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82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

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Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#131

Post by jodrellblank »

dahart wrote: post #85
hermitdev wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I admittedly don't have much experience learning foreign languages; I did K-12 in the US and was only required to take 2 years of Spanish. I'd assumed from discussions with other students taking, for example German, that it'd be more difficult. Versus programming languages, I've learned, C, C++, C#, Java, Python and Perl (and I supposed a modicum of JS) as well as x86, x64, 68k, MIPS, z80 and Atmel AVR a…

Spoken languages are a lot harder to learn than programming languages. But think about how much faster you learned JS than the time it took to learn C (or whatever your first programming language was.) Don't forget to account for the vast amount of learned information you get to leverage from your first language, even if you have to unlearn a few things or learn a few new things. Even though JS is very different from…

YouTube anecdotes, but here is Gabriel Wyner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBMfg4WkKL8 describing his experience of learning nothing much linguistically in High School or College, but then joining immersion based courses at an adult and making significant progress in a few weeks.

and here: is Chris Lonsdale saying adults can learn useful amounts of spoken Chinese in 6 months, with immersion and being able to watch mouths closely and see how speakers move their moouths to pronounce things (IIRC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0

and there's a bunch more; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WLHr1_EVtQ and so on

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#132

Post by kazinator »

jodrellblank wrote: post #126
kazinator wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only problem is, those commands are useless. COPY won't back up a directory tree. You need XCOPY. Oops, XCOPY chokes for weird reasons and terminates with a strange error message because a path was more than 255 bytes. It needs a bazillion options to do the equivalent of GNU's "cp -a". If you go online to get help with this, the best advice you get is to download and install something called RoboCopy. Yes, MS-DOS was…

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/87128 "copy doesn't copy directory structures, it will only copy the files, hence the error message you're encountering. To do a deep copy such as this you can enlist either the tar command and use the construct tar cvf - --files-from=... | (cd /home/tmp/test/files/; tar xvf -) or you can just use rsync." That's so much better..

cp most certainly does copy directory structures. Just not filtered ones whereby just certain entries are arbitrarily selected from the source tree and only those are replicated in the destination tree.

The issue in the question is that the person has expanded, into the cp command line, a bunch of full paths, effectively like "cp a/b/c/file1 a/b/d/file2 .... dest" and wants those relative paths to be re-created under dest as dest/a/b/c/file1 and so on. Indeed, cp does not do that; it simply puts the specified objects file1 file2 ... into dest.

An option to create each object's relative path under dest would be useful, but it would be a pretty awful default behavior.

GNU cp has this option:

  `--parents'
     Form the name of each destination file by appending to the target
     directory a slash and the specified name of the source file.  The
     last argument given to `cp' must be the name of an existing
     directory.  For example, the command:

          cp --parents a/b/c existing_dir

     copies the file `a/b/c' to `existing_dir/a/b/c', creating any
     missing intermediate directories.
GNU Coreutils is in active development, unlike the Windows command line which is basically abandonware (as, to be even-handed, is the Unix (tm) command line.)

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#133

Post by [deleted] »

astura wrote: post #110
oceanman888 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is good to know, I am not from the states. I thought Jap was abbreviate for Japanese what have the internet done to me lol.

"Jap" only became an ethnic slur in American English during/due to World War II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jap

[deleted]

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#135

Post by olingern »

I just moved to Japan, and it's fascinating that connotations (including my previous) with Japan are "High tech, futuristic, efficient" when in reality it is, "slow moving, traditional, and (frequently) inefficient." I can comment more as to why / how.

This woman is not only fighting cultural norms of the _world_, but also Japan. Software engineering, in general, lags so far behind the rest of the world, save robotics. It's starting to change, and I'm glad that people like Wakamiya-san are preventing the creation of a 'conventional software engineer'. Seriously, the field needs more role models like Grace Hopper to idolize rather than our current trend of Jobs, Gates, Woz, Knuth, etc.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#136

Post by onion2k »

noir_lord wrote: post #24
paulpauper wrote: post #11

I still find it hard to get a php ajax form to work despite tinkering with code for over 10 years. I can;t imagine trying to code an entire app when getting a form to work takes hours. guess some people learn faster than others

Things are a lot less painful than they used to be. fetch()/promises/async/await and better browser support. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FormData https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API Also promises (coupled with async/await) make things a great deal more pleasant and I'm old enough to remember the old days.

JS syntax is a lot nicer these days but that's always been relatively easy. Where web dev is hard, and will always remain hard, is the concept of writing stateless applications. Building something that might seem easy to you, such as a form with server-side validation, is very different to building a desktop app. When you write desktop apps you don't rebuild the entire UI for every update. You don't have to reload the user's entire state on every call. Those things are weird if you're not used to it.

It's perfectly reasonable for a developer to say they find it hard.

And, arguably, it could be part of the reason why frameworks like React are so popular - they make writing for the web a little more like writing a desktop app, because components can have persistent state.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#137

Post by huseyinkeles »

olingern wrote: post #135

I just moved to Japan, and it's fascinating that connotations (including my previous) with Japan are "High tech, futuristic, efficient" when in reality it is, "slow moving, traditional, and (frequently) inefficient." I can comment more as to why / how. This woman is not only fighting cultural norms of the _world_, but also Japan. Software engineering, in general, lags so far behind the rest of the world, save robotic…

>> I can comment more as to why / how.

please, I'd like to hear your observations.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#138

Post by tonyedgecombe »

gowld wrote: post #105
dronescanfly wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how a lot of people assume that companies can only ever work with investor money...

Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

I don't think they did because I read the same thing.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#139

Post by axaxs »

jdietrich wrote: post #43
bazooka_penguin wrote: post #4

I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude. I generally find kids more eager to jump into new things, while adults are more stubborn and complacent towards new experiences. Once you have money or kids it's a lot easier to just have someone else do it for you. Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat, and she's found m…

I think that openness and confidence are major factors. Having taught older adults to use computers, one of the major difficulties is getting them past the fear that they might "break" the computer and the need to memorise rote instructions rather than experiment with the interface. The body language is quite distinctive - tentatively pressing keys with an outstretched index finger as if the keyboard might jump up an…

I notice the same thing. At least in my experience, I think it's generational experience not age or ignorance. I'll use my father as an example. He grew up poor, having to build or fix things for his family. Guy could build anything, build and rebuild engines, appliances, even electronics. But what these all have in common...they aren't interactive, at all. It's a process, and even a tiny mistake can ruin the entire thing or get yourself hurt. Compound that with being told as a kid not to touch expensive things (say, TV) or you'll break it, dangers of being shocked by capacitors, etc. In the end I think you end up with people who really are scared of computers. It's a new way of thinking (interactive vs process), and years of fear of breaking expensive things. Compound that further from experiences of trying to use a computer freely, getting scammed or getting a virus, getting gouged for money by Geek Squad and losing all their files/bookmarks...of course they're afraid of messing up. Just my opinion, of course, I have no hard data to back it up.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#140

Post by sdrothrock »

olingern wrote: post #135

I just moved to Japan, and it's fascinating that connotations (including my previous) with Japan are "High tech, futuristic, efficient" when in reality it is, "slow moving, traditional, and (frequently) inefficient." I can comment more as to why / how. This woman is not only fighting cultural norms of the _world_, but also Japan. Software engineering, in general, lags so far behind the rest of the world, save robotic…

> when in reality it is, "slow moving, traditional, and (frequently) inefficient."

Since you just moved here, I would also consider the "whys" of those problems you see. Approaches are probably different from what you're used to elsewhere, but that doesn't necessarily make them inefficient or bad -- just different from what you're used to.

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