Early vs. Beginning Coders • Hacker News Board

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#81

Post by klibertp » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:25 PM UTC

octatoan wrote: post #61

morganvachon wrote: post #58

I feel like I'm perpetually stuck between what the author describes as "beginner" and "early". I understand what programming is, I can write a bash script that does what I want it to (granted, I have to read a ton of man pages to make sure I understand what it is I want to accomplish), I can write simple programs in Visual Basic or Python or Javascript that do simple tasks. I understand program flow, logic, and all t…

Haskell does not need you to learn mathematics (category theory, if you've heard of it). Grab Learn You A Haskell[1] and have fun. ;) [1]: http://learnyouahaskell.com

> Haskell does not need you to learn mathematics

...but it makes you feel stupid if you don't. Better to use "Real World OCaml" if you're more interested in the ideas themselves than in their formalizations or related nomenclature.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#82

Post by fredgrott » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:28 PM UTC

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…

try COBOL..just one space in the right column and it crashes :)

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#83

Post by cwp » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:35 PM UTC

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #27

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…

"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'…

Writing code is not mechanical and deterministic. Executing code is mechanical and deterministic. As much as possible, anyway.

Code has bugs because people don't think like computers.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#84

Post by sanderjd » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

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…

You're exhibiting exactly the phenomenon the OP was talking about.

> The way I would explain it is to have them take a imagine writing a code tokenizer and interpreter of a simple language themselves.

For instance, the OP had a part about how a beginner doesn't know that `|` is called "pipe". It follows pretty logically that they are significantly less likely to know what a tokenizer or interpreter is, let alone be able to imagine writing one. Your intro CS class at Berkeley where you did this stuff in Lisp was catering to (in the OP's parlance) early programmers, not beginner programmers.

The whole point is that there's a difference between people who know nothing and people who know things but need practice applying them. There are lots and lots of people who don't know anything about programming, whether you think it's ridiculous or not.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#85

Post by gohrt » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #31

SCHiM wrote: post #14

This is good. I've had problems that were somewhat related to what the author talks about. When I was learning C# and was already quite fluent in C/C++. I had a big problem with the C# type system/management. I'd been reading guides that were in the first category the author mentions, eg. "not really a beginner, but new to this language". I was trying to retrieve the bytes that a certain string represented. I was loo…

That's only "basics" if you've got the wrong idea. There are millions of possible mistakes, no beginners' guide can explicitly address every one. People told you to just use the string - wasn't that a good enough answer?

>People told you to just use the string - wasn't that a good enough answer?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KzOtz-8coJU/Uga2fN7SNmI/AAAAAAAAKI...

> > I was trying to retrieve the bytes that a certain string represented.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#86

Post by gohrt » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:38 PM UTC

jordanpg wrote: post #54

loup-vaillant wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 conce…

I just don't see it. No one would ever recommend learning Spanish and Mandarin at the same time, for any reason. All of the things you said are true, and yet the beginner has only so much time, so much patience, so much learning to do in one day. Given this, I see larger advantages to spending all of that time and energy in one ecosystem. There are many perspectives on, say, Java coding styles, patterns, and idioms.…

> No one would ever recommend learning Spanish and Mandarin at the same time

American? :-)

Huge portions of the world (Europe and Asia especially) raise children bilingually.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#87

Post by NTDF9 » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

Part of the problem is that there are too many things each language can now do. Every single language wants feature parity with every other language. Every single language wants to do everything.

This means, an expert in one language is going to be "Beginner" instead of "Early" in some some ways...but "Early" instead of "Beginner" in other ways.

Anecdotally, as a software engineer working with C++, I had to spend a whole months trying to understand event-driven programming of other languages. I didn't really need tutorials on loops and recursions but I sure as hell needed to understand how a typical program in that language works.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#88

Post by kevinschumacher » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:40 PM UTC

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…

"what's a tokenizer? what's an interpreter?", said the beginner.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#89

Post by mdpopescu » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

morganvachon wrote: post #58

I feel like I'm perpetually stuck between what the author describes as "beginner" and "early". I understand what programming is, I can write a bash script that does what I want it to (granted, I have to read a ton of man pages to make sure I understand what it is I want to accomplish), I can write simple programs in Visual Basic or Python or Javascript that do simple tasks. I understand program flow, logic, and all t…

You don't have to understand everything. I've been programming for 30 years and it took me 3 years to understand monads. (At least I think I understand them /grin.) I also have no idea what "inverted trees" mean - if you're talking about the recent thread about the guy who got rejected by Google, I believe it just meant trees with the left and right nodes reversed.

Re: Early vs. Beginning Coders

#90

Post by merrickread » Wed, Jun 17, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

Last fall I went through a coding bootcamp in Toronto. It was 9 weeks of hard work sprinkled with lots of frustration and lots of feel good successes. A main takeaways I had was everyone comes in with a different background and everyone has a unique approach to learning.

The problem expressed in this article is a fundamental bottleneck of education. The communication between teacher and student is often misinterpreted at both ends and the subject matter is never perfectly conveyed or received.

I feel what really lacks in the learn to code community is teaching one how to actually learn. Lay a positive attitude towards failure and a framework of problem solving first, the content and understanding of a language will come after.