You only can learn how to program, if you have learned how to code. So learn how to code :)
Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#32> "Programming is a notion to extend human capability, by offloading humanly-infeasible work onto a machine. It is the promise of an amplified knowledge worker. This would be worthy to learn." With this (correct) notion the author continues until he decides that > "Meanwhile there are few souls looking to evolve text code into something more humanly intuitive. For example something you can touch, you don’t have to re…
> Why is it acceptable to say that effective communication with people depends on being able to think like the person you're talking to, but demand that communication with a far more different and limited machine should never require you to compromise on your preferred thought patterns? Other people are sentient beings with their own personalities, dreams, desires, and attitudes. Recognition of our shared humanity ne…
There's nothing wrong with trying. There is, however something wrong (or at least irritating) with demanding that it magically become like that, without trying, or contributing any insight into how to achieve it.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#33Hold on a second. OOP, markup, APIs, and HTML/CSS/JS are snake oil, while visual programming isn't? Say what you will about the former technologies, but they're being used for productive purposes. Visual programming is vaporware that someone tries to build every 5 years or so to no effect. Functional programming has much the same challenge, but it's getting integrated into mainstream languages. Otherwise, it would li…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW I believe that's an example of visual/graphical programming, it's fairly mainstream in some areas and not vaporware. Re: Rest of comment - Filtered site, I'll read it at home.
I used LabView in college and a couple of other visual programming schemes in my work that have since disappeared, and they all had the same drawbacks: If your needs fit tidily within the assumptions made by the designer, they can be very productive indeed. Once you step a little bit outside of that, they turn into a tortuous mess. Can't even count the number of times I wished I could just write a few lines of code instead of trying to figure out a byzantine way to hook up enough icons that I got my desired end result.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW I believe that's an example of visual/graphical programming, it's fairly mainstream in some areas and not vaporware. Re: Rest of comment - Filtered site, I'll read it at home.
having used labview I'd say that if that is the pinnacle of visual programming, then it has quite a bit of improvement needed.
Did I say it was the pinnacle? GGP post suggested that visual programming was vaporware. Perhaps for general purpose programming it is, but visual programming itself is not vaporware.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW I believe that's an example of visual/graphical programming, it's fairly mainstream in some areas and not vaporware. Re: Rest of comment - Filtered site, I'll read it at home.
I used LabView in college and a couple of other visual programming schemes in my work that have since disappeared, and they all had the same drawbacks: If your needs fit tidily within the assumptions made by the designer, they can be very productive indeed. Once you step a little bit outside of that, they turn into a tortuous mess. Can't even count the number of times I wished I could just write a few lines of code i…
I've always been told by labview advocates that "you can of course pull up a text editor and write code." The language and API is certainly a different matter, being a second class citizen and presumably an afterthought.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#36My paraphrase of this article: "All of the blood sweat and tears poured into making programming more productive over the years just isn't good enough. No, I haven't done anything, personally, to improve the situation. My plan is to continue bitching about how things aren't good enough until...well, indefinitely, because bitching about other people's efforts is much easier than doing the hard work of solving a challen…
You got my upvote. I can't understand the point of view expressed in this article at all. I particularly can't understand the claim that the accessibility hasn't improved.
Yesterday I implemented a couple of different machine learning algorithms on some test data using python and sklearn. Now, I'm just noob - but there is no way I could have that quickly implemented a machine learning algo on some data 10 years ago. It would have literally taken me months to do the equivalent thing rolling everything myself. And even then my code would have probably taken several days to run for any dataset of any reasonable size because I wouldn't have a clue how to build numpy's optimised data arrays etc...
Plus all this code is just given away... for free... no questions asked. It's so unbelievably awesome it boggles my mind.
So yeah - I don't get why this author is giving all that it's due. It really deserves a crap tonne of due. y'know?
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#37For anyone interested in the prospect of visual programming for web development, please join our newsletter at crudzilla.com ... we are coming out with an update that will attempt to fit a wordpress-like plugin system into an IDE. We think that'll be a good start for a more visually oriented development environment.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#38I don't think we have to worry about "everyone" or even a small percentage thereof learning how to code. They won't. It's not that they can't, but it takes more than a couple of hours writing "Hello World" to do anything substantial and most people are not willing to put in the time, day after day, to learn anything substantial. That being said, I can't imagine anything more human and more powerful than text. If I wa…
"It's not that they can't" No, they really can't. Garbage in garbage out. Can't implement an algorithm or follow a protocol unless you understand it, and the world is full of people who literally don't understand how a thermostat works, how to drive safely, or how to implement the NRAs three basic rules of gun safety. Note that our shared enjoyment of text as per your 3rd paragraph is only politically correct WRT to…
"just the usual womens fashion fad explanations"
Very classy, dude.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#39Again with this visual programming bullshit
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#40I agree with the author in regards to coding web sites. It's not enough to know a just a few languages, there's a whole frickin' vocabulary of crap piled on layers of services and frameworks frosted by the JS flavor of the week.
Or just configuration. Everybody wants to reinvent Make and they all do it wrong...