201–210 of 226 posts
I really appreciate Github doing this, so kudos to them. While I'm no longer a student myself, I don't think cost is the main prohibitive factor for students. The fundamental tools I use for my side projects - Atom, Bitbucket and Heroku - are available for free. The other services are nice to have, but seem to be much more niche. I think the prohibitive factor is the perception that coding is hard and complex for reg…
For instance, I'm working on a web app to visualize a particular subset of twitter activity. Scaling the database to cope with performance demands may prove challenging on free project tiers.
This really makes something I've been thinking about very clear. I often think about the "everyone can code" movement. It's not something I particularly believe in, but exposing as many people as possible is a great thing. However, the bit I get stuck on is programming is more than just typing characters in the correct sequence. It's deploying, testing, environment issues, metrics, databases, dns, etc. Basically it i…
> It's deploying, testing, environment issues, metrics, databases, dns, etc. Basically it is a lot more complex than "learn to code". You're mixing the "everybody can code" idea with "everyone should become a professional software engineer". The former is a great idea, the latter not so much. "Everybody can code" is about basic computer literacy. Too many people do boring and repetitive jobs on their computers. Basic…
I'd imagine most students in the west are comparatively very rich.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The exploration of modern programming is a big factor keeping people out. You don't get a computer with BASIC installed anymore, or magazines that teach you programming from start to finish with code samples included. To figure out desktop programming, you have to download a compiler and hope there is a good tutorial on some random blog which most likely gave up after part two of a five part series. To figure out web…
Is modern programming hard to learn, or is it more that people want to do more fancy stuff than before, and quicker? Making a java app is hard for the uninitiated, but compiling a few java classes just requires a compiler (essentially) and to memorize a few commands (or use something like Dr Java). Making a slick web app in RRails is probably pretty daunting, but writing some HTML doesn't even require a server, just…
So now we have all this computing power and these powerful and easy to use languages and a broad distribution network and thousands of developers and teachers and applications to learn from and programming has only gotten harder. Think about that one. We've stepped back from BASIC to make programming harder. Because we expect more from our programs now, but we haven't put any effort into making it easier to do even the most simple thing.
I'm still drawing interfaces with tens of lines of code. In Visual Basic, I just drew them on the screen. In Java, I'm fighting to get things aligned or sized right or in the right order, to the point where in my Java class I took there was two weeks dedicated to getting to grips with Swing. So we abstract the hard stuff away... with more code. And though we abstract it away to make it easier, we still look down on language like Visual Basic, because real programmers don't draw their interfaces with a mouse, they do it in code with vim or emacs.
Just look at the mindset of one of the other people who responded to me. "We want to make it harder so amateurs can't do it". Fuck that shit. We have the power to make it easier but we don't.
Very cool to have included Screenhero -- SH is great for WFH people.