How the kids stole the show: Young Coders tutorial at PyCon • Hacker News Board

Re: How the kids stole the show: Young Coders tutorial at PyCon

#21

Post by nahname » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 2:31 AM UTC

Dewie wrote: post #11

sophacles wrote: post #8

“I don't think you'd ever see that kind of experimentation in a classroom full of adults, who would more likely do everything in their power not to break their computers,”... I really think, more than anything, this is why we should be teaching kids to code and so on in school. Most of the good coders I know have been doing it from a young age, and I think a lot of it comes from the fearlessness of youth. Personally,…

> Most of the good coders I know have been doing it from a young age, As someone who started programming when I was 21, I sometimes feel like I don't stand a chance.

As someone who has worked with many different programmers from very different walks of life, it doesn't matter. Some of the worst programmers I know started early. Some of the best started even later than you.

It all comes down to your ability for self inflection, a strong desire to always be better and, of course, a love of programming.

Re: How the kids stole the show: Young Coders tutorial at PyCon

#22

Post by derefr » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 7:20 AM UTC

rachelbythebay wrote: post #15

sophacles wrote: post #8

“I don't think you'd ever see that kind of experimentation in a classroom full of adults, who would more likely do everything in their power not to break their computers,”... I really think, more than anything, this is why we should be teaching kids to code and so on in school. Most of the good coders I know have been doing it from a young age, and I think a lot of it comes from the fearlessness of youth. Personally,…

As someone who was a lab TA for a little while and a district-level sysadmin for a while longer, the thing which comes to mind when I think of school machines is "fragile". They could in fact be "broken" in the sense that it would take a nontrivial investment in time to get it back to a state where anyone could find it useful again. Even firing up "ghost" (or whatever the equivalent is these days) takes a while to ha…

> There's something to be said for a box which is going to be just fine if you power-cycle it.

Presuming a Windows environment, have you ever tried DeepFreeze? Every school environment I've worked IT for that hasn't gone diskless seems to have started using it in the last decade. A lot of demo computers on display in stores, too (I think my local Apple Store is now using the OSX version; not sure how widespread that is.)

If you're running a Linux setup, of course, you can just do the equivalent with a tmpfs overlay on /.

Re: How the kids stole the show: Young Coders tutorial at PyCon

#23

Post by rachelbythebay » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 7:40 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #22

rachelbythebay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who was a lab TA for a little while and a district-level sysadmin for a while longer, the thing which comes to mind when I think of school machines is "fragile". They could in fact be "broken" in the sense that it would take a nontrivial investment in time to get it back to a state where anyone could find it useful again. Even firing up "ghost" (or whatever the equivalent is these days) takes a while to ha…

> There's something to be said for a box which is going to be just fine if you power-cycle it. Presuming a Windows environment, have you ever tried DeepFreeze? Every school environment I've worked IT for that hasn't gone diskless seems to have started using it in the last decade. A lot of demo computers on display in stores, too (I think my local Apple Store is now using the OSX version; not sure how widespread that…

Not personally, but I saw things like it used back then. It was pretty funny, since the machine would get a new virus definition file, then it would blow itself back to the snapshot, and then it would get infected... and so on, and so on...

Fortunately I only had to witness it and never had to run a whole fleet of Windows boxes.

Re: How the kids stole the show: Young Coders tutorial at PyCon

#24

Post by csense » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 9:12 AM UTC

simeonf wrote: post #17

ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as I don't see any posts that say "I'm 12 and I haven't done anything important, should I give up?" here on HN

Heh. Louis (awesome kid - 12 years old maybe? at PyCon) told me "I can code but I have no original ideas!" I told him to give it time...

Original ideas aren't a necessity in this business. Execution and timing are really important too.

Anyone remember MySpace? LiveJournal? Xanga? ConnectU?

I'm pretty sure they all predated Facebook, were quite similar to Facebook, and Facebook just outmaneuvered them with execution.

Or think about Blizzard in the mid-to-late '90s. Warcraft/Starcraft weren't the first RTS games -- Blizzard wasn't an innovation leader -- but they were extremely polished products. Flawless execution beat first mover advantage; have you heard anything about the Dune series lately from someone who's not a hardcore retrogamer?