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Early vs. Beginning Coders

zedshaw.com

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Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#41

Post by natural219 »

jordanpg wrote: post #39

The only important trait I see that matters for either of these groups is a willingness to try things, push buttons, see what happens. A beginner worries about breaking the computer and doesn't yet understand that any question they have can be typed into a search engine verbatim and will probably be answered with 20 SO posts and 50 blogs posts. And early programmer is stumbling down this road. I don't know that this…

I disagree with this entirely. You can "push buttons and see what happens" for decades without guidance on what buttons you're pushing and why. In addition, newcomers absolutely cannot just "type [their question] into a search engine verbatim" -- this is actually a highly advanced skill that you get after years of learning the correct patterns, abstractions, and jargon you need to get an effective answer for what you're looking for.

For example, a beginner might phrase queries like "jquery how do I make text appear on screen", whereas a more experienced person might query something like "jquery element insert value".

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#42

Post by natural219 »

This is a fantastic article and is another great example to pile on as to why Zed Shaw is the king of programming teaching.

One area I struggle with in tutoring is how to inspire/invoke/detect disciplined motivation. What I mean is, whenever I sit down to show someone something, I'm constantly questioning myself "wait, do they actually want to learn this level of detail, or am I just giving too much information that's going in one ear and out the other?" If someone is definitely motivated to learn that's great (and really inspiring for me as a teacher to do better at explaining things precisely).

If this nomenclature were more understood, I would like to say something like "Sorry, what you're trying to do is more of an early/junior task, and right now you need to stick with the Beginning basics". I just don't know how to phrase that without sounding condescending.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#43

Post by dkersten »

jordanpg wrote: post #39

The only important trait I see that matters for either of these groups is a willingness to try things, push buttons, see what happens. A beginner worries about breaking the computer and doesn't yet understand that any question they have can be typed into a search engine verbatim and will probably be answered with 20 SO posts and 50 blogs posts. And early programmer is stumbling down this road. I don't know that this…

and ignore the din of people on the internet who claim to effortlessly, expertly jump among 10 languages as part of their day-to-day.

The problem with this isn't whether or not that claim is true, but rather that (as you say) its not the right thing for a beginner. Its perfectly fine (desirable, even, IMHO) for an intermediate-to-expert programmer to know many (different) languages and use a few of them regularly (although perhaps outside of JS and whatever you use on the backend, probably daily is a bit much maybe), but this is all distraction for a beginner. Beginners should focus on learning programming concepts, not on learning programming languages (but one language is a requirement, otherwise you can't learn by doing!) Although, Zeds point about learning the basics of four languages still holds - you can do that and then focus on one.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#44

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

danso wrote: post #36
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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'…

Uh...the reasons can vary quite wildly...so I'll stick to one scope: Why does production code suck even when it's been written by competent programmers? I would argue that in a non-trivial system, it becomes difficult to program components that reliably interact with each other. If one team changes the interface to their component, that is not as "deterministic" from your perspective, if the production workflow doesn…

As someone who was a beginning, community college CS 101 coder at one time, I think focusing on the mechanical, "this code won't compile unless every i is dotted and t is crossed" way of thinking is only half the story. Getting code to compile, after about the 2nd week of class, isn't too hard. Figuring out why your code doesn't give the right result, even when it compiles and runs, is by far a harder skill for new coders to pick up.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#45

Post by danso »

bwy wrote: post #40
danso wrote: post #21

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 woul…

This is pretty ridiculous, man. I don't think I know a beginner programmer who would be so stuck on "every character matters." (Which isn't even true, to some level, in many langauges - ; in JavaScript and Python? Whitespace in languages besides Python?) The way I would explain it is to have them take a imagine writing a code tokenizer and interpreter of a simple language themselves. That's what the intro CS class I…

> This is pretty ridiculous, man. I don't think I know a beginner programmer who would be so stuck on "every character matters." (Which isn't even true, to some level, in many langauges - ; in JavaScript and Python? Whitespace in languages besides Python?)

I guess YMMV...but most beginners I've worked with are confounded by why code interpreters are so literal. The double-equals sign versus an equals sign is one prominent example...it's not that they can't understand why rules exist...but they seem to think the negative consequences (complete program failure) seem to outweigh the tininess of the error.

After dealing with `=` vs `==` errors in beginners' code...something that I almost never screw up on my own as a coder...I've begun to respect the convention in R to use `<-` as the assignment operator...

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#46

Post by eclipxe »

MrDosu wrote: post #30
jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there's definitely an underlying substrate of significant commonality between the various programming languages and technologies. If you're at 10 years in and you still feel like a beginner, you're doing something wrong. Obviously I can't expect to pick up a brand new technology and instantly expect to be a wizard, but I do expect that I can pick up a new technology and be functioning at a high level in a week or…

If you pick up a new tech and it's " just a respelling/reskinning of some technology I've used before" you are doing something very silly or are not using new tech at all. If it's basically the same there is no reason to switch.

Everything comes down to data structures and algorithms. It's just a matter of how much syntactic sugar you want on top of it. Image processing? Machine Learning? Real time communications? Functional programming? HTML/CSS/Javascript? Meteor? NoSQL?

It's all the same thing under the hood, just better syntax and tooling. Data structures and algorithms.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#47

Post by rgbrenner »

MrDosu wrote: post #30
jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there's definitely an underlying substrate of significant commonality between the various programming languages and technologies. If you're at 10 years in and you still feel like a beginner, you're doing something wrong. Obviously I can't expect to pick up a brand new technology and instantly expect to be a wizard, but I do expect that I can pick up a new technology and be functioning at a high level in a week or…

If you pick up a new tech and it's " just a respelling/reskinning of some technology I've used before" you are doing something very silly or are not using new tech at all. If it's basically the same there is no reason to switch.

jerf is right.. you have a mental model of how a programming language works, and a new language is just changing the syntax used to represent those same concepts.

Does that mean there's no reason to switch? No.. since some languages are better at representing some ideas; some languages have better abstractions for certain ideas; etc.

I think starting with a lower level language helps with this way of thinking. If you learn everything about C (for example), and later learn a higher level language, it's easy to think of how you would implement a certain feature of the higher level language.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#48

Post by loup-vaillant »

jordanpg wrote: post #39

The only important trait I see that matters for either of these groups is a willingness to try things, push buttons, see what happens. A beginner worries about breaking the computer and doesn't yet understand that any question they have can be typed into a search engine verbatim and will probably be answered with 20 SO posts and 50 blogs posts. And early programmer is stumbling down this road. I don't know that this…

> I would also recommend that beginners/early programmers learn 1 programming language really well

That's a dangerous approach. The first language is very hard to learn, because, well, it's your first. And when you stick to one language, you easily conflate the syntax and the semantics.

So when you learn a second language, you have to unlearn the syntax of the first, in addition to learn the genuinely different concepts. Distinguishing the similar stuff in new clothes from the actual new stuff is hard. Simply put, learning the second languages will be very hard as well.

Now your programmer has two data point, and knows with their gut that learning a new programming language is hard. This sets expectation, an will make it harder to learn additional languages. It will take some time to realise learning a new language, besides a few insane exceptions like C++, is not that hard.

> ignore the din of people on the internet who claim to effortlessly, expertly jump among 10 languages as part of their day-to-day.

Jumping from language to language may not be that easy. But one can certainly be an expert at 20 programming languages. Once you see the commonalities, there isn't much to learn. Really, a good course in programming languages is enough to get you started. The hard part is memorising 20 big programming frameworks, with all their warts, special cases and so on. Still, if you know the concepts, learning the vocabulary takes little time.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#49

Post by vezzy-fnord »

lmm wrote: post #33
zeroxfe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is one case where I wish Pascal had won. := for assignment, = for comparison.

Dates back to one of the ALGOL dialects, actually.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#50

Post by mcgrootz »

jordanpg wrote: post #39

The only important trait I see that matters for either of these groups is a willingness to try things, push buttons, see what happens. A beginner worries about breaking the computer and doesn't yet understand that any question they have can be typed into a search engine verbatim and will probably be answered with 20 SO posts and 50 blogs posts. And early programmer is stumbling down this road. I don't know that this…

Have you read Zed's books? I think this "ethos" is captured pretty nicely in them. Most chapters end asking the reader to solve a few challenges, some of these are difficult for a beginner, and it is recommended that you spend some time researching the answer.
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