Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
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Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#2I want my children to be happy and fulfilled. Whether or not they're "like me" in doing so is of no importance.
But I do want them to learn from my mistakes (as well as the mistakes of everyone else they are exposed to). One of the things I've tried to instill in them is "Make your own mistakes, not someone else's".
Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#3I want my children to be happy and fulfilled. Whether or not they're "like me" in doing so is of no importance. But I do want them to learn from my mistakes (as well as the mistakes of everyone else they are exposed to). One of the things I've tried to instill in them is "Make your own mistakes, not someone else's".
Having a child now makes wanting him to be "like me" seem like such a fools errand at this point. He's so obviously his own person that even if he decided to do things in a similar way to me his path to getting there would be so different that it wouldn't actually be the same at all.
Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#4"A programmer's perspective" but nothing unique to a programmer parent. I assumed it was going to be about all of the bad habits that go with being a dedicated tech worker, because there are lots of them.
Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#5In terms of programming, if my child wants to imitate me and learn to code, then fine, but doing so is riddled with problems. Firstly, code is so unforgiving, unlike art, where mistakes in art can be tolerated and even add to the aesthetic of the art, but one single misplaced comma in code ruins the whole program.
Then there's the countless times you have to bang your head against the wall whilst coding because of some unrelenting problem/bug that just won't go away and you've spent 5 hours straight combing Google for a solution, but you need the grit to solve it all by your lonesome. No savior of a snippet will solve it for you.
Then there's the mental gymnastics required to envision the end result of your code and the delayed gratification you endure when everything is in prototype mode for long periods of time. You have to have the vision of the end product and execute accordingly.
Coding is not for everyone, but imitate at your leisure.
Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#6Adults think that the best thing you can do for a child is to turn the child out like them. Think about that, that's got to be one of the dumbest ideas ever. - Alan Kay ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#7> We are all full of all sorts of bad behaviour. Instead of accepting our faults we should strive to fix them, so that we don’t pass them onto our children.
We should work on our faults, yes. But we should also strive to accept them, so that our children learn to accept their own faults as well.
If you treat any imperfection as an intolerable flaw, you will teach your children to treat any of their own flaws as intolerable.
Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#8[flagged]
Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#9In terms of programming, if my child wants to imitate me and learn to code, then fine, but doing so is riddled with problems. Firstly, code is so unforgiving, unlike art, where mistakes in art can be tolerated and even add to the aesthetic of the art, but one single misplaced comma in code ruins the whole program. Then there's the countless times you have to bang your head against the wall whilst coding because of so…
Not to mention this whole LLM thing people are talking about...
Re: Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective
#10The ability to pass on passions is dependent on your ability to detach your ego from work and suppress subconscious hierarchy behavior. As in if display how great you are and your kid is not, you destroy the base of the whole transfer. This is not a company environment were the senior lectures the junior. Better yet, hide your ability and just encourage passionate behavior. It's okay to stay up late doing a thing you love so much it's not work anymore.