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On finally learning to program at the age of 40

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Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#41

Post by ThePadawan »

Now I feel like I need to apologize for TAing a class that taught Logo to college freshmen.

This was a CS class for non-technical natural science freshmen, so it was full of pharmacy, biology, geology students etc.

It's primary purpose was also to (in 14 weeks!) teach the barest detail of all of computing, from basic circuits (~1week) to Logo programming (IIRC Teaching Logo to 18 year olds that had never in their life been interested in programming was an eye-opening experience:

Some students (imo rightfully) only did the exercises to get through the exam, since all they wanted was to pass the class. Fair enough!

Others solved the exercises about for-loops one week, then started asking follow-up questions about infinite loops and accidentally inventing while-loops and their eyes lit up and you could tell that they got it, even though this wasn't even their primary degree direction.

Looking back, as a CS student, I wish I had taken more classes like this, designed to make you question if you were actually taking a degree in the direction of what you were most interested in.

Our CS program was math, math, math and 15% programming. Not really any jumping points from that (except into Mathematics).

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#42

Post by sgt »

Stratoscope wrote: post #32
Donckele wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How have the interviews gone?

Thanks for asking! So far so good. I must admit I'm a bit skeptical but still hopeful about the FAANG interview. The interviews with a few less famous companies have been good. (Actually one is very famous, even more than the FAANGs, but not a "tech" company.) I will know more this week and will report back. :-)

Out of curiosity I ended up on your LinkedIn page. What a truly impressive resume. You have been exposed to such an incredible variety of companies and technologies over 50+ years. If this FAANG company doesn't sign you up, it's truly their loss.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#43

Post by FormFollowsFunc »

pjmlp wrote: post #28
Kwantuum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't ActionScript just a dialect of EcmaScript? I would guess transitioning from that to Javascript would be pretty easy.

Without the nice IDE experience though.

There was an IDE for ActionScript called FDT built on top of Eclipse.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#44

Post by andi999 »

im3w1l wrote: post #36
AstralStorm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a quadratic solution. Try solving an inverse problem to get insight - how to know if a sequence is almost a palindrome and what's the "palindromicity" metric - and you will find the faster solutions. (I think it leads directly to a Knuth-Morris-Pratt like algorithm. And you can further apply a variant of divide and conquer on top.)

No it's not quadratic: since there is at most one conflict it will be linear.

It depends how you count. Is string reversion an O(1) or O(N) operation with N the string length? I believe is is O(N) and if you loop over it N times thats O(N^2), isnt it?

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#45

Post by giu »

Stratoscope wrote: post #33
im3w1l wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given a non-empty string s, you may delete at most one character. Judge whether you can make it a palindrome. My thought here is that you start from the outside working inwards. When you encounter a conflict you must decide whether to resolve it by deleting the left or right character. Trying both possibilities should be good enough. From that decision point you just keep comparing and if it fails that branch faile…

Yup, that is pretty much the solution I discussed with the interviewer after writing the code above. We ran out of time to write out the full code, but hopefully coming up with the rough description of a solution like yours was satisfactory. Waiting with bated breath for the interview feedback... :-)

IMHO you did very well if you were able to write down the correct naive solution and then discuss optimizations afterwards. Hopefully it works out for you! :)

Godspeed!

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#47

Post by pjmlp »

FormFollowsFunc wrote: post #43
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without the nice IDE experience though.

There was an IDE for ActionScript called FDT built on top of Eclipse.

I meant that JavaScript/HTML/CSS has yet to offer anything similar to the Flash development experience.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#48

Post by m0zg »

darkteflon wrote: post #12

I'm in this boat. Finally started programming in 2018 at age 38 after a lifetime of playing around with computers as a hobby (thanks, dad!) and a first career in a completely unrelated field, as an attorney. The linked article is about learning for pleasure, but there are also challenges associated with trying to enter the field as a second career. The technical complexity, of course, and the scale of what needs to b…

If you don't mind me asking, why would one give up a cushy, well paid attorney career and choose software engineering? Software engineering compensation _tops out_ below where an experienced attorney compensation _begins_. The least I've ever paid a lawyer was $250/hr.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#49

Post by Someone »

im3w1l wrote: post #36
AstralStorm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a quadratic solution. Try solving an inverse problem to get insight - how to know if a sequence is almost a palindrome and what's the "palindromicity" metric - and you will find the faster solutions. (I think it leads directly to a Knuth-Morris-Pratt like algorithm. And you can further apply a variant of divide and conquer on top.)

No it's not quadratic: since there is at most one conflict it will be linear.

I’m not sure it is quadratic, but the “deleting the left or right character” to me, hint it deviates from linear.

I think the solution, logically, is to cut the string in two halves, duplicating the center character for odd-length strings (¿or can you ignore it a bit more?), computing edit distance between the front half and the reversed right half, allowing only deletions, and bailing out as soon as you know the answer is larger than one.

In real life, optimize away the “cut into two halves” and “reverse” parts, as they will be expensive.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#50

Post by Stratoscope »

sgt wrote: post #42
Stratoscope wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for asking! So far so good. I must admit I'm a bit skeptical but still hopeful about the FAANG interview. The interviews with a few less famous companies have been good. (Actually one is very famous, even more than the FAANGs, but not a "tech" company.) I will know more this week and will report back. :-)

Out of curiosity I ended up on your LinkedIn page. What a truly impressive resume. You have been exposed to such an incredible variety of companies and technologies over 50+ years. If this FAANG company doesn't sign you up, it's truly their loss.

Wow, I don't know how to thank you enough for that word of encouragement. I am really grateful after a long week of interviews and a much-too-hot weekend here in the Bay Area.

But shhhh... We're not supposed to tell anyone that it's been 50+ years! Right? The advice I usually get is to remove everything from more than 5 years ago, maybe 10 at the very most, otherwise someone might think I'm old! ;-)

Yeah, I don't buy that either, that's why I thought I would have some fun with my LinkedIn and list everything in it.

(Well, I did quietly omit that one job where I got fired after six weeks, many years back. It will be my little secret for now.)

But seriously, thank you again! :-)

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