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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

#101
* But a liberal arts CS major prepares you for a career in computer science research, which is completely different from, say, software engineering. It’s like comparing a physical therapist with an athlete

Kind of funny that software engineering is compared to an athlete. In the current situation, I'd compare it with a headless chicken.

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

#103
It seems like the skill in question isn't necessarily about becoming a programmer as it is about becoming a hacker. It's a fine line, but I think the skills you learn at Google will be much more programmer-esque, like code review, unit testing, and doodling on whiteboards :). Whereas I see deploying APIs in weekends to get things off Craigslist to be in the domain of hacker-ish things, what someone else already called "hobbyist". I think that's an important and subtle flag for career prospects, so the line isn't that clear, though.

Another point I get from this is both a critique and praise for CS learned in a liberal arts college. You felt unqualified for getting a software engineering job, which is something that really needs to be addressed in small LACs. On the other hand, academic rigor probably prepared you well for cutting through bullshit that surrounds fashionable technologies. For example, you may not have heard of Heroku, but you may have learned about networking protocols and virtualization, which I think is the harder part to learn.

I think you struck a good community by choosing web development (a bit biased), but I'd like to amend that with a word for the road not taken, which is that back-end programming is becoming really, really accessible as well. Tutorials for Flask, Node, and Rails are just as prevalent (and potentially misleading) as HTML tutorials of yore. Now anyone with a mac (and even windows! would you believe that!) can set up a server and push "hello world" to heroku.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing "How to become a Googler, or the art of ????? well". I don't know what ???? is but I imagine it involves a lot of frustrated inability to Google things :)

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

#105
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…

> Success rate plummets if you Google programming questions in a language other than English.

This is very true. Not just for technical/programming-questions but pretty much everything. Even simple wikipedia entries. There is a huge quality gap between the english Wikipedia and - for example - the german Wikipedia.

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading literature, watching films, listening to the music. Basically, delving into culture which contains common phrases, idioms and sayings scattered around. You hear/read them, understand meaning from context, and commit to memory so you can use it later on. This is not really that different from how kids learn idioms too, isn't it? By the way, a lot of idioms/saying are pretty similar in different countries. Thei…

France here - starting as a student and stepping into the university library, it took me 30 seconds to realize that everything interesting was written in English and not being able to proficiently ingurgitate vast amount of it was going to be a problem. I just shunt French as written input for the next 5 years. When the valley called for a job, I was ready. Pasteur said "Chance favors the prepared mind" - he was rela…

Casting aside writing in French for 5 years, did your ability to write in French degrade over that time?

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

#108

This was fun to read. What I saw was someone say that they were panicking because they needed time to understand how all the things that go into learning to be a researcher goes into learning how to be a professional programmer. I'm quite sure his mind will be blown once he realizes that creating things, while incredibly rewarding, is only half the work. The other half is getting someone else to use your widget. Also…

FYI, the author is not male.

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

#109
post #77
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can't say "some few". Either are fine, but not together. It makes sense to me, but I'm not a native speaker either so I don't know if there's an actual rule behind this.

It's probably ok. Just not extremely common.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/some-fe...

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

#110
post #11

Except for maybe Haskell[0] and Lisp[0], I've begun to feel like there isn't any language that I can't quickly learn with how I'm able to google at the moment. For example, I'm currently helping some fellow students with their F# assignments, even though I don't do F# at all. I just know what to google, because I know the concepts that I need translated to the specific syntax. [0] Maybe Lisp, but Haskell is way too d…

Curious if you've also tried Forth?

Or any other concatenative or stack-based programming language. And Agda and Idris and other dependently typed languages I feel deserve to be on this list. There's also Qi/Shen. Of course various assemblers, too. And logic languages, like Prolog, Datalog, kanren. And then...

In short: every time I thought I know "most" of what there is to know about something I soon discovered that I was wrong, and that "something" was a vast area which I didn't really explore at all except for a tiny little fraction of my immediate surroundings.

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