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82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

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Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#111

Post by sweetbacon »

matte_black wrote: post #13
padthai wrote: post #6

What does it mean "oriented to old people"? Old people can play anything, they just have slower reflexes. Silver Snipers are 60-80 years old and play Counter Strike: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/20/16800924/silver-snipers-...

When I was a teenager playing Starcraft, I learned that one of the guys who regularly played with us was in his 50s. At the time it seemed weird anyone that old would be able to keep up in this game, or even know what it's about.

I find lots of players in Overwatch are surprised to find I'm 46 with an above average SR whenever it comes up. Though I typically don't snipe, I seem to still have some twitch reflexes left!

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#113

Post by Bekwnn »

kzrdude wrote: post #49
always_good wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder the same thing trying to learn a new language. I notice the biggest difference between me and a child is that children don't care about messing up. Meanwhile I often have this worthless apprehension of "better not practice Spanish on these Spanish speakers, I might mess up and feel stupid." I tried to learn Spanish like I learned how to program. Now I'm living proof that you can become good enough to read bo…

It's a different skill but I'm learning piano as an adult. I have a digital piano and headphones, and it's great — nobody like neighbors, roomates or people outside on the street hears so I can play around and learn without problem. We can't really do the same with languages, but it's interesting! I definitely feel how I tense up if I have to practice openly.

I'm currently doing something similar and wanted to give 3 pieces of advice to anyone wanting to do similar:

1. Don't buy a 2 or 3 octave keyboard like I did.

2. Synthesia is great. Guitar hero for a midi keyboard.

3. musictheory.net is a great interactive way to learn some basics.

My learning is mainly geared towards producing for games, so I thought I could get away with a 25 key keyboard, but I regret it a lot.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#114

Post by kazinator »

mehrdadn wrote: post #109
dahart wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd agree with the symptoms you guys are describing when it comes to my parents and grandparents, I don't think this is much of an age problem at all. The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions, and they're uncomfortable with text commands. They don't want to type 'man' or 'help', and they give up very quickly. Everything they…

> The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions Uhm, the issue here is squarely on Bash's end, not your kid's. Even the Windows command prompt is far more intuitive to learn. I know because I vividly remember how much more confused I got when learning the former. In Windows, when you type "help", it actually gives you helpful commands: COPY…

Only problem is, those commands are useless. COPY won't back up a directory tree. You need XCOPY. Oops, XCOPY chokes for weird reasons and terminates with a strange error message because a path was more than 255 bytes. It needs a bazillion options to do the equivalent of GNU's "cp -a". If you go online to get help with this, the best advice you get is to download and install something called RoboCopy.

Yes, MS-DOS was easy to learn. XCOPY worked in MS-DOS.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#115

Post by emodendroket »

supreme_sublime wrote: post #107
Ancalagon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer myself, I'd say one of the harder aspects of my job is using all the freaking GUIs and interfaces presented to me. Granted, I wouldn't consider many of these interfaces to even be considered "good" by most standards, but so many designs are unintuitive I really think thats the root of the problem.

It is tough because there definitely are people who are very nervous about trying things on a computer. We just had a lady today worried about using a Mac as she is used to Windows. It is a slightly different paradigm in terms of finding programs and I remember being a bit lost at first. But I also have confidence with computers and am okay with trying things and searching for how to do things. If you lack that basic…

Yeah, but I can understand this mindset. Like, I think about home maintenance. Some screw-ups are no big deal and some of them I'm going to do a lot of damage and need help fixing it. I'm not exactly gung-ho about knocking walls down with a sledge hammer without knowing what I'm doing.

Now, you might answer that you can't really break anything that badly with software, but I'd say that's not right. I could delete documents I needed with no way to recover them, or end up with ransomware, or end up putting my credit card number somewhere I shouldn't have, or whatever, and I'll likely be bewildered and unsure what happened, if I don't know anything about computers.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#116

Post by kazinator »

dahart wrote: post #23
always_good wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder the same thing trying to learn a new language. I notice the biggest difference between me and a child is that children don't care about messing up. Meanwhile I often have this worthless apprehension of "better not practice Spanish on these Spanish speakers, I might mess up and feel stupid." I tried to learn Spanish like I learned how to program. Now I'm living proof that you can become good enough to read bo…

I suspect adults learn languages a lot faster than kids, when we spend the same amount of time being exposed & practicing. All the polyglots say you have to be willing to mess up a lot and work to shed your fear of feeling stupid. In fact, try to seek it out because that's the primary way you get feedback & learn.

You cannot spend the same amount of time, because a little kid basically has 60 hours in a day.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#117

Post by rdiddly »

jdietrich wrote: post #43
bazooka_penguin wrote: post #4

I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude. I generally find kids more eager to jump into new things, while adults are more stubborn and complacent towards new experiences. Once you have money or kids it's a lot easier to just have someone else do it for you. Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat, and she's found m…

I think that openness and confidence are major factors. Having taught older adults to use computers, one of the major difficulties is getting them past the fear that they might "break" the computer and the need to memorise rote instructions rather than experiment with the interface. The body language is quite distinctive - tentatively pressing keys with an outstretched index finger as if the keyboard might jump up an…

The part about memorizing rote steps is roughly what you would expect from any kind of beginner in any field or skill set. But the part about being all tentative seems like a difference between a beginner who is older and one who is a little kid. The old person has spent a lifetime learning that rash actions can have bad consequences, while the kid hasn't yet. In other words the kid doesn't know or care about breaking the computer, and so probably learns faster as a result. (Good thing it's hard to break the computer and the consequences are usually nil. Wouldn't necessarily recommend the same approach for something like base-jumping or neurosurgery.)

I wonder how much it would help these people if you framed it more as an interaction with a person. Which it is. For example, telling them things like "OK so the programmer who wrote this told the computer to grab that bit you just typed, and display it for you over here [point, point] for your reference." In other words I wonder whether knowing a little about what's going on inside the thing, and the fact that it was just some silly ordinary dufus that wrote the software, helps a person like that be a better end-user.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#118

Post by dahart »

mehrdadn wrote: post #109
dahart wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd agree with the symptoms you guys are describing when it comes to my parents and grandparents, I don't think this is much of an age problem at all. The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions, and they're uncomfortable with text commands. They don't want to type 'man' or 'help', and they give up very quickly. Everything they…

> The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions Uhm, the issue here is squarely on Bash's end, not your kid's. Even the Windows command prompt is far more intuitive to learn. I know because I vividly remember how much more confused I got when learning the former. In Windows, when you type "help", it actually gives you helpful commands: COPY…

Fully agree with the crapiness of learning Bash 100%. Bash is very hard to learn compared to, say, the OS UI in Android or Nintendo Switch.

But, my point is that my kids lose all their confidence and all their patience, and they become tentative and fearful. They show all the same symptoms that were mis-attributed to age in the above comments.

On a game console, my kids are not afraid to explore every menu and push every button. In a text interface, they are lost and they don't try things. They seem to learn slowly and they don't seem to listen to instruction because of how different text UIs are from the GUIs they know. When I get a new text interface, I know all kinds of things to try, and I do so without much fear.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#119

Post by Splines »

mehrdadn wrote: post #109
dahart wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd agree with the symptoms you guys are describing when it comes to my parents and grandparents, I don't think this is much of an age problem at all. The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions, and they're uncomfortable with text commands. They don't want to type 'man' or 'help', and they give up very quickly. Everything they…

> The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions Uhm, the issue here is squarely on Bash's end, not your kid's. Even the Windows command prompt is far more intuitive to learn. I know because I vividly remember how much more confused I got when learning the former. In Windows, when you type "help", it actually gives you helpful commands: COPY…

> In Windows, when you type "help", it actually gives you helpful commands: COPY, MOVE, DEL, REN/RENAME, etc. and at least the basic commands are actually what you'd expect. At least you have a foothold somewhere that you can ground yourself, and you start learning a bit more every time.

Yes, this. I recall back in the MS-DOS days that I frequently used a text-GUI help menu that showed all the commands you could do and what each one did.

Personally, this is what I struggle with on *nix shells - I can do the very basics but there's little guidance showing you a broad overview of what is possible. Granted, the world is bigger now but if you asked me how to do a random task I'd probably google it first instead of reading a man page.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#120

Post by supreme_sublime »

emodendroket wrote: post #115
supreme_sublime wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is tough because there definitely are people who are very nervous about trying things on a computer. We just had a lady today worried about using a Mac as she is used to Windows. It is a slightly different paradigm in terms of finding programs and I remember being a bit lost at first. But I also have confidence with computers and am okay with trying things and searching for how to do things. If you lack that basic…

Yeah, but I can understand this mindset. Like, I think about home maintenance. Some screw-ups are no big deal and some of them I'm going to do a lot of damage and need help fixing it. I'm not exactly gung-ho about knocking walls down with a sledge hammer without knowing what I'm doing. Now, you might answer that you can't really break anything that badly with software, but I'd say that's not right. I could delete doc…

That's true, it is just difficult to know what level of expertise your users are at and what responsibility do you have to educate them?
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