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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

#151

Post by penprog »

mentalbastille wrote: post #150
penprog wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it even mean to be on the inside? Nobody in my family had any experience with computers. My first programming book was a gift for me when I was ten that I asked for (it was a learn C++ in 24 hours book). You can imagine how that turned out with nobody there to help me. I didn't understand what variables were let alone how to add the compiler to the path on windows. The only help I had was that my dad bought…

Yes; you started at 10, and had a computer growing up to practice on.

So pretty much everyone in the US who owned a computer was on in the inside.

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

#152

Post by dded »

natejenkins wrote: post #126
dded wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

"learning a language is hard" I don't agree here. First off, your two years of high school German, like my two years of high school Spanish, were likely a waste of time. I had the highest grade in class and couldn't speak a word of Spanish, although I could write simple sentences in present tense quite successfully. I moved to a French speaking country when I was 23. Initially, like most Americans, I thought that lea…

No doubt immersion is the way to go.

But it still seems to me that countries where students learn foreign languages successfully at a high rate start those students before they're 12. My two years of high school was a waste, as you said yours was. But Germans (and Dutch, and Norwegians, etc.) have much better success in their schools, and they all start before the age 14 that's common for starting here in the US (though that's starting to change).

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

#154

Post by ASneakyFox »

levosmetalo wrote: post #121
eloisant wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a comparison, my German (as a foreign language) used to tell us the first year we learned it, "beginners shouldn't use a bilingual dictionary". In order to ensure the word you found in the dictionary is correct, you need to be good enough in the language. Often there will be homonymns in your native language, and you'll get the wrong word. For example you want to translate the bank of a river but end up with the p…

> In order to ensure the word you found in the dictionary is correct, you need to be good enough in the language. Often there will be homonymns in your native language, and you'll get the wrong word. For example you want to translate the bank of a river but end up with the place that keeps your money. That's why you use a good dictionary that support phrases, and even give a context annotations[1]. That makes the adv…

You still have to know enough to discern what phrase seems to be correct in order to know that's the phrase you want.

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

#155

Post by foobarge »

viewer5 wrote: post #106
foobarge wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I cast aside written French input. I still had to produce output. And I did learn, under supervision, how to write well during these years; using French as a target language but that knowledge has proven to be highly re-usable. I'm lost writing correct French without a spell checker.
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