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Learning to program is getting harder

allendowney.blogspot.com

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Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#361

Post by Retric »

exDM69 wrote: post #310
Retric wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see zero connections between having computer administration skills and fixing those problems. Knowing how to install and troubleshoot software would be a waste of their time. Programming on the other hand would take a significant commitment to be useful. Sure having say ~1% of doctors go down that path might be useful but for the other ~95% it would be a horrible waste of time and cost literally hundreds of billion…

If there were doctors and nurses who have basic computer literacy and entry level coding skills taking part in the acquisition and development process of the IT systems they use, I bet they wouldn't suck as much as they do. Most specialized software systems, e.g. those that are used in hospitals or selling you train tickets, are developed by people who don't have a faintest idea how the software is used daily. This e…

Yea, even basic programming is not part of basic computer literacy. You are looking a very different and expencive in terms of time to acquire sill set.

Worse, Doctors are often not part of these decisions in the first place. Further there are plenty of doctors with these skills however they don't work for cheap and most of this software is build by people that are paid as little as possible. Remember their workflow is not actually complicated, it's just not helpful when selling this software.

Really, this software is not terrible because it's hard to make, it's terrible because of how it's sold and maintained.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#362

Post by [deleted] »

cheschire wrote: post #292
PeterStuer wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(btw, I'll use 'older' and 'younger' as a sort of statistical reference, not implying a strict age separation exists and all on either side are clones of a prototype) I recognize this. My 'younger' colleagues can't install a computer from scratch, a get completely stuck on the slightest network issue. But I don't thin it is related to education. The 'older' programmer had to squire these skills by necessity as it was…

The youngest guy on my team refuses to reinstall his development environment like the rest of us when new major platform changes occur. Then every few months complains when his environment causes an error in the build.

[deleted]

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#363

Post by kbwt »

root_axis wrote: post #192
gameswithgo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have Python, Ruby, Javascript... We have the Web as a platform Can you explain how any of those things makes learning programming easier?

They are easier to get started with for several reasons. 1. Automatic GC means new programmers don't have to understand memory management or concepts like pointers up front. 2. Dynamic typing does not demand type declarations or throw type errors so it lets new programmers get up and moving quickly without having to appreciate the purpose and benefits of a type system. 3. No compiling means faster builds so newbies b…

But then we're not comparing the same thing. If you were trying to learn manual memory management, type declarations, linkers, cross-compilation and packaging in 2018, would that really be any easier than in 1998?

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#364

Post by nickjj »

As someone who makes developer courses / training material I think it's a really bad idea to use online services like PythonAnywhere or Cloud9IDE.

It's really important to learn how to set up your own development environment as a developer and if you're making this content, I believe it's our responsibility as teachers to show people how to do this.

Personally I use Docker in my courses (because it's what I use for my own stuff) and it's been a smashing success. I do get occasional people questioning "why" but after I explain what the process would be like to set up a proper Python dev environment without Docker they immediately see the wins.

Of course I do get Docker related installation questions but it's a small percent compared to questions on the course content. One of my courses is building real world web apps with Flask and it's probably 80% Flask / 20% Docker related questions.

That's much better than punting a local development environment off to a third party service / pre-built VM and then leaving people stuck in the dark for getting anything done on their own.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#365

Post by CJefferson »

narrator wrote: post #103
blackbagboys wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Programming is not harder than it used to be. For example, I was programming Macs in the pre-Internet era which meant lots of thick books. If you got stuck there was nobody who was going to help out and you just had to puzzle it out vs the example in one of the few how-to books like the famous Mac Programming Primer. Also, there was little open source, so you couldn't read the library source to figure out how things…

On the other hand, nowadays if you think (for example) for web development you need Babel and webpack and npm modules and vue.js, it's easy to give up before you even get to hello world.

Now of course you don't need that to do hello world, but a beginner doesn't know that!

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#366

Post by gutnor »

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…

Well, that's an effect of experience. You don't just become a better programmer with experience, you become better at software development. Better handling stress, better understanding requirement, gathering requierment, better navigating political corporate structure, better explaining yourself, better defending yourself, ... and yes, better getting your environment sorted.

That said, the specific point you raised is interesting because I was having the same problem at work. Except it was caused by automation. We have automated pipeline for everything, zero downtime deployment, containers, ... all of that is working very well - so well that there is just no enough big stuff to do so that newcomer on the project can build enough experience with the pipeline to master it. The best people achieve is some sort of very rudimentary debugging capability, earned from the monthly minor tweak the system require. Basically either you build similar pipeline on another project, something that is extremely unfrequent, or you missed the train.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#367

Post by prawks »

nickjj wrote: post #364

As someone who makes developer courses / training material I think it's a really bad idea to use online services like PythonAnywhere or Cloud9IDE. It's really important to learn how to set up your own development environment as a developer and if you're making this content, I believe it's our responsibility as teachers to show people how to do this. Personally I use Docker in my courses (because it's what I use for m…

I think I'm in the group that doesn't immediately see the obvious gain of teaching in a Docker container vs. teaching how to install pyenv/virtualenv.

Is it mainly cutting out troubleshooting differences between host OS's while also getting isolated python environments?

Maybe I do see the win there, after all?

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#368

Post by SZJX »

Isn't what he said the natural consequence of technology being available to a wider and wider segment of the public, reaching ubiquity? This is to be expected when what was originally something only known in a small circle is now having to be used by essentially everybody then. One thing that can definitely help is to incorporate programming as mandatory into national/state school curricula as soon as possible. Programming literacy could become something like writing literacy, though of course we're not quite there, yet.

Everybody having a solid grasp on programming principles would also protect the democratic society in the sense that people would have an idea on how the software they're using daily actually work, what is being done to their data, etc. Leaving such a fundamental fabric of the society in the hands of few is self-evidently dangerous.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#369

Post by Nullabillity »

analog31 wrote: post #264
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 this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. You have people that want to be programmers but don't include "computing" as one of their hobbies. It may be the result of the competitiveness of the education system. Everything is more competitive. As I understand things, CS is the hottest undergraduate major right now. You can't just sign up because you learned to program in high school a…

> It may be the result of the competitiveness of the education system. Everything is more competitive. As I understand things, CS is the hottest undergraduate major right now.

Hardly. Looking at the Swedish admissions statistics[1] from this year (because that's what I'm familiar with):

- Of the top 5 programmes, 3 were for physicians (doctors), with the required GPA ranging 22.09-22.29

- The hardest engineering programme to get into was no. 8, technical physics, requiring 21.98

- The hardest computer-related programme to get into was no. 56, software engineering, requiring 20.73

That said, it was above 20.0 (straight As), so the requirements do seem to have increased in the last few years

[1]: https://statistik.uhr.se/uhr.html, to see applications to programmes based on high school GPAs you'll want to pick "Bara program", "Urval 1", and then set "Visa urvalsgrupp" to "BI". You'll want to sort by "Antagningspoäng".

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#370

Post by kbwt »

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…

> forums

Every single forum I frequented "back in the days" (ca. 2004, vBulletin-style) is gone. These were forums that hosted intense/focused technical discussions, in a way that just doesn't seem to exist anymore, with very few exceptions. At least I cannot find anything comparable. Today, there is just Reddit/HN and everything else is mostly commercialized and/or dumbed-down content. Don't even get me started on "educational" youtube videos.

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