Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning to program is getting harder

allendowney.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 422 posts

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#251

Post by xstartup »

socialist_coder wrote: post #2

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling. Younger programmers seem to comm…

I have these skills too and yes they prevent me from getting blocked when I run into these issues. I hate relying on others for help on small issues like this. But I also get not everyone would want to waste their time with issues with do not challenge them. As a company owner, I will prefer a dedicated help desk to sort my programmers with these issues but as an entrepreneur, I want to be self-reliant.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#252

Post by BigJono »

Will_Parker wrote: post #246
narrator wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is not harder than it used to be. For example, I was programming Macs in the pre-Internet era which meant lots of thick books. If you got stuck there was nobody who was going to help out and you just had to puzzle it out vs the example in one of the few how-to books like the famous Mac Programming Primer. Also, there was little open source, so you couldn't read the library source to figure out how things…

> If you got stuck there was nobody who was going to help out and you just had to puzzle it out vs the example in one of the few how-to books Maybe, ironically, one of the advantages we had is that these difficulties forced us into a much better learning environment, when the answers weren't all immediately available through Google? Being the one who can self-learn extremely well gives us a big advantage when given a…

I think this is definitely the case. Have a browse over Stack Overflow. Most of the questions are asking very specific things and getting very specific answers. Rarely is the context explained properly by either party. People use these questions for future reference, which results in them just trying random stuff until it works. If it doesn't work, they just revert the code and go on to the next question instead of learning why.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#253

Post by telchar »

waxwander wrote: post #198
socialist_coder wrote: post #2

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling. Younger programmers seem to comm…

I've had the opposite experience, with older programmers balking at new libraries, techniques, and setting up any environment they're not used to. If it doesn't work right away they go back to what they know. I know one guy who absolutely refuses to learn c++ because it doesn't compile for him and he only "trusts" c. Another who writes only in good ol' python2.7 (scipy dropping support; subprocess bugs; cough cough).…

I dream of the day I'm happy and productive enough with one set of tools that I refuse to switch to another. I still largely feel like I'm wandering the desert when it comes to tooling, where a new toolset looks good from a distance but when I start using it I discovered the ugly underside and start looking for greener pastures.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#254

Post by xstartup »

sametmax wrote: post #39

I disagree. Creating a program that meets todays' users expectations is what's harder. But learning programming by itself, is way easier. We have Python, Ruby, Javascript... We have the Web as a platform and as documentation. We have communities and cheap, fast computers. The hello world has never been easier to do. What's hard is to make a real time offline first SPA with a beautiful responsive design that uses the…

I disagree. We currently have 5 SaaS companies. We are finding that we are writing lesser and lesser code. Most of our services have 300-500 lines of code and a product is composed of 5-6 such services. We've not found any difficulty in selling it but yea some niches are crowded with tons of competition. I do both backend and frontend for SaaS at my company.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#256

Post by eropple »

Will_Parker wrote: post #249
eropple wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe programming isn't, but perhaps finishing something is? Because while the hands-on-the-keyboard, moment-to-moment writing of code is almost certainly easier than ever, actually making a thing out of that is nowhere near as simple as it used to be. Building a nontrivial thing in QBasic was really, really easy. Building a nontrivial web app--whether it's strict server-side PHP or strict client-side JavaScript or w…

Building a server-side PHP app is really not that hard. That is arguably the biggest historical problem with PHP. :)

I don't agree. It took me multiple years to really wrap my head around building web pages (to say nothing of apps) in PHP. There's just too much h*ckin' stuff in the web that you have to be aware of and being able to build stores of relevant information is definitely in some ways easier--Stack Overflow exists--but in others, thanks to the volume of crap you just have to chew through, it is much more difficult.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#257

Post by xstartup »

rconti wrote: post #76
sametmax wrote: post #39

I disagree. Creating a program that meets todays' users expectations is what's harder. But learning programming by itself, is way easier. We have Python, Ruby, Javascript... We have the Web as a platform and as documentation. We have communities and cheap, fast computers. The hello world has never been easier to do. What's hard is to make a real time offline first SPA with a beautiful responsive design that uses the…

But the learning curve of getting an environment setup to do that is steeper.

Perhaps you are on a wrong platform?

    pacaur -S rust
    pacaur -S visual-studio-code-bin
Then I start coding.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#258

Post by readams »

protomikron wrote: post #189
shakna wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hello world has never been easier to do. We also used to have BASIC pre-installed on a lot of different systems, and were able to write a GUI just by writing to the frame buffer directly. A helloworld was just: 10 PRINT "Hello, World!" I learned to program in BASIC, with just the on-disk manuals. I can't say that it's easier today - I didn't need anything extra back then, and had a snake game up and running in…

I think while True: print('Hello, World!") is not that much worse. Granted you have to launch a shell first. Obviously the programming stack got more complex and users' expectations got higher (which is a good thing), so it is more work to make a program that is useful . But the things that have been simple then are still simple today - they are just not popular anymore or not installed by default.

except with BASIC you turned on the computer and literally the first thing you saw was a prompt where you could type your program. The whole point of this article is that downloading and installing python to the point where you can contemplate typing your program is a big barrier.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#259

Post by Buttons840 »

userbinator wrote: post #156
socialist_coder wrote: post #2

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling. Younger programmers seem to comm…

I agree completely --- being one of the "older programmers" --- and think it could be phrased thus: a new generation of "coders" is being forced to learn how to write instructions for the machine, when they are barely computer-literate. Having taught some introductory CS courses a few years ago, the amount of struggling with basic things like file naming, directory hierarchies, and even simple hardware use was a cons…

I hope you weren't too smug about knowing to turn on the monitor. I can't remember the last time I've had to do so. Remember, there are no intuitive interfaces, only familiar ones.
Post reply on HN