“We would love for this to be rolled out to every high school in America,” said Carson. “But we wanted to fix a couple schools, go deep, and really understand if it works.”
Oh REALLY?
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#62Isn't it odd and curious and such like that the chunks of time bandied about are units of ten? Coincidentally equal to the number of fingers on our hands. 10 years. 10,000 hours. I'd be willing to bet my granny's dentures that if we had eight fingers on each hand those numbers would be 16 years and 65536 hours (well, I mean it would still be 10 and 10,000 but you know what I mean). Also, did you know that in many cul…
Imprecision (one significant digit) + Benford's law (most numbers start with 1) means most numbers needing citation are of the form 10^n. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law Interestingly, this would be true even if we had 8 fingers per hand. If we had 16 total fingers, 16 (base 10) would be written as "10" (base 16). 15 (base 10) would be a one digit number in base 16. On the other hand, you'd rather have six…
That's why many things in the metric system are designed on a grid with edge length 60 - it gives you many possibilities for subdivisions. For example the dimensions of most furniture is based on this - 30 cm, 45 cm, 60 cm, 90 cm, 120 cm and 240 cm everywhere.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#63It doesn't matter if you know programming even with 10 years' experience, since people with much less will get a job by selling and people with more will not get a job if they so much as look funny.
Study how to build a personal reality distortion field, that is the ability most in demand currently
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#64I am never surprised when this article reoccurs on HN. Don't try to rush it and continue to put in your time, that is the only way to get better at the craft.
But being better at the craft doesn't count for as much as we tend to think. Otherwise, we would not see much age discrimination in this industry.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#65Right so, do we get to shrug off people with less than 10 years experience? Sure would end a lot of arguments.
Given the way we shrug people off for using a language we don't like (or not seeming enough of a polyglot), being pessimistic, not working in the past few months, or any number of other silly things, I can't see how a bias against people with less than 10 years would really hurt matters much further.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#66Though agree that those "For Dummies" books grossly underestimate the time needed to be a good programmer, I really wish he didn't use the "10,000 hours is the ultimate immutable number of hours you need to 'master' a skill." It's nonsense.
> It's nonsense. The 10 year / 10,000 hours seems to come up frequently - care to cite or link to some interesting counters? (genuine curiosity)
[deleted]
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imprecision (one significant digit) + Benford's law (most numbers start with 1) means most numbers needing citation are of the form 10^n. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law Interestingly, this would be true even if we had 8 fingers per hand. If we had 16 total fingers, 16 (base 10) would be written as "10" (base 16). 15 (base 10) would be a one digit number in base 16. On the other hand, you'd rather have six…
That's why many things in the metric system are designed on a grid with edge length 60 - it gives you many possibilities for subdivisions. For example the dimensions of most furniture is based on this - 30 cm, 45 cm, 60 cm, 90 cm, 120 cm and 240 cm everywhere.
Not that furniture might not, say, be scaled to fit human proportions or anything funky like that.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#68I started at age 7. I'm 34 now. Still learning, and still feeling like a noob. Can't get enough of this, though.
I feel like a noob too, mostly because I started at 18!
That's to say, I started taking programming seriously at 18. I did write a crappy Visual Basic exe when I was 8, and I dabbled a bit in Flash ActionScript in my teenage years, but I don't really count those years, because I was learning by rote then.
I really only started taking programming seriously when I was in college. Writing an RTOS from scratch was one of my biggest coding achievements. A lot of times, I wish I have a job that's more technically challenging than what I'm doing now.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#69Um, hasn't this been posted and reposted already? Not trying to be a smartass, but I thought this article was already pretty popular, and generally the standard response to any beginner asking how he could learn X in 10/21 days.
HN tolerates reposts after a certain period, I think.
Anyway I'm not complaining. This is one of those articles which ought to be required reading for any aspiring programmer.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#70Isn't it odd and curious and such like that the chunks of time bandied about are units of ten? Coincidentally equal to the number of fingers on our hands. 10 years. 10,000 hours. I'd be willing to bet my granny's dentures that if we had eight fingers on each hand those numbers would be 16 years and 65536 hours (well, I mean it would still be 10 and 10,000 but you know what I mean). Also, did you know that in many cul…
> Also, did you know that in many cultures (ancient Greece, Aramaic, Hebrew, Chinese, to name but some) 10,000† just means "a heck of a lot", "more than you can count". So you see, 10,000 is a bit too magical for me to take seriously.
That's the salient point. When Norvig says it takes "10 years" to be a programmer, he means it takes a heckuva long time to master the art, not that it takes 87648 hours with a 95% confidence interval. That figure is not meant to be taken at face value.