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Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

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Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#101

Post by jacquesm »

Swizec wrote: post #69
soup10 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I copy and paste code all the time. I'm in the business of getting shit done, not learning everything ever, I don't need to learn the ins and outs of some obscure algorithm I'm only going to use once. I also don't need to memorize Apis and boilerplate for technologies I rarely use. Of course once i'm settled into a domain I don't need google anymore. But it's invaluable for quickly diving into new stuff.

Please never stop doing this. I get paid $$$++ to swoop in after people like you are done and whole teams grind to a halt productivity-wise because the codebase is so bad. You are doing god's work, son. Thank you.

Now I need to go buy another keyboard. Thanks :)

To the GP: Swizec has it, please don't stop.

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#102

Post by armada651 »

The kind of brain necessary for programming is the one that sees something it doesn't understand and then does everything it can to learn what it didn't understand.

The real reward in programming is clearly seeing how much your understanding has grown. But at the same time you're humbled by how much you have yet to learn.

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#103

Post by erikb »

Although the basic assumption by the author seems to be correct, the author himself is not very far in his journey to become a programming master. I now study and work in programming for about 7 years. About 3 years into programming I thought the same way as the author: Tutorials and copy&paste.

If you reach a certain level tutorials become a waste of time, because you don't need structural help any more. You also understand that you shouldn't google how to implement a specific solution in the language of choice but which solution in that language solves the given problem. You also don't copy&paste because just solving a single problem is not the question any more. You can already solve most problems. It's more that the desire to improve leads to learning new principles, which means hand-copying small code examples (sometimes from actual programs not from SO questions) and playing with them until you get a feel for it and then start to use it in your daily programming tasks.

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#104

Post by randac »

Swizec wrote: post #88
twelvechairs wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being offensive here - going all as hominem rather than actually demonstrating any reason parent comment is wrong.

You missed this part of the post then: > whole teams grind to a halt productivity-wise because the codebase is so bad

Don't be ridiculous. That does not make "You are doing god's work, son. Thank you." any less ad hominem, nor do you actually demonstrate any reasons. Your argument amounts to "copy+paste coding is bad, therefore your codebase is bad", yet at no point explains why. But keep downvoting anyone who points that out :)

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#105

Post by twelvechairs »

Swizec wrote: post #88
twelvechairs wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being offensive here - going all as hominem rather than actually demonstrating any reason parent comment is wrong.

You missed this part of the post then: > whole teams grind to a halt productivity-wise because the codebase is so bad

I didn't miss this part - you didn't put any reasoning behind it.

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#106

Post by mattmanser »

lazyjones wrote: post #100
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #58

"They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste." No, no, no! This always frustrates me. This is not 'coding' (maybe it is, and we should be doing less of it, and more programming). This is gluing together pre-coded snippets and trying to make it work. Continuing to do this is an impediment to gettin…

> Copy and paste doesn't help you at all with this. In some cases it may prevent you learning essential lessons and hinder your improvement. It annoys the heck out of me too when people apply for a programming job and cannot implement even trivial CS methods (like integer => string conversion with base N), then point out that they would just Google for a solution if they needed something like this. But to be honest,…

I have been programming professionally for 10 years, 5 years more as a hobby. I have been paid 100s of thousands of dollars, my code is used daily by 10s of thousands of people, I have built large, complex systems from scratch, worked in teams and by myself. The things I make do what they're supposed to, they don't break often[1], tend to be fast and usually my client is a happy bunny.

I can fix anyone's code, even when I've never used the language before [2] and it was written by an outsourced programmer who quite obviously only read "how to write SatanScript in 28 days" and then was locked in a room for 2 years until his program kinda worked if you held it upside down while reciting the words to Annie.

I am confident I am a good coder at this point in my career, and much better than many of the programmers I have met. There are a handful I have met that I know are better than me.

I would only have a vague idea of how to do a integer => string conversion with base N without googling it. So am I shit? Am I suddenly a useless programmer because lazyjones only likes people who studied CS? Even though I can understand that code in a glance and rewrite it, often better or clearer than the SO example?

You have picked an arbitrary, and extremely rare in the programming world, standard. No-one needs to write their own string handling routines any more.

Programming is hard and there are many different flavours.

And yours is an old fashioned favour from the early 00s. Stop judging people by it.

[1] Apart from my very bad habit of making a minor last minute tweak or bug fix, not testing it, and introducing an easily fixed bug

[2] They're all pretty much the same after you've used 3 or 4.

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#107

Post by nailer »

jesusmichael wrote: post #93
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #58

"They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste." No, no, no! This always frustrates me. This is not 'coding' (maybe it is, and we should be doing less of it, and more programming). This is gluing together pre-coded snippets and trying to make it work. Continuing to do this is an impediment to gettin…

wow... You must be from the school of re-inventing the wheel... most things that need to be coded have been done before by someone else and quite well... No one chops down their own tress when they want to build a deck. They take lumber that someone else preformed and make it fit their project. If you are writing all your own code every time on every project... You must get nothing done...

Libraries yes, copypasta no. They're maintained, have tests, and a download/follower count.

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#108

Post by lazyjones »

mattmanser wrote: post #106
lazyjones wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copy and paste doesn't help you at all with this. In some cases it may prevent you learning essential lessons and hinder your improvement. It annoys the heck out of me too when people apply for a programming job and cannot implement even trivial CS methods (like integer => string conversion with base N), then point out that they would just Google for a solution if they needed something like this. But to be honest,…

I have been programming professionally for 10 years, 5 years more as a hobby. I have been paid 100s of thousands of dollars, my code is used daily by 10s of thousands of people, I have built large, complex systems from scratch, worked in teams and by myself. The things I make do what they're supposed to, they don't break often[1], tend to be fast and usually my client is a happy bunny. I can fix anyone's code, even w…

> would only have a vague idea of how to do a integer => string conversion with base N without googling it. So am I shit?

I would probably not hire you unless you could actually back up your dubious claims ("I can fix anyone's code ..."). The funny thing is, while I am judging people by their ability to solve a particular problem (which admittedly may have an age bias), you are judging people who studied CS based on the fact that you didn't but are still full of yourself.

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#109

Post by nevi-me »

chubot wrote: post #82
Swizec wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you take a dollar amount. Then you increase it. Then you increase it some more. Because companies who can afford it will pay you pretty much anything if you can make their whole engineering team even just a few percent more productive by improving the codebase. Or can figure out very hairy issues caused by Daily WTF style situations. For example, I have a friend who sometimes fixes bugs in compiled software run…

Man... can I ask what led a company into the situation where they need to fix software without source code access? Did they rely on a vendor that went out of business? I imagine it is ancient software from the 80's or 90's?

To answer you, I'm 24, and an accountant by profession. From what I've seen, most banks still run some core functionality of their systems in IBM Mainframe, which includes JCL, COBOL and maybe other languages.

Because of space constraints then, file names were limited to 8 characters (someone correct me) and lines of code has fixed lengths. That already made commenting a nightmare. I have 'reverse engineered' scripts that were written more than a decade before I was born. Most have outdated documentation, filenames are a mess to figure out, and over time there have been automated conversion tools that were used to update language versions.

As I said, most of these systems still run some core functionality of the bank, and the people who wrote them ain't there no more, so banks have to shell out lots of money to either fix and maintain these, or to figure out what's happening so they can move to newer systems.

A form of anecdote could be that because IBM still make some form of x64 flavour Mainframe OS indicates that large corporates still have code that's potentially double my age.

Re: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

#110

Post by lotsofmangos »

Swizec wrote: post #69
soup10 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I copy and paste code all the time. I'm in the business of getting shit done, not learning everything ever, I don't need to learn the ins and outs of some obscure algorithm I'm only going to use once. I also don't need to memorize Apis and boilerplate for technologies I rarely use. Of course once i'm settled into a domain I don't need google anymore. But it's invaluable for quickly diving into new stuff.

Please never stop doing this. I get paid $$$++ to swoop in after people like you are done and whole teams grind to a halt productivity-wise because the codebase is so bad. You are doing god's work, son. Thank you.

There is a fair amount of code you should copy/paste unless you are doing pure research, some because it has been so well studied it is almost a certainty that you are not going to drastically improve on it and others, such as encryption implementations, because it is actively dangerous to fuck about with unless you are extremely careful and a domain expert.
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