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How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

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Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#91

Post by gjm11 »

noonespecial wrote: post #66
jdiez17 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks. Yeah, being able to recognise non-native speakers (based on accents and non-idiomatic sentences) is apparently a significant evolutionary advantage. I remember reading most people can identify a person speaking in a foreign accent within 80ms. That's pretty impressive! I'm currently trying to actively get rid of my accent. I've been asked a few times whether I'm actually British, and pretty much nobody c…

I always hated it when I was learning German when people would point out that I'd said something silly but not tell me the "right" way to do it. In that spirit, as a native speaker: "...from the context and the few words I recognised." would work just fine. That's english for you. When the peasants are revolting, its very different from when the food is revolting...

I think "a few words" is probably just slightly nearer the intended meaning than "the few words".

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#92

Post by chrisBob »

fhadley wrote: post #67

I found that one particular phrase,"technically privileged", both hilarious and utterly horrifying. Hilarious because I suppose I never paused to consider that the folks in my major who were both curious and motivated enough to be involved in the field outside of class to be particularly "privileged". I suppose I should have given greater thought to how unfair it was that read API documents and I didn't! Like I said…

Did we read the same thing? I got the impression that the author realized at the end that "technically privileged" was just an illusion, and the whole point is that they don't exist.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#93

Post by lostcolony »

tanto wrote: post #76
laichzeit0 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your English is excellent. It's sad that a single non-idiomatically phrased sentence can "blow" your cover though, e.g. "some few words", that gave it away instantly.

I am curious. What exactly is wrong with "some few words"? In german it would make total sense.

As a note, while, as others have mentioned, it's non-idiomatic, and dropped in casual speech would come across as a trifle awkward, it -can- be made tenable in sufficiently florid prose that is clearly intended to be delivered verbally.

That is, while "some few" is ungainly, pausing and delivering it as though 'few' is reinforcing or clarifying 'some' (through a change in tone or similar) would sound a little archaic, perhaps, but completely natural.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#94

Post by dded »

jdiez17 wrote: post #31
sanxiyn wrote: post #3

This is very true, but it's a bit more complicated than that. "I'd come to understand that the answer was out there, somewhere." The answer is out there, but so is the wrong answer. Recognizing the right answer is the hard part. I also must point out that the answer is out there if you know English . Knowing English is a strong privilege. Success rate plummets if you Google programming questions in a language other t…

As someone whose native language is not English (and didn't receive particularly good English classes at school, but had access to the Internet): if you start at a young enough age, you pick it up somewhat naturally. Seriously. In my case, wanting to "do X thing in VB6" drove me to read heaps of text in English, and even if I couldn't make sense of everything I could kind of guess what they were saying from the conte…

"if you start at a young enough age"

My understanding is that less than 12 is a good definition of young enough. (Although, ironically in the context of this discussion, my google-fu is too weak this morning to find the reference that convinced me of this. :)

In any case, a distant 2 years of high-school German coupled with 6 months of effort last year (pretty nearly an hour a day) was not enough to give me the skill to even read a children's book in German. For some of us, learning a language is hard.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#95

Post by collyw »

sanxiyn wrote: post #3

This is very true, but it's a bit more complicated than that. "I'd come to understand that the answer was out there, somewhere." The answer is out there, but so is the wrong answer. Recognizing the right answer is the hard part. I also must point out that the answer is out there if you know English . Knowing English is a strong privilege. Success rate plummets if you Google programming questions in a language other t…

I have to agree. I was interested in Linux before Ubuntu took off and because the mainstream. Now when I have a problem I sometimes end up on Ubuntu sites, and the answers there are far from the best.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#96

Post by fit2rule »

Kenji wrote: post #18

"But I’d never even heard of the words front-end developer or full-stack. What was Heroku? Never heard of Xcode. Wasn’t git just the thing you used to make sure your partner had access to the code you’d written? Frameworks? Didn’t you just need HTML and Javascript? What the hell was an API?!" If you literally never heard about any of those during your computer science courses, you attended a sad, sad university.

Or went to university a decade or so ago, where instead of XCode it was emacs, instead of git it was cvs, and so on ..

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#97

Post by fhnjh »

chrisBob wrote: post #92
fhadley wrote: post #67

I found that one particular phrase,"technically privileged", both hilarious and utterly horrifying. Hilarious because I suppose I never paused to consider that the folks in my major who were both curious and motivated enough to be involved in the field outside of class to be particularly "privileged". I suppose I should have given greater thought to how unfair it was that read API documents and I didn't! Like I said…

Did we read the same thing? I got the impression that the author realized at the end that "technically privileged" was just an illusion, and the whole point is that they don't exist.

Well they do in a sense. It's the difference between growing up in a family like Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' and in a family that encourages growth. I also think that having a family member in the software development would make the transition into the world of work quite a bit easier. But in the end the right attitude can trump any of these things, which is what the author discovered. I am happy for him.

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#98

Post by prawks »

fhadley wrote: post #67

I found that one particular phrase,"technically privileged", both hilarious and utterly horrifying. Hilarious because I suppose I never paused to consider that the folks in my major who were both curious and motivated enough to be involved in the field outside of class to be particularly "privileged". I suppose I should have given greater thought to how unfair it was that read API documents and I didn't! Like I said…

This article reminded me of an NPR piece I saw a few days ago about "When Women Stopped Coding"[1]. The theory goes that without having prior knowledge of working with computers, people cannot compete in many introductory computer science classes. Computers had been marketed like toys, to one gender: boys. Because of this, it was rare for women to have prior computer experience, and so struggled and dropped out of CS.

It made me reconsider what "technical privilege" really means and why I think it's a valid thing. Exposure to computers and technology outside of the classroom is definitely becoming more common, but not the kind of hobbyist interest that this article talks about.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

Re: How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

#100

Post by unclesaamm »

fhadley wrote: post #67

I found that one particular phrase,"technically privileged", both hilarious and utterly horrifying. Hilarious because I suppose I never paused to consider that the folks in my major who were both curious and motivated enough to be involved in the field outside of class to be particularly "privileged". I suppose I should have given greater thought to how unfair it was that read API documents and I didn't! Like I said…

You're missing the point: it's not about "outside of class", it's about prior experience
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