Early vs. Beginning Coders

I've been teaching coding to beginners for the past year now...and even after having done coding workshops/tutorials for many years previous, I've found I can never overestimate how wide the knowledge gap is for new coders.

Yesterday I was talking to a student who had taken the university's first-year CS course, which is in Java...she complained about how missing just one punctuation mark meant the whole program would fail...While I can't passionately advocate for the use of Java in first-year courses (too much boilerplate, and the OOP part is generally just hand-waved-away)...I've realized that the exactness of code must be emphasized to beginners. And not just as something to live with, but something to (eventually) cherish (for intermediate coders, this manifests itself in the realization that dynamic languages pay a price for their flexibility over statically-typed languages).

Is it a pain in the ass that missing a closing quotation mark will cause your program to outright crash, at best, or silently and inexplicably carry on, at worst? Sure. But it's not illogical. Computers are dumb. The explicitness of code is the compromise we humans make to translate our intellectual desire to deterministic, wide-scale operations. It cannot be overemphasized how dumb computers are, especially if you're going to be dealing with them at the programmatic level...and this is an inextricable facet of working with them. It's also an advantage...predictable and deterministic is better than fuzziness, when it comes down to doing things exactly right, in an automated fashion.

I think grokking the exactness of code will provide insight to the human condition. While using the wrong word in a program will cause it to fail...we perceive human communication as being much more forgiving with not-quite-right phrasing and word choices? But is that true? How do you know, really? How many times have you done something, like forget to say "Please", and the other person silently regards you as an asshole...and your perception is that the transaction went just fine? Or what if you say the right thing but your body (or attire) says another? Fuzziness in human communication is fun and exciting, but I wouldn't say that it's ultimately more forgiving than human-to-computer communication. At least with the latter, you have a chance to audit it at the most granular level...and this ability to debug is also inherent to the practice of coding, and a direct consequence of the structure of programming languages.

Actually, the brunt of the confusion is not the variable, but the '=' sign, which in mathematics means 'is equal to', while in a programming language means 'assign to'. This indirectly changes the semantics of the variable within the statement, and confuses people.

This is why `x + 5 = 10` makes sense in mathematics, but not in a programming language.

I think that's the stage I'm at right now (or getting there). But what is the divide between "junior" and "senior/advanced" programmers? And what would help somebody (me) push across that boundary?

"Is it a pain in the ass that missing a closing quotation mark will cause your program to outright crash, at best, or silently and inexplicably carry on, at worst? Sure. But it's not illogical. Computers are dumb. The explicitness of code is the compromise we humans make to translate our intellectual desire to deterministic, wide-scale operations. It cannot be overemphasized how dumb computers are, especially if you're going to be dealing with them at the programmatic level...and this is an inextricable facet of working with them. It's also an advantage...predictable and deterministic is better than fuzziness, when it comes down to doing things exactly right, in an automated fashion."

And yet so much code has so many bugs, defects and errors in it. If writing code was as mechanical and deterministic as you think it is (and should be?), then why does so much production code suck?

Someone's having a bad day :)

If in the world of programming - the biggest issue you're running up against is 'this is too basic', then great :)

If it's too basic, go read something else, no problem. If you're going to get anywhere in this world, you'll have to know how to research. Skimming and figuring out if something is useful or not is a valuable skill - now more than ever. So whoever complains about a well written book not suiting their fancy - it is their problem, not yours.