

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#201

Post by incompatible » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:02 AM UTC

northwest66 wrote: post #158

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've never met a good programmer that wasn't (at least initially) self taught. Presumably they exist, but I've never met one. I do agree though, I find when I'm teaching my juniors I sometimes have to give a little history lesson as part of it (things like why 8.3 filenames).

I thought 8.3 filenames were obsolete, even on Windows? Do your juniors even have any idea what you are talking about?

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#202

Post by eropple » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:03 AM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #178

zerkten wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are trying to make some good points, but your language could have been clearer. If I'm understanding correctly you mean: 1. Treat Computer Science (CS) as a specific field, and don't dilute the curriculum with related items. 2. Introduce a course that covers these broader, non-CS items, and actually push it out beyond the audience of CS? Did I get that right? I think you might have meant the term "informa…

Better to stop trying to create programmers by teaching them a theoretical discipline like CS and to teach them software engineering instead?

Frankly, I think we would need to know what software engineering looks like, outside of the spaces where engineers (like, ones with PEs) more than developers own the project, before we start teaching it to novices.

I mean, I've been getting paid for this for going on fifteen years now and I'm not an engineer. I try to build resilient, reliable systems, I try to test heavily and comprehensively...but I'm not an engineer, and most of the time I'm worried when somebody calls themselves one.

What "software engineering" is, in the context of a web app or a point of sale system, rather hard to define. Worth taking a crack at. But we shouldn't put the cart before the horse.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#203

Post by adamnemecek » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:09 AM UTC

wrinkl3 wrote: post #164

NTDF9 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, they can traverse trees though! Isn't that what you need for the job?

That certainly is what you need to get past the interview.

That's the joke.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#204

Post by HankB99 » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:11 AM UTC

skookumchuck wrote: post #184

sevensor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why 8.3 filenames Why is that, exactly? I grew up in that era, I remember when floppies were actually floppy, and I've been well into computers ever since, but I don't believe I could tell you why. If I had to guess, I'd guess that FAT used a fixed number of bytes for each filename.

It was 6.3 before that. The PDP-10 system :-)

Didn't that include a ';' and version number too? (Or was that later - RSX-11M on a PDP 11/23)

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#205

Post by rbongers » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:13 AM UTC

There's a big green download button on github repository pages with an option to download the code as a zip file.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#206

Post by always_good » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:15 AM UTC

We like to think programming is hard and that there's a barrier to entry that we somehow surmounted because we're oh so smart.

But does anyone here actually know people who learned to program within the last couple years?

My co-founder's girlfriend taught herself enough Javascript and React to help out on our front-end in a couple months. Had no experience except for dabbling in Wordpress. Now closes issues for us.

My buddy learned enough Python to create a GUI for an old card game. Built it to completion enough to challenge himself against the computer player. Hasn't programmed since.

Neither of them had any experience before. These posts really underrate the resourcefulness and intelligence of beginners. And my suspicion is because we like to think it's hard.

People here act like installing Homebrew to download python3 is somehow hard for a beginner when there are hundreds of tutorials online telling them how to do it. Hundreds of tutorials are exactly what I didn't have when I started programming Basic even though the hello-world was a little simpler.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#207

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:17 AM UTC

aje403 wrote: post #187

aurelianito wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably both are correct. But which one is more useful in this context?

Why is a pothole round? Nope - sorry, looks like you're not a mythical unicorn!

The famous question is "why are manhole covers round?" Manholes being artificial, this leaves some room for speculation about why the shape was chosen.

"Why is a pothole round?" is a more objective question.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#208

Post by smt88 » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:19 AM UTC

always_good wrote: post #206

We like to think programming is hard and that there's a barrier to entry that we somehow surmounted because we're oh so smart. But does anyone here actually know people who learned to program within the last couple years? My co-founder's girlfriend taught herself enough Javascript and React to help out on our front-end in a couple months. Had no experience except for dabbling in Wordpress. Now closes issues for us. M…

I actually think programming is pretty easy. Programming well or in constrained environments is hard. It's easy to learn and hard to master.

I've been coding for 22 years, and each year I feel like I can look back to the year before and say, "Wow, I sucked at programming then."

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#209

Post by smt88 » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:21 AM UTC

conradk wrote: post #172

figgis wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really just sounds like issues with whatever web IDE you are using. Remote development does not need to be a huge pain like that.

I wasn't using a web IDE, but the dev server was remote. While I suppose remote environments do not have to be a huge pain, I'd be interested to know how to mitigate all of the issues I mentioned in my previous comment. The only solution I've been able to setup is a local environment with minimal set of dependencies calling the network.

I can't think of a reason a dev server should be remote instead of on your machine, unless you're working with large, live data sets that you can't download...

Can you explain the setup a bit more?

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#210

Post by zbentley » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

drenvuk wrote: post #35

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 fo…

> There are no downloads, there is no setup...

For a REPL/solving an algorithms problem? Sure. And the first time they want to use some code from StackOverflow that uses a library, god forbid, it's off to the races. Require? Script tag? Webpack? Transpile? Minify?

All of those things are important tools, but their use (and presumption of their use, a la "just import 'map' from underscore.js; you know the drill") is so widespread as to present a major stumbling block for first-time programming explorers.