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Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

vikingcodeschool.com

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Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#131

Post by paulhauggis »

I was lucky because I started coding at 13 (Pascal and C). At that point in my life, I could spend all of my free time developing something cool just for fun (and learning a good foundation in the process).

By the time I got to college, new concepts took me a fraction of the time because I already had that foundation.

Even now, I went from 10+ years of PHP development to building full Python apps in a short amount of time. Aside from some newer features, it's mostly a syntax change. The basics are the same in every language.

I don't think I could start from knowing nothing. I just don't have the time.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#132

Post by pm90 »

bad_user wrote: post #95

Here's where I disagree with other people - software development is special in that it requires focus, relentlessness, intelligence, creativity and I also find it interesting that many software developers tend to suffer conditions from the autistic spectrum. To me that's a clear sign that software development requires the mind to be hardwired in a certain way. And the thing is - I never needed handholding, which is w…

I don't really agree with the notion that software development is something that others cannot learn if they try to do it; that seems like a very harsh perspective which, from my anecdotal experience, is far from the truth. Any skill can be learned if you have the discipline to put in regular effort: that's just the way the human mind works. I do agree that for a lot of people, Software Engineering is easier because they have a certain kind of brain, just like Mathematics or Physics or Music is easier or "makes sense" for some people more than others.

If anything, we need to promote education among adults, give them the choice to possibly check out any vocation that they would want to try. Liberate them from the notion that they are "stuck" doing what they chose to do earlier in their life. I'm not saying that its easy; you have to start small and take baby steps. And its not something that can be done in a day or a week or a month. But if modern society has provided us one great benefit, it is of making knowledge accessible very inexpensively.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#133

Post by rapind »

rcthompson wrote: post #43

When I was in college, one CS professor explained the difficulty of coding to me in terms of discreteness vs continuity. In the real world, things are continuous. If you accidentally build your structure with 9 supports instead of 10, then you only lose 10% of the strength of the structure, more or less. The strength varies continuously with the amount of support. But if you're writing a 10-line program and you forge…

If you're lucky it won't compile. It's when it's 2% wrong that makes programming so hard.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#134

Post by DanielKehoe »

I've had the pleasure of co-teaching Rails classes with Erik Trautman (OP) and he's a smart, dedicated guy. He's written a thoughtful article but underplays a key point. Learning to code would not be "so damn hard" if there were better learning resources. There's too much "learn to code" crap for beginners (as Erik points out), and not enough resources for advanced education (the "resource density" in the "Desert of Despair," as he points out). Learning to code would be easier if someone produced better advanced tutorials, books, and courses. I've been doing this for two years with the RailsApps tutorials [1]. And my "fluffy cat" book, "Learn Ruby on Rails," [2] provides guidance for writing apps from scratch without tutorials. Erik's article would be totally irrelevant if authors and teachers delivered better educational content. Erik's trying to do it with Viking Code School, and I've been trying to do it with my own writing, too. It's educators and authors that have to get smarter and work harder, not learners.

[1] https://tutorials.railsapps.org/ [2] "Learn Ruby on Rails" on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QK2T1SY

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#135

Post by gambiter »

spain wrote: post #122

I feel like I'm in the "Desert of Despair" and I'm not quite sure where to go. So far I'm self-taught in C, C++, Python, Lisp (a few of them) and some shell stuff. I have the basic syntax nailed in all of those. I don't know any of them well enough to be able to write simple programs without constantly looking up StackOverflow articles or reading references. I haven't even touched GUI programming. It doesn't help tha…

Personally, I think this is the phase where what you need most is practice. There are practical things you need to learn that you just can't learn without running into them during a project.

Just keep practicing. Varied things. Challenging things.

You'll get there!

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#136

Post by the_cat_kittles »

rcthompson wrote: post #43

When I was in college, one CS professor explained the difficulty of coding to me in terms of discreteness vs continuity. In the real world, things are continuous. If you accidentally build your structure with 9 supports instead of 10, then you only lose 10% of the strength of the structure, more or less. The strength varies continuously with the amount of support. But if you're writing a 10-line program and you forge…

i say its "brittle" ...those words discrete and continuous dont really apply cleanly, though i understand the idea somewhat intuitively

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#137

Post by baq »

codingdave wrote: post #44

Many of the coders I know (which is mostly folk in their 40s) never learned from scratch. More often, we started in support roles, and slowly worked into the code. First, learning to read it to help troubleshoot issue, then making basic changes, and slowly picking up more and more of a specific codebase. Once the basics were understood, we'd start making basic apps on our own, often while still supporting more comple…

did you have people readily available to ask questions to and get correct answers? it makes all the difference if you have somebody to guide you through periods of being stuck.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#138

Post by svachalek »

freehunter wrote: post #126
dccoolgai wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course one is not "born knowing how to code". Saying "Just code" does not mean "sit down by yourself and try to figure out the C compiler." It means, for most of the people I've met/worked with "Stop agonizing over what course to take, what book to read, what you should build first - just build." Implicit in that is that the person can ask me for help outside of some master/grasshopper relationship.. no I'm a code…

I think we're way past the point where mindlessly playing around and idle curiosity can reliably teach someone how to program. That might get them interested in programming, but it's one thing to print something to a terminal or change the text on an exiting page; it's quite something else to get a GUI app going or deploy Rails to a server. And GUI/web is pretty bare-minimum when it comes to keeping people interested…

It's funny you use walking as an example. I never told my son to "just walk" but I may as well have. No one taught him, he never asked how. It just never occurred to him that there was any option but to keep trying until it works. As far as I know everyone learns to walk this way.

In my generation and before it, most of us learned coding the same way. (And self esteem for that matter.) Even if you do have the luxury of teachers and classes and handholding and cheerleading, the real learning is not going to happen until you sit down with a code editor and actually try to make something real.

And if the first difficulty you hit causes you to turn around and run then that's another win. It's a very fast way for you to learn this not a career or hobby for you, because dealing with those decisions and difficulties is a major part of the job. 30 years in I'm still dealing with stuff like that every day.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#139

Post by Alex3917 »

spain wrote: post #122

I feel like I'm in the "Desert of Despair" and I'm not quite sure where to go. So far I'm self-taught in C, C++, Python, Lisp (a few of them) and some shell stuff. I have the basic syntax nailed in all of those. I don't know any of them well enough to be able to write simple programs without constantly looking up StackOverflow articles or reading references. I haven't even touched GUI programming. It doesn't help tha…

> I don't know any of them well enough to be able to write simple programs without constantly looking up StackOverflow articles or reading references.

Most people who write code for a living never bother to memorize the syntax for all the tools they use. Figuring out the logic is the hard part of coding, having to look up the syntax for every other line shouldn't have much impact on your productivity.

If you want to memorize the syntax then there are a bunch of guides to doing that (e.g. Derek Sivers wrote something on this), but that's probably not actually your limiting factor.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#140

Post by Stratoscope »

ingler wrote: post #110
Stratoscope wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first job was Night Operator at Transdata, a dial-up timesharing company in Phoenix, for the summer of 1969, earning $2/hour. The fun part was that they turned off the timesharing service at night - but they didn't want to power down the Sigma 5 for fear that it might not start back up in the morning. There were occasional overnight batch jobs to run, but mostly I didn't have much to do. I already knew BASIC, havi…

I was 8 years old in 1970. My dad was working for NCR in Waltham, Mass. He'd bring home a honkin' huge teletype and an acoustic coupler on the weekends. I taught myself BASIC and got hooked on Hamurabi [0], my first computer game vice. How much paper did all of us go through back then? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi

A lot of paper!

Do you remember the first time you saw one of those newfangled "glass teletypes"? A terminal that printed out your typing and the mainframe's reply on a CRT instead of paper?

Was your first thought anything like mine: "How do I look back at what I was working on a few minutes ago? There's no roll of paper piled up behind the machine! How do I see my printouts?"

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