Advice to a novice programmer

This advice is really good, even excellent. The first bullet is very important, and often ignored: "you can't do good work with bad tools". I might prefer to say "use low friction workflows", but it's largely a semantic quibble. The insight here is that what makes a good set of tools for a novice programmers is different from what an expert programmer needs. Specifically, while VSCode is a great editor, it's maze of plugins and configs makes it quite challenging for a novice programmer. Something trivial like Notepad++ or nano is actually more appropriate for a novice. The new crop of web IDEs are also quite good for the novice and should be seriously considered for intro classes. No novice should be forced to manage ssh keys for their first assignment.

A novice student should be able to generate a working "hello, world" program in 10-20 minutes. This typically means leaving a lot of the software engineering aspect out of the workflow. That's all ok for a novice programmer. It is important for them to engage directly with the workflows.

For example, consider this SWIG tutorial: https://www.swig.org/tutorial.html

Assuming you have a basic editor that you can use (nano) and an environment with all the dependencies installed, you can get a working python plugin built by reading 4-6 sentences, copying data into 2 files, and invoking 3 shell commands. This despite the fact that SWIG is a very deep and complex tool.

The debugging information is really important. I've seen classes where they do not discuss this at all with novice students. Kids need tools to troubleshoot their problems, desk checking code is difficult and only gets more difficult as the length of the programs grow.

The advice on avoiding long expressions is likewise golden. Long expressions are difficult to read, shorter ones are easier to read (this actually applies to variable names well - contrary to the advice in the article).

Finally, the advice on adhering to the DRY principle is not really applicable to novice programmers. Refactoring is hard. Writing library quality code is time consuming. Novice programmers should not be shamed for copy pasting 2-5 lines of code throughout their program. The topic of code organization, libraries, and SOLID principles are things to dig into after a novice has written a couple dozen programs.

I use vim therefore disagree

I really have to disagree with the disparagement of vim/scp at the beginning. It's a bit slower to start if you begin with command-line tools, but the dividends payed out by learning the standard command-line utilities are huge. Learning the command-line utilities means you have the tool-set to build your own tool-set; since it's a lot easier to using CLI tools as building blocks for larger tools.

At both of the last jobs I've held, it was rare that you would be in an environment where you had a full IDE. And in both cases I was asked several command-line oriented questions during the interviews.

Also big disagree on the final statement of the article. CS is not a vocational major, nor should it be. There are plenty of good post-secondary schools that focus on writing code and the tools you use to do so; CS curricula should not be focused on producing programmers, it should be focused on producing computer scientists. The recent insistence that we turn CS programs into job-mills is one of the big reasons for declining quality in my opinion, my local university CS program was recently told to "push more people through" and to make the curriculum "less theoretical" and more "career oriented". If you want that kind of stuff, go to a career college.

I still don't really understand what Vim users see in it. They always seem to claim that you can edit faster... and sure you can if you're comparing with Notepad++. But modern editors have multiple cursors and tons of useful editing tools that let you be easily as fast with much less pain.

I don't think he was shitting on command line tools; he was shitting on the remote machine his child was having to use, which was slow and unreliable.

> Also big disagree on the final statement of the article. CS is not a vocational major, nor should it be. There are plenty of good post-secondary schools that focus on writing code and the tools you use to do so; CS curricula should not be focused on producing programmers, it should be focused on producing computer scientists. The recent insistence that we turn CS programs into job-mills is one of the big reasons for declining quality in my opinion, my local university CS program was recently told to "push more people through" and to make the curriculum "less theoretical" and more "career oriented". If you want that kind of stuff, go to a career college.

Colleges should make this distinction clearer as well. I got a CS degree, and my belief was that I was being taught how to become a software engineer.