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Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

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Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#261

Post by tacotime »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #258
serve_yay wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I agree, and I don't think it's a good thing. As Crockf…

I dont think so. Why wrong ? Computers have huge potential. Forget the naysayers who dont understand these "big machines taking our jobs!", they fear the change and spread this fear to those who work with them too. Be proud of what you do. Love it. Aknowledge you are on the right path. Or else change path or your way to approach it. Why do it if it feels wrong ?

>Why do it if it feels wrong ?

I may well be mistaken but I don't believe this was the intended meaning in the quote. Do what feels right, that's not being disputed... but what feels right to someone who "sees the code" behind things in life is often very different from what feels right to the average/normal human at this point in time. Like how everyone loves a good comedian but if you ask any good comedian they almost all say you have to be kinda fucked up to embrace that life... I agree with you though, I don't thing it's wrong or fucked up, I think it's just different from the lives that most people believe to be everyone's status quo.

Amish people freak me out. I can't understand why you'd want to limit yourself to that set of strange ideals (roofers with cell phones who play angry birds on lunch break but they have to higher a driver because it's against their weird rules?) but I don't believe they are fucked up or wrong... they're just a quark of this strange existence... I don't want to believe it but I might be just like them if I'd grown up indoctrinated into that life. There is some beauty in every path if you choose to see it.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#262

Post by pm90 »

vehementi wrote: post #219
mb_72 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, most people can 'learn' most things - but how well can they apply them? How good a developer / musician / etc will they be? I feel that this 'anyone can code' movement is good up to a point, and dangerous beyond that. In the same way that we don't need more half-arse and incompetent engineers, lawyers, doctors, pilots, we don't need similarly incapable developers. The field of software engineering is still in i…

I'd wager that the incapable developers aren't the ones that "just learned too late, welp", but rather lazy ones or ones without discipline, etc.

Yep. Discipline is the principle at work in making any craftsman better...whether it be a carpenter or a programmer. The nice thing about programming though is that there is so much technology and knowledge easily accessible for programmers to become better at their profession; I'm not so sure about other professions.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#263

Post by tacotime »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #259
bad_user wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a good thing either. I also find the spread of autism terrifying. My wife works at a kindergarten and she has had to deal with children that have problems from the autistic spectrum, healthy enough to be allowed to integrate in a normal collectivity, problematic enough that adjustment is very hard - they simply stand out from everybody else. And she noticed an interesting pattern, those children us…

Is standing out a bad thing ? Look at where we are now. Consumerism at its highest, people becoming mass educated, mass medicated, mass produced. Is the world in a good shape ? Maybe those who stand out are exactly the specialists we need to change this world. To think differently, as Steve Jobs famously said. We are not broken. We are perfect as we are. It is our approach to these children and people that is broken.…

I like it. But, I do think you can't fully embrace your strengths until you've admitted your weaknesses. Maybe it's my own biases but I'm afraid of people ending up at a dead end, an unsolvable problem, and not having an outlet because they haven't been forced to lead a somewhat normal life like the people surrounding them. That's an awfully dark place to be in. I think it's important not to let someone get too inside their own world, you still have to try and "integrate" them into "society" but I certainly agree there are better ways it could be done than holding everyone to the same strict/lacking standards across the board.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#264

Post by bshanks »

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…

> For me that desert of despair was fun and nothing could have stopped me.

> To me educational efforts for adults are misplaced.

My theory is that the difference is just that (some) young people have more spare time. If you have lots of time, then the inherent fun of learning stuff makes it fun to wander around learning stuff. But if you don't have much time, then you prioritize the things that relate to your goals, and then unexpected things in between you and the goal are stressful obstacles.

If you have tons of time, then your default state (alternative activity) is boredom, and learning anything interesting saves you from that, so you're glad you did it. But if you don't have much time, then learning something only to find that it wasn't as useful as you thought it would be (which often happens when you don't know what you don't know, but are trying to learn) is disappointing, because you know you sacrificed other important things (in retrospect, things that were more important) to spend time learning that.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#265

Post by pwg »

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…

Then you might enjoy example 7 on page 18 of this document:

UNIQUE ETHICAL PROBLEMS IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

By Walter Maner

http://faculty.usfsp.edu/gkearns/articles_fraud/computer_eth...

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#266

Post by [deleted] »

sturakov wrote: post #255
drcomputer wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My question to you, how do you approach learning? Learning new things and marking your progress? What gives you the satisfaction that you've made progress in "learning" a given topic? I don't know. Right now I am learning how to not know when I am learning, because I have determined that measuring learning in any form can often be a barrier that actually prevents me from learning.

Interesting.

[deleted]

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#267

Post by rcthompson »

danellis wrote: post #247
rcthompson wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. DNA as a programming language has to be at least somewhat continuous, or else evolution has nothing to optimize because every change has a random effect.

DNA is discrete. It can be precisely represented symbolically.

DNA is a lot less discrete that you might think. There's epigenetic factors and population proportions, for example.

But even considering DNA as just a 4-letter language with discrete characters, my point is that many, even most, small sequence changes to a genome (e.g. single-nucleotide variants) have small effects or no effect at all, which gives evolution a smooth enough gradient to optimize things over time. That's what I mean by continuous in this context. The opposite would be, for example, a hash function, where any change, no matter how small, completely changes the output. Hence you couldn't "evolve" a string with a hash of all 7s by selecting for "larger proportion of 7s in the hash function", because hash functions are completely discontinuous by design. But you can evolve a bacterium that includes more of a given amino acid in its proteins by selecting for "larger proportion of that amino acid in protein extract".

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#268

Post by emmelaich »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #136
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

Yes, "brittle" is how it's been described to me and how I describe it to others.

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#269

Post by rcthompson »

pwg wrote: post #265
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…

Then you might enjoy example 7 on page 18 of this document: UNIQUE ETHICAL PROBLEMS IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY By Walter Maner http://faculty.usfsp.edu/gkearns/articles_fraud/computer_eth...

Well, that's probably where my CS prof got the example. Thanks for pointing me to the likely source!

Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

#270

Post by arnaldo »

collyw wrote: post #240
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…

Not sure I agree with you. I always avoided maths at school, despite being reasonably good at it, because I didn't find it interesting. Studied biology and ended up in software engineering. Now after many years in the "real world" I can see the practical application for many forms of mathematics (particularly statistics), and kind of wish I had studied it more. If I had the chance to go back to university and study i…

I feel the same on the Maths part, and have recently found an excellent essay that depicts how this is the case and why we shouldn't be put off by the terrible "mathematics" we were taught at school: A Mathematician's Lament http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsL...
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