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Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#61

Post by japhyr »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #13

It would be interesting to see this split down by age too. It's less likely the parent of someone learning to code in the 70's/80's was a programmer. It was also probably a lot more difficult to learn to code back then without a mentor. Now that's not too big of a problem thanks to the internet.

I am wondering how much the availability of online resources really takes away the need for a mentor. Sure there are more resources for learning and asking questions, but programming environments are also a lot more complicated than they used to be.

I've watched some people trying to learn programming, who get lost in all the little details that we have sorted out a long time ago. A mentor, or just someone knowledgeable that you can ask simple questions from on a regular basis, still seems pretty helpful.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#62

Post by k-mcgrady »

japhyr wrote: post #61
k-mcgrady wrote: post #13

It would be interesting to see this split down by age too. It's less likely the parent of someone learning to code in the 70's/80's was a programmer. It was also probably a lot more difficult to learn to code back then without a mentor. Now that's not too big of a problem thanks to the internet.

I am wondering how much the availability of online resources really takes away the need for a mentor. Sure there are more resources for learning and asking questions, but programming environments are also a lot more complicated than they used to be. I've watched some people trying to learn programming, who get lost in all the little details that we have sorted out a long time ago. A mentor, or just someone knowledgea…

A mentor would definitely be helpful but they are significantly less necessary. e.g. I've been programming full time for 5 years and have had no mentorship - I learnt everything online. I've also worked solo from home the entire time so haven't had any help from other programmers which would have been available had a been in a standard work environment. I probably could have progressed quicker with a mentor and it would have been helpful but it's not as necessary as the way it would have been pre-internet.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#63

Post by taylodl »

My dad used APL to do CNC programming. I remember reading his APL book as a kid. I could only get so far without having a computer that could run APL (or not having a computer at all since this was the late 70's). Later, I was able to get into a math and science oriented high school where we learned Pascal and 6502 assembly on various Apple II systems. I've been programming ever since.

Lately I've been thinking about that APL book. There's a version of APL called J which uses normal ASCII characters that I've been meaning to check out. Maybe 2014 will be the year to do so!

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#64

Post by jason_slack »

Neither of my parents were programmers. However my Dad did buy me a Vic-20 and a Commodore-64 which is where I started to program in Basic. I have a few computers after that, but when I was 17 my Grandmother loaded me $300 so I could buy a Pentium Motherboard and processor so I could run the new Borland Turbo C++ compilers. My 486 wasn't cutting it :-)

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#65

Post by blazerboy65 »

I don't have any programmer family members, just one friend. I'm completely self-taught. It was REALLY hard getting started, I mucked around for a few years in a few languages and never really got past conditionals, let alone data structures. In hindsight, making games in Game Maker was really a bad way to learn actual programming or project management. Please don't ask me to look at my old code.

I'm 18 now and trying to thoroughly learn Python with a few books I've downloaded: A Byte of Python, How to Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning With Python, Learning Python the Hard Way. Please don't judge me, but I actually printed the entirety of that last book into a PDF; I'll get around to legitimately buying it eventually.

I kind of feel like I'm competing against my best friend to see who can make the coolest stuff, although it's getting hard to rate website stuff versus CS/math stuff. I'm also no longer scared to dive into manuals or look at code from other languages.

TL;DR Starting on the path of programming without ANYONE to explain things to you or that your code really does suck is not easy, but doesn't make learning impossible. It's like being thrown into a pool in order to learn to swim.

Re: Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

#66

Post by canadiancreed »

The only person that I ever knew of that programmed was my uncle, who passed away the same year I was born. From what I was told, and from the books he had let behind, he was pretty knowledgable in COBOL and FORTRAN (it was the 60s). Had no-one in the family ever so much as even suggest getting into programming, or even what it meant (the family tree is very salt-of-the earth to put it nicely)
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