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Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

norvig.com

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Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#91

Post by michaelochurch »

saintx wrote: post #24

When I was learning how to program, I asked the friend who was teaching me the rudiments "How long does it take to learn how to code?" He replied "Eight hours." "Eight hours?" "Yep, eight hours, every day. It's pretty much just like driving a bus. The hard part is keeping your ass in the seat." Fifteen years and a master's degree later, his advice remains remarkably accurate.

That's brilliant.

I tend to call myself a 121 programmer: I try to improve the total value of my knowledge base by 1% every 21 days. That's realistic, and those 1%'s add up over time.

MacLeod Sociopaths: 121 programmers who optimize for learning. MacLeod Clueless: 911 programmers who deal with hideous emergencies and compensate for bad management. (9-1-1 is the US emergency telephone number.) MacLeod Losers: 501 programmers who are out the door as soon as they can go home.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#92

Post by Tycho »

The article makes a good point. But what's more useful is that programmers skills matrix that someone posted to HN about a year ago. It had a row for every area in comp sci, and then it had columns progrssing in order of depth of knowledge. Over the ten years you chould check off each box one by one.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#93

Post by tianyicui »

Tycho wrote: post #92

The article makes a good point. But what's more useful is that programmers skills matrix that someone posted to HN about a year ago. It had a row for every area in comp sci, and then it had columns progrssing in order of depth of knowledge. Over the ten years you chould check off each box one by one.

link: http://www.starling-software.com/employment/programmer-compe...

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#94

Post by SatvikBeri »

jrmattox1 wrote: post #55
saintx wrote: post #24

When I was learning how to program, I asked the friend who was teaching me the rudiments "How long does it take to learn how to code?" He replied "Eight hours." "Eight hours?" "Yep, eight hours, every day. It's pretty much just like driving a bus. The hard part is keeping your ass in the seat." Fifteen years and a master's degree later, his advice remains remarkably accurate.

A more appropriate title to the post might be "Become an expert programmer in 10 years." We seem to focus on the poles: no coding skills vs. expert coding skills. You can teach yourself to code in less than 10 years, you just might not be an expert. The "learn to code" debate might be more productive if we allowed for definitions of competency at the stages leading up to expert. The post does a good job of defining t…

Completely agreed. Code I wrote with 6 months of programming experience has saved companies millions of dollars by reducing work that required ~10 expensive people to requiring ~1 cheap person. A real developer could probably further reduce that 1 to 0, but examples like these show that even basic automation skills can contribute huge amounts of value.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#95

Post by zzzeek »

wonderzombie wrote: post #36
zzzeek wrote: post #27

Right so, do we get to shrug off people with less than 10 years experience? Sure would end a lot of arguments.

If you are interested in scoring points, yes. If you are interesting in being a mature engineer[1], no. [1]: http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engi...

haha, yeah im not looking to score points, just not waste time on things I know are wrong ;)

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#96

Post by n33 »

nekopa wrote: post #81
michaelwww wrote: post #40

I'd like to meet the person who would buy a book titled "Teach yourself computer programming in 10 years."

Well according to my wrestling with it, that book is out and called "The Art of Computer Programming" by don knuth.

Also see - "A Discipline of Programming" by Edsger W. Dijkstra

http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Programming-Edsger-W-Dijkst...

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