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Attempts like these might be barking up the wrong tree. People who are going to be successful in bootstrapping themselves from 0 to dev are going to naturally
by stillsut 11y ago
Attempts like these might be barking up the wrong tree.
People who are going to be successful in bootstrapping themselves from 0 to dev are going to naturally grasp logic, state, or any other general programming concept. (Not master, but grasp).
What people need is a real problem they can solve with programming: automate an office process, build a website, crunch some numbers, etc. And this is usually best done on a stack that has solutions for these problems. That's why "the future" of learning to program looks more like this: http://automatetheboringstuff.com/ http://automatetheboringstuff.com/ than a noob-IDE.
- romaniv 11y agoI don't think it's about bootstrapping to dev. I think it's about allowing people to solve certain problems using programming, but in a different way from what we're used to. It's about visualizing explorative programming. That's the way I understand it.
- ThomPete 11y agoThats not the point of what Bret has been trying to advocate IMO. Instead he is trying to establish better frameworks for thinking about programming by providing a better feedback loop.
- seiji 11y agoSmalltalk was the pinnacle of programatic pedagogy. Hypercard was the easiest way for regular humans to use computers for computer-like automations. But, then you run into the "No Real Programmer" problem. The nerds take over, hyper-complicate everything, then we're back to nobody understanding anything. (Also see: "No Real Unix User" when people say "Well, I don't consider OS X users to be unix users.")
- jowiar 11y agoThe other major tool I'd put up there with Smalltalk and Hypercard is Excel, at least when it comes to automation of real-world business problems. To an extent, it made a large enough set of problems easy enough to solve that tools have stagnated as a result.
- stillsut 11y agoUnder-appreciated aspect of excel: You store the data on a spreadsheet. A dev: hmm...Should it be Mongo-esque NoSQL, in-memory sqlite, MySQL vs SQLServer? But Postgres has most open source momentum...let's do pros v cons. Excel dude: Put the data in the grid. Then move on to what you're trying to do with it.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoI think you mean the data is displayed in a spreadsheet.
- bitwize 11y agoUnix dude: Fuck it! I'll spit out the data in text/csv and grovel through it with awk/perl.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- CyberDildonics 11y agoDepending on where you sat in history, every programmer tool was considered something for 'noobs'. Von Neuman considered an assembler a waste. Fortran was considered bad by many because you weren't working with the instructions the computer was running. Auto-completion, debuggers, syntax highlighting, fast compilation, interpreters, virtual machines and GUI building interfaces have all been derided by someone as terrible because everyone should man up and get closer to the metal. It has never been on the right side of history to refuse to embrace new tools that make creating software easier.