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Learning to program is getting harder

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Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#321

Post by dragonwriter »

watwut wrote: post #65
gameswithgo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's ridiculous to expect newcomers to a language and/or programming in general to slog through a 20 or 30-step environment setup process Modern IDEs often require an hour long install, and then you turn them on and are faced with 10,000 buttons and 50 windows, they aren't simple either. I have had good success with making beginners people sit through a 30 minute dev environment set up process, in video form. No co…

VS Code is modern ide. And I would really like to know which IDE takes an hour long install. Because I tried multiple on windows and they all required download, double click and that was it.

VS Code is a modern extensible programmers editor; with appropriate extensions, it approximates an IDE, but it's not an IDE like Visual Studio proper, Eclipse, etc.

Now, most actual IDEs don't take long to install either, but VS takes approximately forever.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#322

Post by snarfy »

shakna wrote: post #125
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…

> 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…

My family got our first computer when I was 6 years old. It was a 4K ROM BASIC machine with cassette storage. It didn't come with any software. Instead it came with a book that taught some BASIC and then pages of program listings you were supposed to type in. That's all you could do with the early computers - program them. Now I have a career in software development.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#323

Post by veddox »

mirimir wrote: post #301
bostik wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 constant distraction. Or to put it the other way: users (future would-be programmers) are being distanced[sic] from how the machines work. Even at the most rudimentary level. Frankly, I'm not surprised. Interfaces are systematically being…

Familiarity with how computers work arguably peaked during the early-mid PC era. The first computer that I used was an IBM 360. Basically, someone showed me how to punch cards, and how to enter my data. After submitting the job, I'd find out the next day whether it crashed, or completed properly. And after a few tries, I got my results. But nowhere in that process did I know anything about IBM 360s, or how to program…

> Familiarity with how computers work arguably peaked during the early-mid PC era.

Now there's an interesting observation. I'm not quite sure whether you're right, but quite possibly.

Looking around my local libraries and bookstores, most of the books that deal with using personal computers do seem to be from the 90s/early 2000s era. The question is whether the decline in these books indicate that they are not needed any more, or that they are not wanted anymore (due to "hidden complexity")?

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#324

Post by yousir »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #308
Hextinium wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but, it's the classic Dunning-Kruger effect, they know so little about how to use a computer that they think that using a iPhone is a skill that is equivalent. This usually isn't a problem for most people but this person is in CS, where you would expect them to have at least passing knowledge in computers to join the major.

It is a computer, of a different design.

A jet fighter is a computer with wings. I don't think we should expect pilots to be computer literate the same way a software programmer needs to be.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#325

Post by tluyben2 »

8note wrote: post #303
eropple wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can make a rails app and run it in heroku within an hour into your first tutorial. How long does it take to actually understand what all of that does? I can claim to understand it, sure--but I'm also thirty years old and I've been getting paid for this stuff for the last fifteen. (Not, like, random POKEs into memory to make syscalls, for sure, but I understood why stuff like SCREEN 13 worked, along with the gen…

have you breadboarded it out with transistors though? when was the last time you designed a board? when was the last time you laid telephone poles or dug tunnels for wires? designed fiber optics for cross ocean communications? launched a satellite for your GPS? at some level, you're always going to be assuming the layer before reasonably works the way somebody gave it to you. Its not cargo culting if you know where t…

Not really the point; if you know the dependencies but do not know the fundamentals, you can build stuff but when things go wrong and the fix is not the first SO hit, you are going to waste a lot of time on something you have no clue how to even start diagnosing.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#326

Post by roboyoshi »

skookumchuck wrote: post #182
userbinator wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There aren't really any clues as to how a computer works on an iphone. There isn't even a visible filesystem. It's no wonder students today have no idea how a computer works.

"what's a computer?"

looks like there is some truth in that ad

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#327

Post by Zpalmtree »

ericmcer wrote: post #104

I got my CS degree in 2012. It was kinda scary how many students were on the verge of graduation, and were unable to use a terminal, use SSH, or tell you what git is (not that I know exactly o_o). Those aren't particularly complex concepts. It is definitely partially the schools fault, but CS is also a field where you have to have some interest in what you do. You can't just go through the motions.

100% agree. To me it seems like most students aren't particularly interested in programming, none of them have side projects or care that much about the field.

I don't know if this is because some people are just looking for a good career path (This is not my experience from talking to my friends) or just weren't sure what to do with their lives other than they like computer gaming and computers.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#328

Post by blt »

telchar wrote: post #253
waxwander wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell me about it, I'm using tensorflow now and it does amazing things, but the API is so bulky for anything besides setting up the computational graph... Planning to check out pytorch for next project. Imo most dev environments and software leave a lot to be desired, we should not settle.

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#329

Post by askvictor »

solomatov wrote: post #45

I work at JetBrains on https://datalore.io/ It's an interactive computational notebook for data science, which automatically recalculates code as you change it. We believe that such an interface lowers the barrier for entry into data science (and programming).

Looks great, though I can't find anything about pricing or pricing plans (looks like it's in open beta?)

While I've dabbled with using jupyter for teaching programming to high school students, on the whole its usually too difficult to get up and running for someone who's not already moderately tech savvy. Interface is everything when starting off; this looks quite promising if the pricing is affordable for schools

Re: Learning to program is getting harder

#330

Post by veddox »

ewjordan wrote: post #28

I remember when I was first learning Java, whacking my head repeatedly against all these sorts of problems - WTF is a JRE vs. a JDK, why is it asking to install a browser toolbar, WTF is Eclipse and why doesn't it just let me run the file that I'm working on without going through half an hour of researching "Run configurations" and classpath BS first, etc. It was doable, but as a new person to the whole ecosystem, it…

Learning to program just takes a huge amount of frustration-tolerance. Fullstop. It's inherent in the craft and doesn't really ever go away - it's just the problems you face that change. So in that sense, complex setups are perhaps not our biggest problem.

Of course, that's no excuse for terrible interfaces. But I dare say there have been easy-to-use and not-so-easy-to-use programming setups in every era...

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