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Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

johnkurkowski.com

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Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#51

Post by analog31 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #25
VLM wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a stereotype about labview that it is graphically beautiful but its not visual programming because it inevitably results in more typing of text than anything else, otherwise you get a bowl of spaghetti. With textual languages you can interpret it to figure it out, perhaps a billion times slower than the computer, but exactly the same. Visual is a little harder to figure out. Or in summary I've seen l…

I never personally used LabView (well, maybe in a Physics 101 lab in college, but that was a while back). The people using it in the offices I've worked in have generally been electrical engineers, perhaps the schematic view meshes better with their mental model of computation. It seemed to work well on most of the projects. EDIT: I should add, when I did look at the LabView stuffs, it seemed to make sense to me (as…

I suspect that of equal importance to the schematic view, for electrical engineers, is the dataflow programming model. Another dataflow based programming tool, albeit non Turing complete, is Excel.

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#52

Post by analog31 »

ef4 wrote: post #44

The author is frustrated by a real and frustrating problem, but he's missing why things are this way. The "triumvirate of HTML/CSS/Javascript" isn't just a technology. It's a social consensus . It's not actually "designed" in a meaningful sense -- it's evolved. And things pretty much need to be this way, unless you want to be an island. Even if you have the ambition and the resources to throw it all away and "do it r…

An interesting thought about evolution is that text-based programming languages are exquisitely evolve-able, because the technology and effort to evolve a language or create a new one aren't too far out of our reach. If you don't care too much about efficiency, you can create a new language from an old one, and pass it around for others to try out.

This may be why there are 100's of text based languages, but I can think of only one graphical language -- LabVIEW -- in widespread use. LabVIEW requires a monumental organization to maintain. Adding a structural feature to the language, requires changing the entire GUI, menus, and so forth.

I suspect that if LabVIEW came out with a text based option for dataflow programming with support for their massive libraries, folks would abandon the graphical interface.

Maybe graphical isn't always better. Maybe text is really the best way to express programs after all. We could wait for programming to become "intuitive," or learn to develop our intuitions.

An anecdote about graphical systems. When I read tutorials for Windows, it's usually a lot of text interspersed with pictures of windows and dialogs. Even videos. Walking someone through a process over the phone is excruciating.

The same process using Linux: Open the terminal and enter this text.

In fact, Windows tutorials are starting to use: Press the start button and enter some text. I find the device manager by entering "device manager" into the start button menu, not by following an "intuitive" GUI.

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#54

Post by joe_the_user »

nevir wrote: post #49
jimbokun wrote: post #18

My 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…

I read it as: "programming could be so much better; I have a glimpse of what it could be like, but don't know how to get there."

I like your reading better. I would have liked the blog better if it had had more of the feeling of humbleness that your words have.

The blog felt like it was saying "shut up till you do something better" where it should have said "Imagine how cool it would be to do something better".

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#55

Post by mattschmulen »

joe_the_user wrote: post #54
nevir wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as: "programming could be so much better; I have a glimpse of what it could be like, but don't know how to get there."

I like your reading better. I would have liked the blog better if it had had more of the feeling of humbleness that your words have. The blog felt like it was saying "shut up till you do something better" where it should have said "Imagine how cool it would be to do something better".

A humble approach is always nice, its always challenging to give an earnest opinion ( after all that's why I read your content, for your opinions) and be openly modest. your (authors) terminology in differentiating programmers form coders is different from my own 'naming'. My wording are often around application development vs systems programming. a sys programmer writes software for humans to control machines ( databases, OS's,tools) where as an app developer is focused on software (computers) that controls humans ( apps that constructively shape human actions) . I liked the article , good post.

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#56

Post by wwweston »

overgard wrote: post #43

Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's broken. Nobody would say that say, advanced mathematics is broken because the layman doesn't get it. My bullshit detector notes that he talks very generally about "knowledge workers leveraging machines". The problem with the phrase "knowledge worker" is it often means "person who sends lots of emails". You don't need to be a programmer to send lots of emails. Real "kno…

> Nobody would say that say, advanced mathematics is broken because the layman doesn't get it.

We do make math more tractable and accessible over time with various reformulations and new abstractions and conceptual tools, though. You're probably using arabic numerals when you do arithmetic, and there are good reasons for that.

(Though heaven knows, if I'm likely to run across an abacist anywhere in this sort of discussion, it's probably here. :)

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#57

Post by zarriak »

Jtsummers wrote: post #16
j_baker wrote: post #9

Hold 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.

LabVIEW and the rest of visual/graphical programming needs to perfect the feature for cleaning the code layout. LabVIEW does a good job about half the time, but the other half results in time wasted to make the code legible. Mathematical formulas look nasty, which results in having to use a "Formula Node"[1]. The other major problem with LabVIEW is the speed at which you program is not much faster after you understand the fastest ways to do things, because you are still limited to how fast you can click and connect nodes.

[1]:http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361K-01/lvconcept...

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#59

Post by [deleted] »

overgard wrote: post #43

Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's broken. Nobody would say that say, advanced mathematics is broken because the layman doesn't get it. My bullshit detector notes that he talks very generally about "knowledge workers leveraging machines". The problem with the phrase "knowledge worker" is it often means "person who sends lots of emails". You don't need to be a programmer to send lots of emails. Real "kno…

[deleted]

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#60

Post by kamaal »

There is no point in teaching something to people they don't like doing. Its a bit like forcing painting or sketching on people who just don't like doing it. A lot of schools do it, and kids who don't like painting or sketching do it real bad and become the object of ridicule.

Programming et al has a meta science its called 'making', 'tinkering' or 'hacking' or whatever you call it. If there are people who don't have a taste for it, teaching them sorting algorithms is as boring as learning math. Now common people are one thing, most people who join our industry as programmers discover they just want to do something else and go down the managerial stream.

Programming isn't for every one, just like building houses, cars, dams, or an electric grid isn't for every one. In all those disciplines common patterns of problem solution and general science are at play. Chances are if you like chasing a difficult bug and fixing it, you will also like repairing a car engine, or fixing your TV.

I have an elder cousin who runs a shoe shop for a living, he tried very hard to learn programming during the dot com boom era. He gave up in like six months. He just realized that procedurally learning something only because, every one is just doesn't work out, the problem isn't just programming. If you don't like solving problems and are not good at problem identification and opportunity identification, it gets really really boring at one point. He likes to sell things and is exceptionally good at that. Building things is just not for him. And there is nothing wrong about it.

The biggest problem with 'teach every one to code' is you have to first ask 'Do they want to learn coding?'.

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