Wait, what does he mean about the shift key? I pushed shift, then pushed a, and the a is still lower case.
you didn't even write it in all lowercase.
Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
21–30 of 145 posts
Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#22About a third of his class needs to switch to a more challenging course. Every university should have a way to "place out" of introductory programming classes, just like you can place out of introductory (natural) language classes if you have previous coursework or are a native speaker. This should be done by demonstrating proficiency in the skills that will be taught in the programming course.
My first day of programming in college I read the syllabus and told the teacher I'd already done everything on it. They let me switch to the next class.
Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#23I don't believe that programming is something you need to just get. I've seen a lot of people struggle on assignments like these as a TA. Usually, it's that they're missing certain concepts, but they don't know which ones and they can't debug themselves. If you know 70% of basic Java, you won't be able to create a working solution. You'll get tripped up on a type mismatch error that just makes you bonkers until you g…
I have to wonder if a language with less syntax would be easier to pick up.
Start people that are totally new to programming with something like Scheme or Ruby (surely there are even better ones than these) that requires less arcane punctuation to do things like hello world, then once they get the hang of things, slowly introduce them to more structured languages.
Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#24Wait, what does he mean about the shift key? I pushed shift, then pushed a, and the a is still lower case.
you didn't even write it in all lowercase.
I used to use caps-lock for that.
But then I learned enough Chinese to tell my pet monkey to type my comments up for me while waiting for Eclipse to launch.
Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#25Diagnosable mental defects aside, I refuse to believe that there exist students who genuinely want to learn Java with a private tutor who understands the student's mental model of the world.
Students range from couldn't-care-less to passionate, not from stupid to smart.
Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#26About a third of his class needs to switch to a more challenging course. Every university should have a way to "place out" of introductory programming classes, just like you can place out of introductory (natural) language classes if you have previous coursework or are a native speaker. This should be done by demonstrating proficiency in the skills that will be taught in the programming course.
Well, sure, if universities were there to teach things , they'd invent ways to teach you using fewer classes. If universities are there to make you take classes until you get a piece of paper, why would they care?
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Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#27Several people in the blog comments have cited the “camel has two humps” paper, which still hasn’t made it through peer review. There have been some failures to replicate the study. Perhaps their results were an artifact of the authors’ teaching style, i.e. they were just terrible at teaching, so the students who entered the class without knowing the material failed? I’m very skeptical of results that claim that some…
"I’m very skeptical of results that claim that some large fraction of the population is incapable of some mental feat like programming. 500 years ago the same was thought of reading, writing, and arithmetic." Yeah and the reason was that 500 years ago reading and writing was college level material. Now they start teaching the alphabet at what age 5? Then again most print material is targeted to a pretty low reading l…
Two illiterates can have a conversation a writer could transcribe. I'm pretty sure I couldn't represent the behavior or thought process of a computer-illiterate in code.
Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#28I don't believe that programming is something you need to just get. I've seen a lot of people struggle on assignments like these as a TA. Usually, it's that they're missing certain concepts, but they don't know which ones and they can't debug themselves. If you know 70% of basic Java, you won't be able to create a working solution. You'll get tripped up on a type mismatch error that just makes you bonkers until you g…
I have to wonder if a language with less syntax would be easier to pick up. Start people that are totally new to programming with something like Scheme or Ruby (surely there are even better ones than these) that requires less arcane punctuation to do things like hello world, then once they get the hang of things, slowly introduce them to more structured languages.
ruby syntax can be a little confusing. e.g. you can usually leave out parenthesis, but not always, and sometimes you get warnings but it works anyway.
Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#29Wait, what does he mean about the shift key? I pushed shift, then pushed a, and the a is still lower case.
tRY LAYING OFF THE CAPS LOCK.
Re: Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to wonder if a language with less syntax would be easier to pick up. Start people that are totally new to programming with something like Scheme or Ruby (surely there are even better ones than these) that requires less arcane punctuation to do things like hello world, then once they get the hang of things, slowly introduce them to more structured languages.
ruby syntax can be a little confusing. e.g. you can usually leave out parenthesis, but not always , and sometimes you get warnings but it works anyway.
Well with any language you have to teach a little bit of convention to go along with the rules, and the convention on when to use parens in ruby is mostly standardized from the code I see.
But yeah, I'm sure there has to be a better language for learning out there, I just don't personally know it. I originally learned with C++, and I remember the terror that were pointers at first. When I had a class that taught me Scheme, I remember thinking: "hey, I could write this code on paper without even testing it out if I wanted", which was the polar opposite of my C++ experience.