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Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

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Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#251

Post by throwaway2037 »

throwawayboise wrote: post #87
chrisaycock wrote: post #5

Given the ever-increasing amount of automation in the economy, I believe that programming (of one form or another) is going to become a skill as important as writing. Everyone learns how to write in school, even though only a few become novelists or journalists. Similarly, everyone will learn to code even though only a few will become data scientists or software engineers. Programming for non-professionals looks a lo…

It has been a pipe dream of some since the 1960s that "everybody" would program computers in the future. It hasn't happened and won't happen. Most people simply don't have the patience for it.

It is amazing that no one has pointed out JavaScript in this thread. The vast number of people who can come into programming by way of a free web browser with a built-in debugger is astonishing. It is incredible to think of the zero-cost (!) development environment that is Microsoft Visual Studio Code plus Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox (run+debug). I could have never imagined it twenty years ago, and I am not a JavaScript fan-gurl/-boi.

And what about coding boot camps? Again, they have put umpteen more people to work as programmers. (Are they more than universities yet?) Again, you don't have to love them, but they are lowering the bar and helping more people gain access to the programmers market.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#252

Post by ksec »

So many has ( and hasn't changed ) in the past 50 years of computing. I mean look at C++ today, and pick any programming language in the 70s.

Another point is, are we really taking about programming language on the surface, its syntax? Or programming language as its whole ecosystem with library, tools, edge case and best practice. The former, arguably is very very easy. The latter is very very hard.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#253

Post by throwaway2037 »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #91
chrisaycock wrote: post #5

Given the ever-increasing amount of automation in the economy, I believe that programming (of one form or another) is going to become a skill as important as writing. Everyone learns how to write in school, even though only a few become novelists or journalists. Similarly, everyone will learn to code even though only a few will become data scientists or software engineers. Programming for non-professionals looks a lo…

I'm not sure what you expect them to be able to do beside using Excel.

And what is wrong with Excel -- functional programming by formulas, and procedural programming by VBA? Until mid 2000s, many Wall Street Investment banks were still running trading desks making 100M+ USD per year profits (each!) using only Excel for quoting and trading. I assume Biotech and Big Oil still use lots of Excel.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#254

Post by throwaway2037 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #101
wyager wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of us are special for working in tech Computer occupations as a whole have a median intelligence at least 1stddev in excess of the population median. https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2002-hauser.pdf I have to imagine that programmers in particular are even higher.

I've always felt like a good data point in favor of IQ playing a non-trivial role in suitability for programming is the fact that anti-credentialist moves like 10-week coding bootcamps have been so incredibly successful. Bootcamps took off shortly after I graduated from my top-ranked CS program, and I remember being extremely dismissive of their value: there was no way that you could fit the four years of my CS degre…

>

Thank you. What a naked and honest thing to say on HackerNews. My brother is so much smarter than me. I went the CompSci route and suffered (toiled!) for years at a university. His boot camp was less than three months and he landed a just fine job. Internally, I was incredibly dismissive of his boot camp, but was proven wrong (again!) by my own horrible elitism.

No everyone needs to be working on cutting edge ML/AI. My brother makes websites for shopping. (Yay.) His income easily doubled after a year of cutting his teeth.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#255

Post by throwaway2037 »

SilurianWenlock wrote: post #204
andai wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most programmers are not computer scientists. Even most people with computer science degrees are not computer scientists at heart, they forced themselves to do the coursework so they could get a job (mostly web, utilizing almost nothing they were taught). I learned to program as a child (I taught myself, for fun!) but I didn't learn much computer science until well into adulthood.

Why does web dev not use much formal cs in your opinion?

This is an interesting question. From personal experience, I have also found simple GUI work to the "digging ditches" work of programmers. (Weirdly, I still love it, because it makes it easy for end-users to understand your tools!) Of course, complex GUIs are another beast, but usually GUI programming on the low end as it is very hard to test (easily) and requires endless tweaks due to the high configurability of GUIs.

For example, if you just look at GUIs created using Excel/VBA, you will find they seem to need endless tweaking to work just right (edge cases?), but do not at all require a formal CS degree. (I have worked with many non-CS people who are fine a mid-level Excel/VBA stuff.)

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#256

Post by thaumasiotes »

kaba0 wrote: post #201
thaumasiotes wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is that "something happening after something else" is not related to the idea of an if-then-else. In Common Lisp the if-then-else construct is IF. The "something happening after something else" construct is PROGN. The whole point of if-then-else is that only one thing happens ; "something happening after something else" requires a minimum of two things.

I don't really get your point. If/else expressions are in principle free to evaluate both branches, but that would be needless. But when we provide an IO Monad for example, if/else expressions will not suffice in the naive way -- you have to use the monad "bind" operation to actually provide an order -- what it boils down to basically: the A; B; C; in imperative languages become C(B(A())) in pure FP ones -- with impl…

> If/else expressions are in principle free to evaluate both branches, but that would be needless.

This is true only in a pure functional language; if you admit the existence of side effects, then it is a crucial part of an if statement that the code associated with the other branch is never executed.

My point is just that it makes no sense to say "some languages have no form of if statement; for example, Haskell doesn't have the concept of one thing happening after something else". That example is untrue. But if it were true, it still would not interfere with Haskell's ability to have an if statement. Thus, defending Haskell's ability to run one statement after another statement is unnecessary to refute the claim; the claim never worked in the first place.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#257

Post by swiftcoder »

josephg wrote: post #238
swiftcoder wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very key. By the time I entered undergrad CS, the kids who had owned computers growing up, and played or even modded videogames, had a massive starting advantage over the ones who hadn't. The entire first year of CS courses was mostly there to instill fundamental computer skills (not CS skills!) in the ones without that preexisting knowledge.

I haven't seen any data on video games helping with programming. But having a strong math background definitely seems to help. I don't think its knowledge - there's something about how you internally model a system that math teaches you. Approaching programming with the same mindset makes learning much easier. I read a paper over a decade ago talking about this. They gave a survey to freshman students and looked for…

Video games definitely help develop overall computer literacy. The basic computer skills that are missing in folks who didn't grow up around computers are so foundational they might surprise you: - Filesystem basics, aka "where does a file go when you save it, and how do you find it again?". Do you know how many people just save everything to the documents folder, and scroll through the list of every file they've ever accessed every time? - Window management. I clicked on something, and now my document has disappeared. Help! - Drag-and-drop. Particularly on a laptop with a trackpad, this requires a fuckton of coordination.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#258

Post by hnfong »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #251
throwawayboise wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been a pipe dream of some since the 1960s that "everybody" would program computers in the future. It hasn't happened and won't happen. Most people simply don't have the patience for it.

It is amazing that no one has pointed out JavaScript in this thread. The vast number of people who can come into programming by way of a free web browser with a built-in debugger is astonishing. It is incredible to think of the zero-cost (!) development environment that is Microsoft Visual Studio Code plus Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox (run+debug). I could have never imagined it twenty years ago, and I am not a Ja…

I think your point actually corroborates the GP's point about "everybody will be a programmer" being a pipe dream.

It's gotten ever so easy to learn and write programs, and people still don't do it.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#259

Post by hnfong »

urthor wrote: post #221
chrisaycock wrote: post #5

Given the ever-increasing amount of automation in the economy, I believe that programming (of one form or another) is going to become a skill as important as writing. Everyone learns how to write in school, even though only a few become novelists or journalists. Similarly, everyone will learn to code even though only a few will become data scientists or software engineers. Programming for non-professionals looks a lo…

Absolutely not. Programming is like, using mathematical structure to instruct a computer. But many domains don't need you to use mathematics to instruct the computer. Natural language processing, like a search bar, GUI, . Medicine, legal, so many other trades don't need mathematical instruction of a computer. They just need not-totally-useless operation of it, through

Either "programming" is not using "mathematical structure" to instruct a computer, OR printf("Hello world\n"); is a "mathematical structure", OR it is not programming.

Which one?

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#260

Post by hnfong »

prydt wrote: post #105
Animats wrote: post #99

Even MIT abandoned Scheme and SICP and switched to Python. There's a beautiful elegance to that approach. It gives a sense of the mathematical foundation of computer science. It's not that useful for building large programs from off the shelf libraries, which is what almost everybody does today. At one time, computer science required a good understand of what's in Vol. 1 of Knuth. That's not in much demand any more.…

Where can one find those hash table theorists? (Just curious, that sounds really interesting actually)

Daniel Lemire has some very interesting blog articles about "low level" data structures that you'd think you understood in first year CS.

I just linked to a google search on "hash tables" because that's what you asked for, but some of his other posts are really quite fascinating.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alemire.me+hash+table

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