Never and ten years[1] feel pretty similar in month two.
How I Learned to Code
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: How I Learned to Code
#12Developing software != 'coding'.
Re: How I Learned to Code
#13All the good coders I've ever met had already taught themselves to code before the age of 10. (Most of them were so passionate about it they went on to do computer science degrees which polished their raw skills and taught them rigor.) The question isn't how to learn to code: if you have the innate ability you can't STOP yourself from coding the first time you encounter a computer. I'm all for people learning new ski…
Indeed; coding is akin to music, art, etc. in that it's not so much you learn to do it, but it's just what you do as a result of you being you. Sure, learning is necessary to grasp the tools and make them do what you want, but once you have enough tools to get started (editor/compiler, guitar, paint & brush) you just run with it. At age 10 Dad brought home a terminal and had me type in a 3-line program; ran it once, and immediately wanted to change it, already grokking loops and output formatting. Programming as "work" isn't so much a means to an end as someone funding my needs so I can do what I can't stop myself from doing: code.
I half expected the article to consider the sheer scale of the programming stack: today, the conceptual layers from NAND gates & machine code to graphical resource editors are so numerous and complex that I can scarcely comprehend how any student of programming starting out these days any later than grade school can absorb the material in any sensible timeframe.
Re: How I Learned to Code
#14I didn't really start learning to code, even though I had a year of CS under my belt, until I found a problem that I wanted to solve. I was using Audiogalaxy to download music over a 56.6K modem and I wrote a program to monitor the download folder and move any file after it was completed in order to prevent automatically sharing/uploading it to other users.
It wasn't as technically difficult as most CS homework, but it was the first time I started thinking about programming as a tool to solve an actual problem I was experiencing.
Re: How I Learned to Code
#15In writing we call this "The Genius of Desperation".
That is an interesting expression. If it's very established, do you have a reference where I can read more about it? Google turns up nothing but a quote by Disraeli.
Re: How I Learned to Code
#16All the good coders I've ever met had already taught themselves to code before the age of 10. (Most of them were so passionate about it they went on to do computer science degrees which polished their raw skills and taught them rigor.) The question isn't how to learn to code: if you have the innate ability you can't STOP yourself from coding the first time you encounter a computer. I'm all for people learning new ski…
I don't buy this. To be peerless in this profession probably this description makes sense. But I know a lot of physicists that came to programming because of the paucity of jobs for BS Physics, and they were, at the worst, very competent, up to extremely good. I know plenty of others for whom programming is a means to an end - they want to make robots, gather data to answer social questions, or what have you, and the programming is a means to an end.
With that said I did find myself wondering whether the author is a programmer, or slings code around. If you have the right kind of mind its not so hard to figure out how to tell the computer to do something, especially with a powerful SW stack; it's another thing entirely to deliver, say, 300K lines of code that is readable, robust, maintainable, extensible, and somewhat future proof, or to make the stack itself from the ground up. Of course, many of the "I've been programming since the age of 10" can't do that either.
And, with that said (:)), I probably share your suspicion of wanting to 'do a start up'; it's hard to throw a stick here (SV) without hitting somebody yacking about a start up. Problem is, 'start up' is so often the idea. It's rarer to hear "I want to build a device to help the blind, I reviewed my options, and VC money turned out to be the best choice for me because..." (VC money is often a terrible option, it depends on your business situation).
But I am straying off the subject, which is the blog said to learn to do something, dive in and actually try to accomplish something. I am wholeheartedly behind that. I'm trying to learn a topic for work, and am reviewing some Coursera courses. And, not getting far - I need to immediately try to apply the ideas to a real problem to get traction, I think. I think I will succeed just fine, despite not having tried to do this particular thing (Machine Learning/AI) since the age of 10.
Re: How I Learned to Code
#17Yes, granted, the title's intention is to inspire controversy, but it's still worth pointing out that the author's two concluding avenues to 'learning to code' - all-or-nothing desperation and irresistible intellectual attraction - are baseless. I'm confident that they're entirely false. Just more evidence-free platitudes dreamed up by a fellow twenty-something. I'd wager that these two extremes represent a very small percentage of real coders.
To answer anecdotal proof with anecdotal proof, I studied finance and taught myself to build web apps. I didn't do it because I had to. I didn't do it because I couldn't stop myself. I just forced myself to do it the same way I force myself to memorize Chinese characters, the same way I force myself out of bed every morning. Willpower isn't some mythical ability granted to the anointed few. It's just asking yourself, what am I doing right now? Is it what I want?
There's also a troubling perception of what 'coding' is behind this post and many others. I write code for a living and I'm under no illusions about my abilities. As James Somers pointed out in Aeon, I'm a kid playing around with tools given to me by adults. Nobody like myself or the author is going to build a Rails, a V8, an Ember, a Heroku. If I learned how to use a brush I wouldn't call myself an artist. It's fine that we're becoming more abstracted from the machine's reality - thank God DHH didn't have to use punchcards - but with that abstraction should come a bit of humility about what we've actually learned. Because for web development, at least, it's mostly syntax.
I'd better stop before I exceed than the original post length. If you'd like a tl;dr, it is: fuck the author's position, my experiences contradict it, and the author is confused about what 'real' code constitutes. (However, I wholeheartedly agree with his suggestion to learn by building something you yourself want.)
Re: How I Learned to Code
#18All the good coders I've ever met had already taught themselves to code before the age of 10. (Most of them were so passionate about it they went on to do computer science degrees which polished their raw skills and taught them rigor.) The question isn't how to learn to code: if you have the innate ability you can't STOP yourself from coding the first time you encounter a computer. I'm all for people learning new ski…
Young minds certainly have more plasticity, and I agree that people with the requisite level of interest tend to discover programming young.
But I think there's another factor that's at least as important: time. A ten year old has a much bigger time budget for learning programming than a thirty year old.
And it takes a vast amount of time to truly master it.
Re: How I Learned to Code
#19The biggest problem with this article is that it is -- and this is non-obvious until you've read through the whole thing -- written with a very specific audience in mind. To wit, the audience the article is directed to is people similar to the author in his earlier circumstance while he was still working in finance.
It is assumes that whoever is reading the article is similarly situated to that earlier version of the author both in terms of career circumstance and interests.
This is particularly clear in this excerpt:
I found that there are two types of people that power through the frustration [...] [t]hose that are really intellectually interested in learning to code. If you haven’t learned to code by now, it’s highly unlikely you’re one of them.
Re: How I Learned to Code
#20What a load of crap. Coding is a skill, and like nearly every skill you can learn it on the side. It's like saying that you'll never learn to play the violin unless you quit your job and force yourself to play violin for your supper. Indeed, it's even more of a silly assertion, because you can be "pretty good" at playing the violin and still not be good enough to make something out of it, but you don't even have to be that good at coding to do something useful with it.