When and Why to Learn to Program
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When and Why to Learn to Program
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Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#2The rivers of nonsense questions coming into stackoverflow from well meaning people who are not able to describe the difference between a variable and a browser and who don't have the capabilities to care unless it solves their immediate problem at hand leads me to believe that not everyone should program. in fact, many people who do program should be politely asked not to.
Stackoverflow needs a "entrence barrier" test where if you can't communicate or have no ability to think rationally about the words being typed there to solve problems, your question goes to the "dumb" section of the site.
point is, stop encouraging everyone to be programmers. You're slowing progress by doing so.
we've got 4.4 million questions, 90% of it from novices that should be asked not to program. you can go take a look at them, they are little better than "how is babby formed" type questions. These people are trying to program when they should be told that it's too hard.
Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#3This is very good advice: "My opinion is that if you're fortunate to have friends that know how to program then you should learn to program in the language they're best in."
Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#4I'm of the belief that while not everyone may be able to code in a way that contributes to their startup's codebase, knowing the point and power of programming can vastly help the direction you pour your resources in.
For example, understanding how loops and iterative tasks work will help you understand why changing the text on one specific product page (out of a 1000) isn't as easy as popping open the text-editor and changing that page's text. It helps you figure out a sensible data-model on the back-end (so that your frustrated coder isn't writing a special if-statement that breaks on the next iteration of the site)
Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#5The rivers of nonsense questions coming into stackoverflow from well meaning people who are not able to describe the difference between a variable and a browser and who don't have the capabilities to care unless it solves their immediate problem at hand leads me to believe that not everyone should program. in fact, many people who do program should be politely asked not to. Stackoverflow needs a "entrence barrier" te…
I couldn't disagree more. It's very elitist to say that interested minds shouldn't pursue the field you're in because they're asking the wrong questions. The better and more productive approach would be to educate them by answering their question and at the same time pointing out the preferred way to look at it.
I know when I was first starting out there were obvious cliffs that I confronted when growing as a developer. The first cliff is going from syntax to understanding how to piece syntax together. Then further down the line is learning best practices and how more seasoned developers do things. This is something that you can only learn from practice and by asking questions on sites such as Stack Overflow and your peers. How else are you going to learn?
Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#6The rivers of nonsense questions coming into stackoverflow from well meaning people who are not able to describe the difference between a variable and a browser and who don't have the capabilities to care unless it solves their immediate problem at hand leads me to believe that not everyone should program. in fact, many people who do program should be politely asked not to. Stackoverflow needs a "entrence barrier" te…
How did you learn programming? How did you learn about browsers and computers etc.?
Did you NEVER ask anybody any questions at the beginning?
You surely did. Why do you feel the need to keep the joy of programming just for yourself or just for the ones who came before now and learnt it a few years ago? Am I stealing your work when I learn programming? Do you absolutely HAVE to answer dumb questions on stackoverflow? You can just ignore the stuff you don't like, you know.
Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#7I'm of the belief that while not everyone may be able to code in a way that contributes to their startup's codebase, knowing the point and power of programming can vastly help the direction you pour your resources in. For example, understanding how loops and iterative tasks work will help you understand why changing the text on one specific product page (out of a 1000) isn't as easy as popping open the text-editor an…
This is so true. I've only been programming for around a year, but I now have a much better understanding of what goes on under the hood. In the last few months, I've gone from doing 100% to 20% of the coding as I'm now working with a better developer than myself, but the understanding alone has given me a huge leg up on other CEOs/product people who have no experience programming.
Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#8The rivers of nonsense questions coming into stackoverflow from well meaning people who are not able to describe the difference between a variable and a browser and who don't have the capabilities to care unless it solves their immediate problem at hand leads me to believe that not everyone should program. in fact, many people who do program should be politely asked not to. Stackoverflow needs a "entrence barrier" te…
Nonsense. Knowledge is relative and there are always going to be people that are orders of magnitude more skilled in any craft than yourself.
It's rather odd to find someone on a "hacker" site advocating any sort of discouragement of autodidacticism.
Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#9The rivers of nonsense questions coming into stackoverflow from well meaning people who are not able to describe the difference between a variable and a browser and who don't have the capabilities to care unless it solves their immediate problem at hand leads me to believe that not everyone should program. in fact, many people who do program should be politely asked not to. Stackoverflow needs a "entrence barrier" te…
I had to ask seemingly "dumb" questions a lot when I started programming. I switched to software after having been a classical musician for many years and the transition in just learning a whole new world of vocabulary and how everything worked was pretty rough for about a year. Luckily, there were enough patient people to help me get through that and answer my questions. I wanted to learn to program pretty badly, I just didn't have the background to converse fluently right away.
Re: When and Why to Learn to Program
#10This was great to read - I'm the same age as you and changed majors away from CS about 10 years ago because of similar reasons to what you described. Being young and not knowing much about the world meant that I didn't have any passion for what I was building, and after getting some real life experiences under my belt, I've come back to learn programming again because, well, I just can't help myself.
I've thought about trying to learn programming again for the past few years, but gave up on the idea by telling myself it was too late and that I could never really succeed without a structured learning environment. But once I started looking into it, I'm dumbfounded by the amount of resources out there that not having access to knowledge is simply not a valid excuse. These massive open online courses out there are revolutionary and having just finished one, I felt much more passionate, thirsty, and focused than I ever was as an undergraduate.
And to echo the point in your article, what has kept me learning is a project I want to build. Learning backwards by figuring out what I want to do then researching how to do it works great for me. But, what's been challenging is staying grounded to the task of building the product rather than letting my mind wander off into a daydreamy state of wondering how I'm going to manage/promote/monetize the product once it's finished. Baby steps...