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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 t

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 11y ago
Oh that's a really good insight. Yes, totally agreed.
TheOtherHobbes 11y 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 11y 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.

hangonhn 11y ago

Oh that's a really good insight. Yes, totally agreed.

TheOtherHobbes 11y 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 11y 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.