3 ms·

"When developing a skill, it is much better to acquire the right reflexes from the start rather than have to correct years of bad practice." I disagree with th

"When developing a skill, it is much better to acquire the right reflexes from the start rather than have to correct years of bad practice." I disagree with this statement. "Learning" is a long process of acquiring and also discarding habits and knowledge. The best intro I ever read for relativity was "An Equation That Changed the World" and it's a series of dialogues between Newton, Einstein, and the author (a modern physicist). Newtonian physics is relatively (haha) easy to understand. Once you understand that and then you can throw in some edge cases where it fails, you can introduce relativity and it makes relativity much easier to grasp. Likewise for programming. I learned with QBasic. Then as the code got messier, I started using "sub", etc. and then started playing other concepts until I outgrew the language. Functional programming came to me the same way. I outgrew my existing methods and reached for more advanced ones. All this is to say it's OK to start with easier and imperfect methods. We learn by acquiring new knowledge and then knowing them well enough to see their flaws before moving onto something better.

vinceguidry 10y ago
I'd argue that programming isn't like other skills in this regard. Obviously if you're teaching something like the violin, where there's one right way to hold the bow and learning how to play holding the bow in any other way will ultimately hamper you, sure, it's worth it to drill the One True Way. But coding isn't like that. Sure, GOTOs as a means for control flow, suck for most serious applications compared to the readily-available alternatives, it's not like you can't build your own control flow mechanisms with their own properties out of the GOTO primitive, and learning how these work and fail is really good practice. Time spent mucking about doing the wrong thing in coding teaches you how to ascertain the right way. Other skills don't necessarily offer this.
- hangonhn 10y ago
  Oh that's a really good insight. Yes, totally agreed.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  There isn't really a One True Way in music either. There are stupid ways to hold a bow, and there's a small range of ways that works. But it's certainly not something you can reduce to a formula of so-many-inches along and an angle of theta. The arts are mostly practice led, so there are efficient and comfortable ways to get an expressive result, which may not be intuitive or obvious to beginners, and which probably need to be practiced. But plenty of people pick up instruments by experimenting, and some of them go on to have successful careers - because results matter more than technique, and if you're getting good artistic results perfect technique is secondary. And I think the GOTO thing is overblown, and misses the point in exactly the same technique-vs-outcome way. The desired outcome is legible, maintainable code. If you bracket a thousand lines inside a single if statement, you're not any closer to that aim than someone who uses GOTO. What's missing from BASIC - and from any kind of training that's syntax-based instead of concept-based - is that sense of using structures to simplify and highlight program logic and flow. PASCAL was fairly new when I was learning to code, and it was billed as some kind of magical mental training tool that would eliminate bad habits and make you a better programmer. In fact it's just a vanilla C-family language with a few quirks, and the mental training side of it was always wildly oversold. Currently no language at all teaches separation of concerns, chunking, relative abstraction, DRY, and other fundamental concepts in an accessible way - and there should be. Because they really can help turn hard problems into simpler problems, and make all kinds of challenges more manageable - which is more fundamental to programming than knowing that POKE 53280,1 will make the screen frame white on a C64.
- panic 10y ago
  Maybe the difference is that holding a bow is a physical skill? Once physical skills become second nature it's harder to unlearn them.

vinceguidry 10y ago

I'd argue that programming isn't like other skills in this regard. Obviously if you're teaching something like the violin, where there's one right way to hold the bow and learning how to play holding the bow in any other way will ultimately hamper you, sure, it's worth it to drill the One True Way. But coding isn't like that. Sure, GOTOs as a means for control flow, suck for most serious applications compared to the readily-available alternatives, it's not like you can't build your own control flow mechanisms with their own properties out of the GOTO primitive, and learning how these work and fail is really good practice. Time spent mucking about doing the wrong thing in coding teaches you how to ascertain the right way. Other skills don't necessarily offer this.

hangonhn 10y ago
Oh that's a really good insight. Yes, totally agreed.
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
There isn't really a One True Way in music either. There are stupid ways to hold a bow, and there's a small range of ways that works. But it's certainly not something you can reduce to a formula of so-many-inches along and an angle of theta. The arts are mostly practice led, so there are efficient and comfortable ways to get an expressive result, which may not be intuitive or obvious to beginners, and which probably need to be practiced. But plenty of people pick up instruments by experimenting, and some of them go on to have successful careers - because results matter more than technique, and if you're getting good artistic results perfect technique is secondary. And I think the GOTO thing is overblown, and misses the point in exactly the same technique-vs-outcome way. The desired outcome is legible, maintainable code. If you bracket a thousand lines inside a single if statement, you're not any closer to that aim than someone who uses GOTO. What's missing from BASIC - and from any kind of training that's syntax-based instead of concept-based - is that sense of using structures to simplify and highlight program logic and flow. PASCAL was fairly new when I was learning to code, and it was billed as some kind of magical mental training tool that would eliminate bad habits and make you a better programmer. In fact it's just a vanilla C-family language with a few quirks, and the mental training side of it was always wildly oversold. Currently no language at all teaches separation of concerns, chunking, relative abstraction, DRY, and other fundamental concepts in an accessible way - and there should be. Because they really can help turn hard problems into simpler problems, and make all kinds of challenges more manageable - which is more fundamental to programming than knowing that POKE 53280,1 will make the screen frame white on a C64.
panic 10y ago
Maybe the difference is that holding a bow is a physical skill? Once physical skills become second nature it's harder to unlearn them.