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Is learning to program inherently hard?

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Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#61

Post by robryan »

kiba wrote: post #10
cletus wrote: post #9

Programming is like most things in life: hard if you have no affinity for it, much easier (but not necessarily easy) if you do. I see programming to have a lot of parallels with being a combination mechanic and automotive engineer. A mechanic fixes cars, diagnoses problems, tunes a car and so on. It's really a lot like (code) reading, testing, debugging and maintenance--all key programming skills. An automotive engin…

What is affinity? I just learned programming just like how I learn the artistic craft: Through sheer practice. (Now, ironically, I actually make more money doing my lesser skill in art than I do in programming)

I think practice and patience can overcome the affinity issue. I think what stops most of the population from programming is zero interest or a low tolerance to getting frustrated and quitting.

At the same time though I do think there is a class of people for which programming comes very naturally.

Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#62

Post by Dn_Ab »

gruseom wrote: post #60
Dn_Ab wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am new here and so do not understand the intricacies of this community. Is there anything particularly offensive or especially stupid about my comment? I tried to be careful but perhaps I failed and so would appreciate any insight for further edification.

Don't worry about it. Your comment was fine. People sometimes downvote for idiosyncratic reasons but someone else usually comes along and neutralizes that (as I just did). The main thing is to keep the discussion on-topic and not go meta. You make an excellent point: the difficulty of programming is not only that of instructing the computer but also that of the problem the program is to solve. I agree. (As an aside,…

Thanks, that was helpful. I'll have to take on that course as I do need to work on communicating clearly. The unedited stream of thought thing does a good job of hiding what I am trying to say. counter-productive.

Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#63

Post by alanfalcon »

chopsueyar wrote: post #37
aridiculous wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive the pedantry, but riding a unicycle is not difficult even if you have bad motor coordination. I'm fairly janky in terms of my motor skills and learned to unicycle in a week or two. It consists of hacks, concepts, and fundamentals just like most seemingly complex tasks.

But what if you don't have legs?

Then you have an advantage!

http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/11/aimee_mullins_12/

Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#64

Post by inovica »

klbarry wrote: post #41
inovica wrote: post #12

As a 'business' guy, I taught myself to program so that I could communicate effectively with my team. It was damned hard - partly because I was doing it on an evening and (if I'm honest) I wasn't that interested in it... at first. The more I learned though, the more that I understood that its about solving problems and as soon as my brain understood that it was a challenge it became more fun. I will admit that I am s…

I've thought about this for a while. Where did you start, and what languages are best for this kind of toe-dipping? Also, what kind of time investment did you have to put in?

Well, I've been in business a while, so the first language I learned was called Cold Fusion (I think now owned by Adobe). I then tried learning PHP, but there was some kind of mental barrier there unfortunately for me, though I think I'd be OK with it these days. I then moved to Python which I've found to be a great language. There are a lot of free online books out there. In terms of investment in time, I just started off doing an hour a day. As I did not have anything specific to do, with any timeframe, this worked well for me and did not impact on the day-to-day activities. I will say though that you need to set yourself a challenge fairly quickly as this is the only real way to solidify the theory in your mind. The first one for me was a small crawler to screen scrape some data from a site, put it into a database and search it. One of my team could have done it much quicker of course, but the sense of achievement when it (finally!) worked was great. Hope this helps

Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#65

Post by kranner »

Vivtek wrote: post #26
cletus wrote: post #9

Programming is like most things in life: hard if you have no affinity for it, much easier (but not necessarily easy) if you do. I see programming to have a lot of parallels with being a combination mechanic and automotive engineer. A mechanic fixes cars, diagnoses problems, tunes a car and so on. It's really a lot like (code) reading, testing, debugging and maintenance--all key programming skills. An automotive engin…

I would be useless as a mechanic. 90% of being a good mechanic, just as 90% of being a good programmer or a good doctor, is debugging. If you're a good debugger, you can damn well do anything .

I propose using the term debuggist for a human operating a debugger, as in typist and typewriter.

Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#66

Post by Jach »

devilant wrote: post #40
Eliezer wrote: post #7

Learned to program when I was around five or six years old, by picking up a book of prewritten programs in BASIC for a Sinclair ZX80 (or ZX81? not sure), figuring out how they worked and writing my own. I am not sure what the term "inherently hard" is supposed to mean in this context.

Come on. I think the context is pretty clear. If a group of novelists are discussing how writing is inherently hard, would you let them know you don't understand how they can say writing is hard? After all, you learned how to write when you were five or six by picking up "See Spot Run" and then stringing together some nouns and verbs of your own...

If something is "inherently hard", not just "hard", it seems that it should be hard for everyone, which is clearly not the case with programming for some geniuses out there. There are people who don't blink an eye at mastering any data structure or algorithm, don't sweat when it comes to actually coding, and they're human just like you. Plus what if programming became really simple for some AI to do? You ask it "Make me a triple-A style video game I might enjoy" and it does so after a short while. I believe Eliezer is pointing out that programming being inherently hard is a mind-projection fallacy.

Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#67

Post by Vivtek »

chopsueyar wrote: post #36
Vivtek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be useless as a mechanic. 90% of being a good mechanic, just as 90% of being a good programmer or a good doctor, is debugging. If you're a good debugger, you can damn well do anything .

As a mechanic, you also need good grip strength and not be afraid to bloody your knuckles.

That's the 10%.

Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#68

Post by LiveTheDream »

"The contraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds. In that sense computer science is like an abtract form of engineering; it's the kind of engineering where you ignore the constraints that are imposed by reality." - Harold Abelson in SICP lectures

Re: Is learning to program inherently hard?

#69

Post by kragen »

kenjackson wrote: post #4

Programming is hard, period. Knuth has noted that its so difficult for him that when he is programming he can't teach courses, and he's among the best programmers in history. Jon Skeet wrote a blog on the topic: http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2009/01/29/program... Jon Skeet is right. Programming is hard, except the most trivial tasks. And anything that is not trivial is probably broken. But we're OK with t…

Programming is hard for Knuth because his standard is that his programs should be correct. That would mean that they would contain no bugs. There are very, very few pieces of production software that might plausibly contain no bugs. TeX/METAFONT is one; qmail is another. I don't know of any others.

Programming is sometimes hard and sometimes easy. One of the things that makes it very hard is having a standard that demands the complete absence of bugs.

Fortunately, sometimes buggy programs are useful anyway.

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