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Re: undefined

#111

Post by echelon »

asow92 wrote: post #110
echelon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should only take a few days This doesn't work for everybody! Let people learn in the direction that interests them. The highest energy reward function first. Once they feel rewarded, then let them learn theory. They'll have a deeper appreciation and the stamina to press deeper.

Hard pill to swallow: Doing things that are good for us that we don’t necessarily like is a part of growing up.

Forcing someone to learn something is a quick way to turn them off forever.

Re: undefined

#113

Post by Kalium »

picometer wrote: post #93
Kalium wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're completely right. That's a wonderfully kind, empathetic, and compassionate approach that's incredibly effective for teaching people what kind of power they are starting to have access to. I've found it's also one that is very expensive as measured by instructional time and energy. I've also found it relatively ineffectual for teaching fundamentals. I do not have to lecture someone about how they are unworthy a…

This seems like a good context for the quote, “if you want to build a ship, […] teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” I don’t think that Saint-Exupery intended to suggest that the yearning was enough on its own, but it makes the process so much more effective.

The trick is doing so without demeaning the value of basic carpentry. Which would be obviously silly in building a ship, but in computing we frequently have people looking to become software engineers without encountering or learning the fundamentals of the field.

This particular project comes from people who regard fundamentals as optional.

Re: undefined

#114

Post by johnnny »

tester756 wrote: post #38
l__l wrote: post #7

> Today's developers didn't learn binary before learning Python, why should you learn how to code without the most modern tools? This phrasing makes me wary. There's a difference between being self-taught, and not even bothering to teach yourself the absolute fundamentals of computing, like binary...

I'll argue - bitwise operations, they're fundamentals too, but If you arent working close to hardware, then for example doing bitwise operations may be really rare. I don't think I've met a problem that required them even once during my first few years as SE. I've had CS degree and years of experience and I werent proficient with those, I needed to write it down in steps and then I started working closer to hardware…

I work in networking, not particularly close to the hardware. I have colleagues who manipulate IP addresses by looking at the string representation of the address, splitting on the `.`, casting each part back to an integer, etc. Their code breaks as soon as we use a netmask other that /24 or (shock, horror!) we run in an IPv6 environments.

Re: undefined

#115

Post by asow92 »

echelon wrote: post #111
asow92 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard pill to swallow: Doing things that are good for us that we don’t necessarily like is a part of growing up.

Forcing someone to learn something is a quick way to turn them off forever.

Yes, I can see that now that I’ve tried to teach you this point.

Re: undefined

#116

Post by mynameisvlad »

denton-scratch wrote: post #104
mynameisvlad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your own admission you have never used the knowledge you learned. Why exactly is it “good to know how it works” if you literally have never used that knowledge? Why is it “something you want to get a handle on pretty quickly” if you don’t touch binary? Are there places where it would come up? Most certainly. Is it required learning for every single dev out there? Highly debatable.

> Highly debatable. For the sake of debate: call me old-fashioned, but I don't ever want to rely on code from a "developer" who isn't familiar with binary notation.

How does knowing binary produce meaningfully better code? Most of us aren't working at a low enough level for it to be substantial.

You should be judging the code, not the person who wrote it.

Re: undefined

#117

Post by Swizec »

nmnmnmnmnm wrote: post #98
Swizec wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a difference between being self-taught, and not even bothering to teach yourself the absolute fundamentals of computing, like binary Been doing this for almost 30 years now, about 15 of those professionally. I think the last time I used binary was in a microcontrollers class in high school. Even in college, yeah we talked a lot about binary, we learned the single most useful thing in my career – truth table…

>Did we ever use binary for anything practical? No of course not, that’s what the compiler is for. How to tell people you have never implemented anything performance sensitive in your life without spelling it out bluntly in a nutshell. The code of any popular image processing/decoder/encoder/compression/cryptographic libraries is littered with the use of bit operators because they operate at the fundamental building…

> How to tell people you have never implemented anything performance sensitive in your life without spelling it out bluntly in a nutshell

And that’s okay. Millions of engineers work on software that leverages those fine-tuned optimizations. Hundreds of engineers make them.

Plus I grew up in an era of cheap compute. Everything got faster every 18 months for free. Even now computers as a whole keep getting faster and faster despite the cap on single core performance.

Even at my relatively high level, the performance concerns I spent months learning about in 2005, just don’t matter anymore when you can get a single server with terabytes of ram and petaflops of compute.

99% of [user facing] code just isn’t performance bound these days. What does it matter if your loop takes 10ms or 20ms when the data is a 300ms network call away

Re: undefined

#118

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #109
Kalium wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, being good at searching is a skill that's only really useful when you have some idea what kind of question you're looking for an answer to. I don't think we're actually talking specifically about binary. I am treating the reference to binary as a stand-in for the mathematical fundamentals of computing, rather than a narrow comment on understanding binary and bitwise operations.

> IMO, being good at searching is a skill that's only really useful when you have some idea what kind of question you're looking for an answer to. "why is my arithmetic operation not rounded" seems like something anyone facing the problem would ask. That's pretty much the root issue in words. > I don't think we're actually talking specifically about binary. I mean, that is literally what the thread you replied to was…

> the OP’s quote which talks directly about binary

The OP's quote is "fundamentals of computing, like binary..." It seems reasonable for a person to think the discussion is about "fundamentals of computing" more generally than the specific example given of "binary". More precisely, the fact that a thread caught on to one specific aspect of the discussion doesn't mean that a commenter can't keep in mind the greater context.

Re: undefined

#120

Post by youreincorrect »

WoodenChair wrote: post #56
joshmanders wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning binary and knowing what binary is are two separate things. I don't think you need to learn binary to learn to code. Been doing this for 25 years working at some big name companies, I don't know binary other than 1 is on, 0 is off. I'm starting to feel like this whole notion that newbies can't come in and learn say React or modern JavaScript without having to go all the way back to that day in 1995 when they…

> Learning binary and knowing what binary is are two separate things. I don't think you need to learn binary to learn to code. Been doing this for 25 years working at some big name companies, I don't know binary other than 1 is on, 0 is off. You're wearing your lack of CS knowledge like some kind of badge of honor. Of course you don't need deep CS knowledge to be a competent programmer. But almost undoubtedly you'll…

You're obligated to define exactly what you mean when you talk about "knowing" binary.
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