Learning to program is getting harder • Hacker News Board

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#331

Post by veddox » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

edmundhuber wrote: post #114

racl101 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As relatively young person I agree. Many people my age and/or younger expect quick results and don't really have the patience to see something through. But like with any other facet in life, if people take shortcuts they totally deprive themselves of vital experiences that are necessary for them in the long run if they want to experience any decent amount of success. Especially if they are wishing to learn something…

I'm not that old, 33, but I think I recognize that I wasted a lot of my youth being paralyzed by the thought of failing, when really it is the most successful people who start out by failing. A lot. It is important to get comfortable with failing, and to separate one's failure in trying something from the thought of personal failure. That is "I failed because I need to learn more," versus "I failed because I'm not go…

Excellent life lesson! Never mind coding, that is one of the most important things we can teach our teenagers. (Not to deride coding, but you know what I mean.)

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#332

Post by DanBC » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

dahart wrote: post #57

> Computer retailers stopped installing development environments by default This is true, but somewhat ignores web browsers. The big ones (Chrome, Firefox, IE & Safari) all have complete and high quality dev environments. The article is Python-centric, and so the best answer for that right now is: install Anaconda! Otherwise, the general argument being made here is solved by JavaScript at the moment. If you use JS to…

BASIC is easy to understand. Javascript is incomprehensible in comparison.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637866

    var drawing = document.createElement('canvas');
    document.body.appendChild(drawing);
    var ctx = drawing.getContext('2d');
    ctx.beginPath();
    ctx.moveTo(0, 0);
    ctx.lineTo(100, 100);
    ctx.stroke();

VS

    SCREEN 13
    LINE (X1, Y1) - (X2, Y2), COLOUR

I'm not claiming BASIC is a good language, or that it teaches good programming. But it is very easy to use.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#333

Post by veddox » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:45 AM UTC

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 don't think people per se have gotten lazier, but the fraction of the populace that wants to learn programming has increased. When the visibility of programming in society was small, the people who were attracted to it tended to bring along a very strong dedication to the task. As programming became more hip, more and more people were attracted to it, so the average level of determination sank...

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#334

Post by ZenoArrow » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

stinos wrote: post #319

stryk wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRQ conflicts! Holy mother of hell IRQ conflicts! particularly when dealing with those early gen Sound Blasters -- and trying to get that Roland MT32 you borrowed from the greasy weirdo in your big brother's band hooked up and pumping out that sweet, sweet midi

IRQ conflicts! Recently I had this surface, some RT kernel extension we use would display possible conflicts. Despite programming a lot these days, my background is electronic engineering, so I still have a rough idea of what an IRQ is and does even on the lowest level. However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer.

> "However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer."

Interrupt requests are easy to explain to even a novice computer user if you frame them in the context of something they're familiar with.

For example, when you press a key on your keyboard an interrupt request will be created to make sure the computer knows you've pressed the key. So in simplified terms, you could say when you press the "A" key on your keyboard, there is a part of the computer that says "pause what other things you're doing, respond to the "A" key press, then continue with what you were doing before".

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#335

Post by veddox » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

soniman wrote: post #311

I had this same problem as the OP describes and my solution after a lot of frustration was taking some tutorials on Linux from Youtube. That actually might not be a bad place to start because bash is a programming language (right?). Teaching some simple bash scripts plus navigating the file system wouldn't be the worst intro to programming and it can now be done in Windows.

Yes, bash technically is a programming language - but it's a pretty horrible one in terms of usability, and not the first that I would teach a newbie. Plus, you really don't need it unless your deep into sysadmin stuff.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#336

Post by shakna » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #307

shakna wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hello world has never been easier to do. We also used to have BASIC pre-installed on a lot of different systems, and were able to write a GUI just by writing to the frame buffer directly. A helloworld was just: 10 PRINT "Hello, World!" I learned to program in BASIC, with just the on-disk manuals. I can't say that it's easier today - I didn't need anything extra back then, and had a snake game up and running in…

Yeah but we only has BASIC. Want to do some real C++ GUI programming? That'll be £1000 for the compiler please.

Guessing you never had access to Turbo C++, which was originally released for US$50.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#337

Post by ozim » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 10:04 AM UTC

For me it looks like inverted survivorship bias. You won't hear from people that succeed so you don't have way to count them. People that nag or email author might be even in some special group of 'someone please make it work for me', I cannot imagine mailing author of a book. I do not believe that such group to be really big, maybe it just visible more than others. Like 'plz give codez' on StackOverflow.

Buying a book or reading blogpost does not entitle you to anything more, like wasting author time. Time is most valuable asset and he already spent it on writing book. If that book is crap you can rate it on Amazon or something but directly contacting author?

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#338

Post by ZenoArrow » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 10:06 AM UTC

incompatible wrote: post #201

northwest66 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I still use .htm as an extension name for HTML files, even though all modern OS' can support .html. I wonder how common that is.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#339

Post by kd5bjo » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 10:28 AM UTC

dan_mctree wrote: post #126

switchbak wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly I think I'm the first to disagree. I find a modern IDE comes with so much implied mental baggage that new users can get completely overwhelmed. Sure, languages which require complex build environments almost demand one, but in simpler environments it can be a lot easier to reduce the cognitive load in a simplified environment. One can do a lot of programming and learning with just a simple editor (Nano?)…

For me it's the opposite. A modern IDE is significantly easier to understand, with far less mental baggage than some hacked together combination of several CLI based tools. The mental drain of clicking some nice green play arrow on screen when you want to execute code is non-existent. The baggage of remembering which tool does what, what weird flag you have to keep adding to one of the commands you need, what keyboar…

CLI tools are all about codeveloping the build environment with the project. Instead of you trying to remember the weird flags, write a one-line shell script and save it with the project.

For example, my current side project is built on C+SQLite. The larger chunks of SQL are plain text files so that I don't have to worry about C string escaping. Instead of trying to read them at runtime, I have the build process wrap them in a .o file that gets linked into the executable.

This is relatively simple because it's just a slight variant on what's already happening (.sql files are "compiled" with objcopy instead of gcc), but I've utterly failed whenever I've tried to do something similar in an IDE-based project.

On the other hand, the standard build process is generic enough these days that most projects don't need to do this sort of customization. For those projects, being locked into the IDE's process isn't really a drawback and you may as well take advantage of the benefits it provides.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#340

Post by Flow » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 10:30 AM UTC

drxzcl wrote: post #312

arbie wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

himem.sys seemed like black-magic to me at the time.

It still does. I mean, it pokes the keyboard controller in order allow the processor to control an additional bus line to the memory controller. Then, thanks to 8086’s overlappping segmentation architecture, you can access 65519 additional bytes that were never intended to be there in the first place. There’s Cthulhu mythos that is more acc si le than that.

Wasn’t there himem on the 286 as well?