7 ms·

Stop saying learning to code is easy

148 points by david90 10y ago

kraftman 10y ago
So we shouldn't tell people learning to code is easy, we should tell them it's hard, complicated, exhausting, and exasperating, but it'll be worth it in the end? Why not just give them some easy code, help them through it, and let them see if they enjoy it?
- hartator 10y ago
  No one tells people being an architect or a writter is easy. Why lying?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retra 10y ago
    Are you sure about that? Lots of hard-to-do things are said to be easy by those who know how to do it. You might not think being an architect or writer is easy, but someone who is an architect or writer has a clear picture of how to do it, and they might say it's easy.
    - mto 10y ago
      I have yet to meet a medical doctor saying "medicine is easy" - because it would diminish their status, salary and they love to brag how it is the hardest thing to study.
      - Retra 10y ago
        Have you met a medical doctor who was trying to teach you his/her trade as a medical student?
Avshalom 10y ago
If you run around telling people how hard programming is they'll never even get to the point that it does become difficult. That's why we tell people it's easy.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Surely there's a middle ground right? Being a surgeon is hard, being an astronaut is hard... there's a lot of jobs popular culture says are hard but it doesn't stop people from trying. The thing with programming is that it's turned into one of those things people say "you are born for". So when newbies have trouble with it, they give up and say their minds don't "work that way". I think it's good to tell people that anyone can learn the basics of programming and get started. No need to be a genius for that. I don't know why but people seem to think programmers are "different" than the general populace (even from those with other hard jobs). But it's not easy. We've all dealt with hard problems in our jobs, classes, or personal projects, right? If you tell people programming is easy they'll hit that first roadblock like the article says and quit. Seen it happen many times.
- nilkn 10y ago
  This doesn't seem true. There are plenty of jobs that are commonly regarded as being hard and yet they attract plenty of people. I think you also drastically underestimate the number of people who are specifically interested in hard things, not easy things. And in many cases these are exactly the sorts of people you want to hire.
caffed 10y ago
I am going to support Cory Koski's comment on your post: I don't know what your intentions are, but you have a post titled "Stop saying learning to code is easy" and a photo of three women with laptops. Are you trying to make a correlation of women being glib about the difficulty of software development/programming?
- yborg 10y ago
  I don't know why the parent post is even trending on HN, it's content-less trivial fluff, but I also facepalmed at the inclusion of the picture. I'm not a supporter of the idea of the "patriarchy" meme, but putting this picture on a post like that certainly implies at least an unconscious association in this guy's mind. Good thing he's a "former professor".
  - rimantas 10y ago
    It says nothing about the author's mind, but your comment and the one above says a lot about their authors. It's you making the asumptions.
- shanselman 10y ago
  The three young women are programmers sitting in the NYC Microsoft office. They are my friends and the image is part of the WoCTechChat CC Image collection. There is no correlation. Flip a few coins and it could have been three men or a combination. Sorry if it felt correlated, it's not.
sgeisenh 10y ago
I'm not sure I agree. The title doesn't match the content. The title contends that learning to code is hard, and I've never heard anybody disagree, learning to code is difficult. But then the content of the post contends that coding itself is hard. And I disagree. Programming difficulty is a function of a huge number of factors. Among which familiarity and experience are paramount. If you're writing a program that's familiar to one you've written before, programming is easy. If you're writing a complex new system with little to no precedent, programming is hard. There isn't a blanket statement that can be made about the difficulty of programming, it is all contextual.
zfnsgmdydmy 10y ago
Except it is easy. In fact, it was designed to be easy by the language architect. Unlike engineering where you're dealing with unchangeable laws of physics, computer languages are designed to be written by people.
- Retra 10y ago
  Programmers are still dealing with the laws of physics. This is why you get 10,000 asynchronous communication platforms all generally failing to result in massive improvements in usability and parallelization. Most programming problems are communication problems, and most communication problems are a result of physical limitations.
  - zfnsgmdydmy 10y ago
    While, yes, you can't run CERN on a raspberry pi, the performance limitations of the underlying CPU are a fundamentally separate problem (unless you're developing for a microcontroller). Going out and writing code (any code!) is a purely mental exercise that's unaffected by the outside world. Don't like the syntax? Use another language! Want a feature that's not currently there? Import a library! The point is that code was meant to be written, whether it relies on a physical processor or not. You have lots of different options that each try to make it easier for the programmer.
    - Retra 10y ago
      That's not entirely true either. Computer programming is largely performed using text in a 2d grid, and there are a good deal of problems not suitable to being represented that way. Language designers have to deal with this when deciding what syntax to support, and how that maps to the desired semantics. This is one of the reasons for the proliferation of so many different languages in the first place.
- LaMarseillaise 10y ago
  > where you're dealing with unchangeable laws of physics The language of mathematics is also designed to be written and understood by people, and is used to describe the laws of physics. I, personally, find writing mathematical statements be comparable to writing code (and also Latin).
Olscore 10y ago
Sorry. I understand the sentiment behind this but disagree with advisory or demands to speak a certain way. It's blatant political correctness and nobody has an obligation to set another person's expectation regarding coding. In common vernacular we say something is easy as an attempt to encourage a person to continue. This would just be changing words in order to achieve the same goal. What difference does it make if some say it's easy and others say it's hard? Let the dynamic range of opinions be. Is it necessary to squash one opinion over the other in an attempt to soothe the struggling of a few newbies?
- mden 10y ago
  I find meta-arguments like this really silly. You are simultaneously telling him that people are entitled to their own opinions while at the same time saying his opinion is invalid. As to it being political correctness, I would argue that has little to do with it. It's really marketing - an attempt to change the perception of something to achieve some goal. No one's feelings are hurt when you say something is challenging (I guess unless you explicitly say challenging compared to what).
VeejayRampay 10y ago
I really feel like current salaries are too much to bear for honchos of the industry and that there's been a recent push to make it seem like "programming is easy" and "everybody can take up code". I agree that the learning process has been made much easier than it ever was before (MOOC, screencasts, collaborative learning, cornucopia of open source code available everywhere), but that's only the first step in the learning process. That part (the one that leads to being able to produce code) has actually always been rather "easy". It's the next steps that are usually hard. Learning data structures, design, architecture, how to collaborate with coworkers, how to fix, debug and review code, mastering the associated tools (shell, git, regex, making a given editor your home and harnessing its power, etc). From what I've observed with more junior developers that are usually coming through self-learning or accelerated programs, it's not the "code" that is hard, it's those following phases because in the end, they're what really matters. Though, don't get me wrong, it's absolutely nice that we're pushing programming literacy and making it more accessible for everyone, I just feel like we should not be selling false hope.
- stdbrouw 10y ago
  > Learning data structures, design, architecture, how to collaborate with coworkers, how to fix, debug and review code, mastering the associated tools (shell, git, regex, making a given editor your home and harnessing its power, etc). I learned all of those things way after shipping my first usable and useful code. These things don't make the programming learning curve steeper, they just make it longer.
  - lumpypua 10y ago
    I agree, you can do awesome things without too much coding knowledge—but a big part of the current push to teach people how to code is to give them access to the coding job market. If I'm going to hire you as a "software engineer" at an engineering salary, I expect you to know all those things. Of my friends learning to code for masters degrees now, the ones with a natural coding mindset and studying it hard are taking about 2 years to hit a production engineering level. Most seem to be on a 3-4 year trajectory. That's pretty reasonable for a complex skillset.
tommynicholas 10y ago
Learning to code is easy
danbruc 10y ago
Learning to write code is not too hard, maybe not the easiest thing but really not too hard. Writing good code - readable, maintainable, secure code with few bugs - on the other hand is really hard. The gap between a non-programmer and a junior developer is way narrower than the gap between a junior developer and a good senior developer. And something that I am missing in most of those articles is that writing code is actually the easy part of the job, the hard part is talking to the customer and figuring out what they actually want you to do and then keep up with them changing their mind every four weeks and still somehow manage to ship something that roughly does what it currently is supposed to do.
- x5n1 10y ago
  The hard part, as you describe it, is usually not the job of coders. It's the job of project managers. In lesser organization the coders are doing work that management is suppose to be doing, so they might be doing multiple roles which makes their job much harder.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    I don't think that would be part of the job of the project management or at most it would be their job to keep the number of change requests as low as possible. In my current project, for example, with have people dedicated to requirements engineering and things are reviewed several times, at least in theory, before they end up in the sprint backlog. But nonetheless I would say that just reading a user story and coding it out is the exception, usually you write a if statement and then notice that there is nothing in the specification that says what to do in case the condition is false. And then you ask and suddenly it turns out that this whole thing totally conflicts what somebody implemented a month ago. Personally I have never worked in a project where people where just supposed to code out a given specification, they were always also involved in gathering requirements and at least to some extend in shaping the architecture. Only the overall system architecture is usually already fixed by architects, most of the time to ensure that the system integrates well with the existing environment.
  - collyw 10y ago
    Junior coders maybe, but a senior level engineer should be able to make these decisions. Often PM's aren't particularly technical or their tech knowledge is dated, so its good for someone doing the implementing to help with the decision making.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
shkkmo 10y ago
Learning to code is easy, learning to use that ability to solve interesting problems is hard.
prodmerc 10y ago
Learning to fix electronics is easy. Learning to fix your car is easy. Just open up the enclosure/hood and... do stuff :D
brandonmenc 10y ago
Learning to code is easy (everyone who wrote a BASIC program as a child, raise your hand.) Learning to code well is difficult and requires years of experience, obsession, and a titanic amount of patience.
- mto 10y ago
  True, especially as a child it's not unnatural at all. I discovered qbasic by accident and just played around until I could write small games. It never felt hard, frustrating or exhausting. All fun and play. That is the big difference to actually work in the field and have to do the boring stuff too :)
spb 10y ago
To be honest, I'm not surprised to hear a statement like this from Scott Hanselman. Learning to code is hard... when you have to do it inside Microsoft's byzantine, arbitrary .NET ecosystem, with its mandatory thousand-button GUI toolchains and fifty-file project baselines. In environments with less absurd barriers to entry, like JavaScript, learning to code is easy (especially in light of the things Scott mentions in that post, such as the vast swaths of community support available when running into problems).
prodigal_erik 10y ago
I'm in favor of self-exclusion. Anyone who holds interviews should be aware that there are way too many duds in the industry for no good reason. I want to work with the obsessives who tell themselves "no, there must be some right way to do this" rather than relying on some strange kind of cheerleading that didn't exist when I started.
vinceguidry 10y ago
The main thing that makes learning how to code difficult is the sheer amount of technologies you need to learn before you feel like you can make real progress. Each individual technology isn't by itself particularly difficult, with a few exceptions; (looking at you git) but also aren't particularly useful by themselves. You either have to be willing to learn a simpler stack and pick up skills gradually, or deal with the intense frustration of drinking from the firehose right out the gate. When I was in high school, I went from doing BASIC to elementary web stuff to trying to learn C++. (I didn't have practically anybody who knew how to code to guide me) I gave up and didn't go back to coding for some ten years, sticking to just being a power user. If I were trying to teach someone to code nowadays, I wouldn't really know where to begin. People want instant gratification without the frustration. You can't have both. I've had limited success, but only after finally convincing them that they have to be patient.
- owenwil 10y ago
  I absolutely concurr. The hardest thing for me has simply been connecting the dots. Suddenly needing to understand Git, or how to configure Apache, just to learn PHP. THere are so many bits that aren't explained to you, all the while you're jumping into the deep end with a language. It's hard to hang in there, but it's worth it – however many don't.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    What we really need is sandbox dev environments. A one-click installer that does everything you need to get a stack up and running and ready for code. But it's way way way too complicated. Something like that wants to be a standard, but won't be robust enough to actually solve the problems a standard solves. I'm excited for functional package managers for this reason. It will give us a framework for describing machine state that's actually useful enough to give us real-world one-click install.
    - duncanawoods 10y ago
      A one-click installer sounds great but creating it is not the hard bit, its choosing what goes into it. Its not just the Cambrian explosion of JS frameworks and plugins but the whole stack of external dependencies from databases, monitoring, build, testing and deploy. There have been lots of attempts that pick a stack e.g. Angular-seed for the MEAN stack but they make so many questionable choices that they don't have any longevity. At one point it might have looked sensible but now Mongo is out of favour and React has the ascendancy. Maybe it needs an organisation like a Linux distribution, e.g. Ubuntu For Web, that chooses a complete end to end stack, develops missing glue, maintains forks when necessary and gives some sort of maintenance guarantee for LTS releases and supports upgrade paths.
matchagaucho 10y ago
Playing piano is hard, but teachers that keep the learning experience fun see much lower drop-out rates. Teaching, mentoring, and onboarding students to enjoy coding is the real hard work.
franciscop 10y ago
Totally agree. I have taught to some friends and my gf (pointing that it's people that I care about). What I tell them is that there's easy parts and difficult parts, and that things like SUM() in excel is a basic way of programming. Then I teach them about html+css but starting only on the "easy-ish" part. So using my own library [1] for things like ".row" where you'd need either floats+negative margins or flexbox. Teaching them about images, images sizes (should be set at 100% in many situations), colors, backgrounds, paragraphs and links. That really motivates them. Then some day they will need more advanced things, but if they can make a layout with the content then they become really motivated since they can see their programming real time. I have to do this mainly because some people hate "irrationally" maths, so if I taught the same way I started learning --calculating primes-- then they'd be bored to death. Instead I like choosing something they are personally connected: what website do you like? Okay, let's do something similar... I've even tried doing a small course for free [2], but so far it's not been really effective with those people I'm teaching, but some other friends asked me things about it :) [1] http://picnicss.com/ http://picnicss.com/ [2] https://en.libre.university/subject/4kitSFzUe https://en.libre.university/subject/4kitSFzUe
- garrettgrimsley 10y ago
  You aren't teaching programming, you're teaching web design. Programming doesn't have to start with calculating primes, but it does have to be actual programming. Maybe try introducing the to something like Scratch or Logo.
  - lazerwalker 10y ago
    Serious question: how do you define "actual programming"? CSS is a markup language, sure (although technically Turing-Complete, depending on the spec), but it's still conceptually telling a computer what you would like to happen. It's more declarative than imperative, but given the wide number of different programming paradigms, I don't think that's a problem.
    - rootlocus 10y ago
tikhonj 10y ago
It feels like you could write a perfectly symmetrical article—just as convincing—in the opposite direction. We've been telling people "math is hard" for years and look where that's gotten us. People seem do a better job of learning abstract algebra if you trick them into not thinking it's difficult and arcane. I'm not saying that one view or the other is right. Rather, I'm just saying that it's not obvious which is better or even how much it matters. Posts like this—which basically do say "it's obvious that..." and little more—aren't contributing anything substantial.
alien3d 10y ago
Easy and costly also.Each time new framework and language, most of us will endure dejavu to create same thing.We sometimes not up to all and do please job hunter,interviewer.We arent scientis to know all weird formula phisyic , math and other
Philipp__ 10y ago
Sincerely I think it would be the best to meet somewhere in the middle, between Scott's and symmetrical but opposite opinion on this matter. I am student, and freelance developer. And I ask myself a lot of times, what is the code that we write? Lines aren't clear like in electronics (I studied EE for 2 years, after which I pivoted to CS), where you got rules, theorems, which you use to analyze and build things. Code is a live thing. It grows, it changes, it lives and it dies. And the most paradoxical thing of all is that computers are pretty "dead" and dumb things, bunch of registers, ICs and transistors. (I am oversimplifying things here to prove my point better). The way we approach writing code always changes, code can be pretty personal thing, you can have your own style (like handwriting). And possibilities are almost endless now! So I think people in general should stop treating things with black or white principle. I feel that is very immature. Especially not coding. Software development is single most weirdest and interesting things that happened to me. It makes me scary and enthusiastic at the same time. It is easy and hard at the same time. And I think it is really stupid to try to ascribe any of those exclusive attributes. But everyone has it's own opinion. And that is what makes dev culture and community so interesting in the end.
alien3d 10y ago
Easy and costly also.Each time new framework and language, most of us will endure dejavu to create same thing.We sometimes not up to all and do please job hunter,interviewer.We arent scientis to know all weird formula phisyic , math and other
Waterluvian 10y ago
Coding is like driving. Even someone from a developing nation who has never seen it before can learn it. But we aren't all professional race car drivers. It is easy. And it is very very hard.
- draugadrotten 10y ago
  Coding is like singing. Even someone from a developing nation who has never heard it before can learn it. But we aren't all professional opera singers. It is easy. And it is very very hard.
  - Waterluvian 10y ago
    I like yours better.
- kamaal 10y ago
  My dad was a trailer/truck/bus/cab driver throughout his life. He is sort of retired now, but when I talked to him about Uber and every tom dick and harry now being able to drive a taxi, he just laughed the issue aside. Sure some one can drive and make a few $$'s a day. But to make that considerable source of income to send kids to a good education, to buy your self a home, a retirement and a decent income to retire one to cover all your expenses you have to do a heck lot more. That is when you realize the taxi license was likely least of your worries. You'd have to wake up at 3 am in the morning, suffer rude passengers, wash your car often, have the discipline to spectrum all those things that being successful in profession demands. At the end you really come to the conclusion that what stopped you was not the lack of coding classes at college or government bureaucracy or union or any of that stuff. The true reason is its hard, and most people simply aren't resourceful enough to see through the end.
shafaq 10y ago
Why everyone is being pushed to learn to code in the first place? The reason behind 'coding is easy' is that industry needs lots of programmers? Really?
- krapp 10y ago
  I think in part to flood the market with low quality applicants, and drive salaries down.
  - imtringued 10y ago
    That will only increase hiring costs and increase the risk to get a lemon as an employee.
- gaius 10y ago
  If there really was a shortage, there would be no ageism. There is only a shortage of very junior people willing to be exploited because they don't know any better. That exploitation starts on day one of a very expensive"boot camp", continues with 80 hour weeks for 0.01% equity in their first job, then they burn out...
stevetrewick 10y ago
Think of it like sport. Anyone can have a go and have fun, jumpers for goalposts and all that but the vast majority aren't going to end up as your Ronaldos or Andy Murrays. And that's OK.
- projektir 10y ago
  I don't think that's a very useful analogy since the standard for professional athletes is an inflated moving target. Athletes are evaluated strictly in comparison to other athletes and only the best athletes at a given time are chosen for a very small set of positions. Whereas in software development, there are lots of positions for the same specialization and plenty of average people can make a comfortable living.
ranci 10y ago
"Programming is easy" -- person that has spent a significant percentage of their life programming
ranci 10y ago
Also, stop acting like people are idiots if they don't know how to do something that you know how to do.
- collyw 10y ago
  People often are idiots. The other day, one of our non-technical members of staff said "I think people are just to stupid to use our system". Glad she said it and not me.
gingerrr 10y ago
My personal variant has always been "learning to code is easy, you just have to be okay with feeling completely stupid for a while until it clicks." It's a way to encourage while being up front with the amount of time and mental toil learning new ways of thinking and expressing your ideas takes. It also encourages self-selection, as the few people who took it to heart are some of the best devs I know now, they saw the challenge and remained undaunted.
projektir 10y ago
Interesting. I tend to learn better when I don't perceive something as "hard", as that creates a mental block of sorts for me. Acquiring proficiency requires significant amounts of time investment + effort, but it would seem "hard" should denote something above that. I tend to prefer terms like "tractable", where it's less about whether the given problem is "easy" or "hard", and more about whether I can find a productive way to reason about the problem. An easy subject can be made intractable by the wrong kind of presentation. Most subjects that are very /new/ to a given person may be intractable on the onset. Some subjects, ones that I would call truly "hard", do not become tractable for a very long time. So I don't know if I'd call software development hard, but it's still a new and unfamiliar thing to a lot of people, and it can be quite intractable at various times, which is basically what "bad documentation" means.
jaggederest 10y ago
The problem that I see is the imprecision of english when it comes to the word "hard". There are many different kinds of hard. There's hard like "I have to put effort into it", there's hard like "if you were not born being able to do it, you can't do it", and there's hard like "even people who can do it are only capable at their absolute best moments". So the issue is not "Is programming difficult?" - clearly any learned skill is difficult to bring to an expert level. The question I see people asking is, "Can the average person with diligence and application ever learn to program well?", and the answer is obviously yes, they can. It's not "hard" like running a <3:50 mile is "hard". It's also not hard like "Can you taste PTC or distinguish red and green", in that you either "are born with it" or aren't, and find it effortless if you are capable. So many people that I've met assume that they're fundamentally incapable of understanding algorithmic thought, and that's very sad. They don't need to be Kernighan or Torvalds in order to gain value from learning some programming skills.
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  I think "learning to code" is more ambiguous. I have a designer friend getting in to web design - I've helped him out pick up some jQuery - he learned the stuff that was useful to him pretty fast. Is he a programmer ? No. Can he write code ? Yes. So yea writing code is easy, copy-paste and replace the stuff that seems relevant to you, especially when you have a quick iteration method like a REPL. Control flow might take a while to fully grasp but still it's not hard to understand, but takes practice to get comfortable with.
  - kamaal 10y ago
    Humans generally have a way to look for patterns of repeated effort that could be automated, and then proceed to automate them one way or the other. It has nothing to with programming. We are trained through evolution to conserve resources as much as we possibly can. The guy who invented the wheel was the first programmer.
- benaadams 10y ago
  > The problem that I see is the imprecision of english when it comes to the word "hard". Learning to code is NP-Hard ?
danielmeneses 10y ago
Yeap.. people usually forget how hard it was. Programming is not a natural thinking so when learning, first forget what makes sense in "real world" and embrace a new way of seeing thinks. I understand why some say that it's easy, they're trying to bring more people to tech side, but my truth is: i do programming because i really like and all the hard times to get there are battles won, but don't try to win battles from something that don't stand out for you, remember, you really need to like what you're doing. Peace.
erlend_sh 10y ago
For an alternative take on the exact same subject matter, see Quincy Larson's "One does not simply learn to code" https://medium.freecodecamp.com/one-does-not-simply-learn-to-code-f25bacdc5b62 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/one-does-not-simply-learn-to...
codingdave 10y ago
I work mostly with people teaching kids to code, and for our goals, it is easy. We aren't trying to teach them how to write the most elegant and efficient code... we are trying to get them to understand basic logic and building blocks. We are teaching them how to solve problems, and debug their work. And we are teaching them basic computer literacy. If they are good at it and go deeper into software development or computer science, then it may get hard. But it is a pessimistic view to look for reasons why something will be hard, and pontificate on those problems. Why not just help people take some simple steps, get a few successes under their belts, and decide for themselves if they want to go into deeper more difficult waters.
jokoon 10y ago
I learned C/C++ by myself with "C++ for dummies". I was already taught assembly at school at a very short class. I learned more from linux and C through a linux fanboy, and I seriously learned industrial C++ at school, but I already knew most of the basics. I was obsessed about learning how to code because I always played a lot of video games and loved electronics. I don't have a degree, am chronically unemployed. I admit that learning code is really about understanding the details. Having a taste for computers and math is a huge advantage. If you don't, you will quickly hate it and only learn it for a job, but not for passion. I agree that code looks lame and is really not accessible, while most people who need it, can't always afford to work with a programmer. There needs to be solutions like MIT's scratch or anything that is more intuitive than textual syntax. It's amazing what some people can manage to do with excel.
mrcabada 10y ago
I disagree with this, maybe not because coding is easy, and I can't really measure that because I've been coding since I'm 10 years old (I'm 26 now) so it's been "normal" for me. But what I can tell is that learning to code is like learning to do something else that requieres skills and time. It is as easy as learning something else completely unrelated with computers, it depends on you and how dedicated you are.
Mandatum 10y ago
I think learning to code _is_ easy. I've recently pointed a friend towards FreeCodeCamp, he's never tried development but was asking about it (previous non-tech related jobs) so I pointed him to the website. Yesterday he must have spent 8 hours doing tutorials, occasionally asking questions and has started building his first website. He's beginning to pick up the basic building blocks of programming, not for loops and if blocks, but data structures, debugging (Chrome is amazing), etc. I think the hardest part of learning to code is choosing a language and deciding what to build. The rest is Stack Overflow and online tutorials. Oh, and a whole lot of time. Sure to become an "Expert" you'll need to learn about a vast range of things that are not code, but affect code - like security, best practices, readability and maintainability, different stacks, etc. But getting your foot in the door with the basics is pretty easy.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  So this applies to anything. I helped my friend learn to paint. Bought him a canvas and 4 brushes and some paint. He watched YouTube all day yesterday . I think he painted this circle thing that looked like a sun. Painting isn't hard.
pier25 10y ago
Anyone (probably) with a few tools and some wood can build a dog house. But you need real pros to build a skyscraper.
wcummings 10y ago
Yeah, seriously, and stop teaching people how to code. You people are seriously letting the cat out of the bag.
digi_owl 10y ago
For me at least learning to code have two different requirements. The first is shared across languages, getting to grips with ifs and cases and all that. That is relatively easy. The second is pr language, and it involves learning what is available in the libs and similar. And how to use those to do things like read and write files, connect over networks, or draw a UI on screen. And those are bloody hard.

148 points by david90 10y ago

So we shouldn't tell people learning to code is easy, we should tell them it's hard, complicated, exhausting, and exasperating, but it'll be worth it in the end? Why not just give them some easy code, help them through it, and let them see if they enjoy it?

hartator 10y ago
No one tells people being an architect or a writter is easy. Why lying?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Retra 10y ago
  Are you sure about that? Lots of hard-to-do things are said to be easy by those who know how to do it. You might not think being an architect or writer is easy, but someone who is an architect or writer has a clear picture of how to do it, and they might say it's easy.
  - mto 10y ago
    I have yet to meet a medical doctor saying "medicine is easy" - because it would diminish their status, salary and they love to brag how it is the hardest thing to study.
    - Retra 10y ago
      Have you met a medical doctor who was trying to teach you his/her trade as a medical student?

Avshalom 10y ago

If you run around telling people how hard programming is they'll never even get to the point that it does become difficult. That's why we tell people it's easy.

sotojuan 10y ago
Surely there's a middle ground right? Being a surgeon is hard, being an astronaut is hard... there's a lot of jobs popular culture says are hard but it doesn't stop people from trying. The thing with programming is that it's turned into one of those things people say "you are born for". So when newbies have trouble with it, they give up and say their minds don't "work that way". I think it's good to tell people that anyone can learn the basics of programming and get started. No need to be a genius for that. I don't know why but people seem to think programmers are "different" than the general populace (even from those with other hard jobs). But it's not easy. We've all dealt with hard problems in our jobs, classes, or personal projects, right? If you tell people programming is easy they'll hit that first roadblock like the article says and quit. Seen it happen many times.
nilkn 10y ago
This doesn't seem true. There are plenty of jobs that are commonly regarded as being hard and yet they attract plenty of people. I think you also drastically underestimate the number of people who are specifically interested in hard things, not easy things. And in many cases these are exactly the sorts of people you want to hire.

caffed 10y ago

I am going to support Cory Koski's comment on your post: I don't know what your intentions are, but you have a post titled "Stop saying learning to code is easy" and a photo of three women with laptops. Are you trying to make a correlation of women being glib about the difficulty of software development/programming?

yborg 10y ago
I don't know why the parent post is even trending on HN, it's content-less trivial fluff, but I also facepalmed at the inclusion of the picture. I'm not a supporter of the idea of the "patriarchy" meme, but putting this picture on a post like that certainly implies at least an unconscious association in this guy's mind. Good thing he's a "former professor".
- rimantas 10y ago
  It says nothing about the author's mind, but your comment and the one above says a lot about their authors. It's you making the asumptions.
shanselman 10y ago
The three young women are programmers sitting in the NYC Microsoft office. They are my friends and the image is part of the WoCTechChat CC Image collection. There is no correlation. Flip a few coins and it could have been three men or a combination. Sorry if it felt correlated, it's not.

sgeisenh 10y ago

I'm not sure I agree. The title doesn't match the content. The title contends that learning to code is hard, and I've never heard anybody disagree, learning to code is difficult. But then the content of the post contends that coding itself is hard. And I disagree. Programming difficulty is a function of a huge number of factors. Among which familiarity and experience are paramount. If you're writing a program that's familiar to one you've written before, programming is easy. If you're writing a complex new system with little to no precedent, programming is hard. There isn't a blanket statement that can be made about the difficulty of programming, it is all contextual.

zfnsgmdydmy 10y ago

Except it is easy. In fact, it was designed to be easy by the language architect. Unlike engineering where you're dealing with unchangeable laws of physics, computer languages are designed to be written by people.

Retra 10y ago
Programmers are still dealing with the laws of physics. This is why you get 10,000 asynchronous communication platforms all generally failing to result in massive improvements in usability and parallelization. Most programming problems are communication problems, and most communication problems are a result of physical limitations.
- zfnsgmdydmy 10y ago
  While, yes, you can't run CERN on a raspberry pi, the performance limitations of the underlying CPU are a fundamentally separate problem (unless you're developing for a microcontroller). Going out and writing code (any code!) is a purely mental exercise that's unaffected by the outside world. Don't like the syntax? Use another language! Want a feature that's not currently there? Import a library! The point is that code was meant to be written, whether it relies on a physical processor or not. You have lots of different options that each try to make it easier for the programmer.
  - Retra 10y ago
    That's not entirely true either. Computer programming is largely performed using text in a 2d grid, and there are a good deal of problems not suitable to being represented that way. Language designers have to deal with this when deciding what syntax to support, and how that maps to the desired semantics. This is one of the reasons for the proliferation of so many different languages in the first place.
LaMarseillaise 10y ago
> where you're dealing with unchangeable laws of physics The language of mathematics is also designed to be written and understood by people, and is used to describe the laws of physics. I, personally, find writing mathematical statements be comparable to writing code (and also Latin).

Olscore 10y ago

Sorry. I understand the sentiment behind this but disagree with advisory or demands to speak a certain way. It's blatant political correctness and nobody has an obligation to set another person's expectation regarding coding. In common vernacular we say something is easy as an attempt to encourage a person to continue. This would just be changing words in order to achieve the same goal. What difference does it make if some say it's easy and others say it's hard? Let the dynamic range of opinions be. Is it necessary to squash one opinion over the other in an attempt to soothe the struggling of a few newbies?

mden 10y ago
I find meta-arguments like this really silly. You are simultaneously telling him that people are entitled to their own opinions while at the same time saying his opinion is invalid. As to it being political correctness, I would argue that has little to do with it. It's really marketing - an attempt to change the perception of something to achieve some goal. No one's feelings are hurt when you say something is challenging (I guess unless you explicitly say challenging compared to what).

VeejayRampay 10y ago

I really feel like current salaries are too much to bear for honchos of the industry and that there's been a recent push to make it seem like "programming is easy" and "everybody can take up code". I agree that the learning process has been made much easier than it ever was before (MOOC, screencasts, collaborative learning, cornucopia of open source code available everywhere), but that's only the first step in the learning process. That part (the one that leads to being able to produce code) has actually always been rather "easy". It's the next steps that are usually hard. Learning data structures, design, architecture, how to collaborate with coworkers, how to fix, debug and review code, mastering the associated tools (shell, git, regex, making a given editor your home and harnessing its power, etc). From what I've observed with more junior developers that are usually coming through self-learning or accelerated programs, it's not the "code" that is hard, it's those following phases because in the end, they're what really matters. Though, don't get me wrong, it's absolutely nice that we're pushing programming literacy and making it more accessible for everyone, I just feel like we should not be selling false hope.

stdbrouw 10y ago
> Learning data structures, design, architecture, how to collaborate with coworkers, how to fix, debug and review code, mastering the associated tools (shell, git, regex, making a given editor your home and harnessing its power, etc). I learned all of those things way after shipping my first usable and useful code. These things don't make the programming learning curve steeper, they just make it longer.
- lumpypua 10y ago
  I agree, you can do awesome things without too much coding knowledge—but a big part of the current push to teach people how to code is to give them access to the coding job market. If I'm going to hire you as a "software engineer" at an engineering salary, I expect you to know all those things. Of my friends learning to code for masters degrees now, the ones with a natural coding mindset and studying it hard are taking about 2 years to hit a production engineering level. Most seem to be on a 3-4 year trajectory. That's pretty reasonable for a complex skillset.

tommynicholas 10y ago

Learning to code is easy

danbruc 10y ago

Learning to write code is not too hard, maybe not the easiest thing but really not too hard. Writing good code - readable, maintainable, secure code with few bugs - on the other hand is really hard. The gap between a non-programmer and a junior developer is way narrower than the gap between a junior developer and a good senior developer. And something that I am missing in most of those articles is that writing code is actually the easy part of the job, the hard part is talking to the customer and figuring out what they actually want you to do and then keep up with them changing their mind every four weeks and still somehow manage to ship something that roughly does what it currently is supposed to do.

x5n1 10y ago
The hard part, as you describe it, is usually not the job of coders. It's the job of project managers. In lesser organization the coders are doing work that management is suppose to be doing, so they might be doing multiple roles which makes their job much harder.
- danbruc 10y ago
  I don't think that would be part of the job of the project management or at most it would be their job to keep the number of change requests as low as possible. In my current project, for example, with have people dedicated to requirements engineering and things are reviewed several times, at least in theory, before they end up in the sprint backlog. But nonetheless I would say that just reading a user story and coding it out is the exception, usually you write a if statement and then notice that there is nothing in the specification that says what to do in case the condition is false. And then you ask and suddenly it turns out that this whole thing totally conflicts what somebody implemented a month ago. Personally I have never worked in a project where people where just supposed to code out a given specification, they were always also involved in gathering requirements and at least to some extend in shaping the architecture. Only the overall system architecture is usually already fixed by architects, most of the time to ensure that the system integrates well with the existing environment.
- collyw 10y ago
  Junior coders maybe, but a senior level engineer should be able to make these decisions. Often PM's aren't particularly technical or their tech knowledge is dated, so its good for someone doing the implementing to help with the decision making.

deleted 10y ago

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shkkmo 10y ago

Learning to code is easy, learning to use that ability to solve interesting problems is hard.

prodmerc 10y ago

Learning to fix electronics is easy. Learning to fix your car is easy. Just open up the enclosure/hood and... do stuff :D

brandonmenc 10y ago

Learning to code is easy (everyone who wrote a BASIC program as a child, raise your hand.) Learning to code well is difficult and requires years of experience, obsession, and a titanic amount of patience.

mto 10y ago
True, especially as a child it's not unnatural at all. I discovered qbasic by accident and just played around until I could write small games. It never felt hard, frustrating or exhausting. All fun and play. That is the big difference to actually work in the field and have to do the boring stuff too :)

spb 10y ago

To be honest, I'm not surprised to hear a statement like this from Scott Hanselman. Learning to code is hard... when you have to do it inside Microsoft's byzantine, arbitrary .NET ecosystem, with its mandatory thousand-button GUI toolchains and fifty-file project baselines. In environments with less absurd barriers to entry, like JavaScript, learning to code is easy (especially in light of the things Scott mentions in that post, such as the vast swaths of community support available when running into problems).

prodigal_erik 10y ago

I'm in favor of self-exclusion. Anyone who holds interviews should be aware that there are way too many duds in the industry for no good reason. I want to work with the obsessives who tell themselves "no, there must be some right way to do this" rather than relying on some strange kind of cheerleading that didn't exist when I started.

vinceguidry 10y ago

The main thing that makes learning how to code difficult is the sheer amount of technologies you need to learn before you feel like you can make real progress. Each individual technology isn't by itself particularly difficult, with a few exceptions; (looking at you git) but also aren't particularly useful by themselves. You either have to be willing to learn a simpler stack and pick up skills gradually, or deal with the intense frustration of drinking from the firehose right out the gate. When I was in high school, I went from doing BASIC to elementary web stuff to trying to learn C++. (I didn't have practically anybody who knew how to code to guide me) I gave up and didn't go back to coding for some ten years, sticking to just being a power user. If I were trying to teach someone to code nowadays, I wouldn't really know where to begin. People want instant gratification without the frustration. You can't have both. I've had limited success, but only after finally convincing them that they have to be patient.

owenwil 10y ago
I absolutely concurr. The hardest thing for me has simply been connecting the dots. Suddenly needing to understand Git, or how to configure Apache, just to learn PHP. THere are so many bits that aren't explained to you, all the while you're jumping into the deep end with a language. It's hard to hang in there, but it's worth it – however many don't.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  What we really need is sandbox dev environments. A one-click installer that does everything you need to get a stack up and running and ready for code. But it's way way way too complicated. Something like that wants to be a standard, but won't be robust enough to actually solve the problems a standard solves. I'm excited for functional package managers for this reason. It will give us a framework for describing machine state that's actually useful enough to give us real-world one-click install.
  - duncanawoods 10y ago
    A one-click installer sounds great but creating it is not the hard bit, its choosing what goes into it. Its not just the Cambrian explosion of JS frameworks and plugins but the whole stack of external dependencies from databases, monitoring, build, testing and deploy. There have been lots of attempts that pick a stack e.g. Angular-seed for the MEAN stack but they make so many questionable choices that they don't have any longevity. At one point it might have looked sensible but now Mongo is out of favour and React has the ascendancy. Maybe it needs an organisation like a Linux distribution, e.g. Ubuntu For Web, that chooses a complete end to end stack, develops missing glue, maintains forks when necessary and gives some sort of maintenance guarantee for LTS releases and supports upgrade paths.

matchagaucho 10y ago

Playing piano is hard, but teachers that keep the learning experience fun see much lower drop-out rates. Teaching, mentoring, and onboarding students to enjoy coding is the real hard work.

franciscop 10y ago

Totally agree. I have taught to some friends and my gf (pointing that it's people that I care about). What I tell them is that there's easy parts and difficult parts, and that things like SUM() in excel is a basic way of programming. Then I teach them about html+css but starting only on the "easy-ish" part. So using my own library [1] for things like ".row" where you'd need either floats+negative margins or flexbox. Teaching them about images, images sizes (should be set at 100% in many situations), colors, backgrounds, paragraphs and links. That really motivates them. Then some day they will need more advanced things, but if they can make a layout with the content then they become really motivated since they can see their programming real time. I have to do this mainly because some people hate "irrationally" maths, so if I taught the same way I started learning --calculating primes-- then they'd be bored to death. Instead I like choosing something they are personally connected: what website do you like? Okay, let's do something similar... I've even tried doing a small course for free [2], but so far it's not been really effective with those people I'm teaching, but some other friends asked me things about it :) [1] http://picnicss.com/ http://picnicss.com/ [2] https://en.libre.university/subject/4kitSFzUe https://en.libre.university/subject/4kitSFzUe

garrettgrimsley 10y ago
You aren't teaching programming, you're teaching web design. Programming doesn't have to start with calculating primes, but it does have to be actual programming. Maybe try introducing the to something like Scratch or Logo.
- lazerwalker 10y ago
  Serious question: how do you define "actual programming"? CSS is a markup language, sure (although technically Turing-Complete, depending on the spec), but it's still conceptually telling a computer what you would like to happen. It's more declarative than imperative, but given the wide number of different programming paradigms, I don't think that's a problem.
  - rootlocus 10y ago

tikhonj 10y ago

It feels like you could write a perfectly symmetrical article—just as convincing—in the opposite direction. We've been telling people "math is hard" for years and look where that's gotten us. People seem do a better job of learning abstract algebra if you trick them into not thinking it's difficult and arcane. I'm not saying that one view or the other is right. Rather, I'm just saying that it's not obvious which is better or even how much it matters. Posts like this—which basically do say "it's obvious that..." and little more—aren't contributing anything substantial.

alien3d 10y ago

Easy and costly also.Each time new framework and language, most of us will endure dejavu to create same thing.We sometimes not up to all and do please job hunter,interviewer.We arent scientis to know all weird formula phisyic , math and other

Philipp__ 10y ago

Sincerely I think it would be the best to meet somewhere in the middle, between Scott's and symmetrical but opposite opinion on this matter. I am student, and freelance developer. And I ask myself a lot of times, what is the code that we write? Lines aren't clear like in electronics (I studied EE for 2 years, after which I pivoted to CS), where you got rules, theorems, which you use to analyze and build things. Code is a live thing. It grows, it changes, it lives and it dies. And the most paradoxical thing of all is that computers are pretty "dead" and dumb things, bunch of registers, ICs and transistors. (I am oversimplifying things here to prove my point better). The way we approach writing code always changes, code can be pretty personal thing, you can have your own style (like handwriting). And possibilities are almost endless now! So I think people in general should stop treating things with black or white principle. I feel that is very immature. Especially not coding. Software development is single most weirdest and interesting things that happened to me. It makes me scary and enthusiastic at the same time. It is easy and hard at the same time. And I think it is really stupid to try to ascribe any of those exclusive attributes. But everyone has it's own opinion. And that is what makes dev culture and community so interesting in the end.

alien3d 10y ago

Waterluvian 10y ago

Coding is like driving. Even someone from a developing nation who has never seen it before can learn it. But we aren't all professional race car drivers. It is easy. And it is very very hard.

draugadrotten 10y ago
Coding is like singing. Even someone from a developing nation who has never heard it before can learn it. But we aren't all professional opera singers. It is easy. And it is very very hard.
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  I like yours better.
kamaal 10y ago
My dad was a trailer/truck/bus/cab driver throughout his life. He is sort of retired now, but when I talked to him about Uber and every tom dick and harry now being able to drive a taxi, he just laughed the issue aside. Sure some one can drive and make a few $$'s a day. But to make that considerable source of income to send kids to a good education, to buy your self a home, a retirement and a decent income to retire one to cover all your expenses you have to do a heck lot more. That is when you realize the taxi license was likely least of your worries. You'd have to wake up at 3 am in the morning, suffer rude passengers, wash your car often, have the discipline to spectrum all those things that being successful in profession demands. At the end you really come to the conclusion that what stopped you was not the lack of coding classes at college or government bureaucracy or union or any of that stuff. The true reason is its hard, and most people simply aren't resourceful enough to see through the end.

shafaq 10y ago

Why everyone is being pushed to learn to code in the first place? The reason behind 'coding is easy' is that industry needs lots of programmers? Really?

krapp 10y ago
I think in part to flood the market with low quality applicants, and drive salaries down.
- imtringued 10y ago
  That will only increase hiring costs and increase the risk to get a lemon as an employee.
gaius 10y ago
If there really was a shortage, there would be no ageism. There is only a shortage of very junior people willing to be exploited because they don't know any better. That exploitation starts on day one of a very expensive"boot camp", continues with 80 hour weeks for 0.01% equity in their first job, then they burn out...

stevetrewick 10y ago

Think of it like sport. Anyone can have a go and have fun, jumpers for goalposts and all that but the vast majority aren't going to end up as your Ronaldos or Andy Murrays. And that's OK.

projektir 10y ago
I don't think that's a very useful analogy since the standard for professional athletes is an inflated moving target. Athletes are evaluated strictly in comparison to other athletes and only the best athletes at a given time are chosen for a very small set of positions. Whereas in software development, there are lots of positions for the same specialization and plenty of average people can make a comfortable living.

ranci 10y ago

"Programming is easy" -- person that has spent a significant percentage of their life programming

ranci 10y ago

Also, stop acting like people are idiots if they don't know how to do something that you know how to do.

collyw 10y ago
People often are idiots. The other day, one of our non-technical members of staff said "I think people are just to stupid to use our system". Glad she said it and not me.

gingerrr 10y ago

My personal variant has always been "learning to code is easy, you just have to be okay with feeling completely stupid for a while until it clicks." It's a way to encourage while being up front with the amount of time and mental toil learning new ways of thinking and expressing your ideas takes. It also encourages self-selection, as the few people who took it to heart are some of the best devs I know now, they saw the challenge and remained undaunted.

projektir 10y ago

Interesting. I tend to learn better when I don't perceive something as "hard", as that creates a mental block of sorts for me. Acquiring proficiency requires significant amounts of time investment + effort, but it would seem "hard" should denote something above that. I tend to prefer terms like "tractable", where it's less about whether the given problem is "easy" or "hard", and more about whether I can find a productive way to reason about the problem. An easy subject can be made intractable by the wrong kind of presentation. Most subjects that are very /new/ to a given person may be intractable on the onset. Some subjects, ones that I would call truly "hard", do not become tractable for a very long time. So I don't know if I'd call software development hard, but it's still a new and unfamiliar thing to a lot of people, and it can be quite intractable at various times, which is basically what "bad documentation" means.

jaggederest 10y ago

The problem that I see is the imprecision of english when it comes to the word "hard". There are many different kinds of hard. There's hard like "I have to put effort into it", there's hard like "if you were not born being able to do it, you can't do it", and there's hard like "even people who can do it are only capable at their absolute best moments". So the issue is not "Is programming difficult?" - clearly any learned skill is difficult to bring to an expert level. The question I see people asking is, "Can the average person with diligence and application ever learn to program well?", and the answer is obviously yes, they can. It's not "hard" like running a <3:50 mile is "hard". It's also not hard like "Can you taste PTC or distinguish red and green", in that you either "are born with it" or aren't, and find it effortless if you are capable. So many people that I've met assume that they're fundamentally incapable of understanding algorithmic thought, and that's very sad. They don't need to be Kernighan or Torvalds in order to gain value from learning some programming skills.

rubber_duck 10y ago
I think "learning to code" is more ambiguous. I have a designer friend getting in to web design - I've helped him out pick up some jQuery - he learned the stuff that was useful to him pretty fast. Is he a programmer ? No. Can he write code ? Yes. So yea writing code is easy, copy-paste and replace the stuff that seems relevant to you, especially when you have a quick iteration method like a REPL. Control flow might take a while to fully grasp but still it's not hard to understand, but takes practice to get comfortable with.
- kamaal 10y ago
  Humans generally have a way to look for patterns of repeated effort that could be automated, and then proceed to automate them one way or the other. It has nothing to with programming. We are trained through evolution to conserve resources as much as we possibly can. The guy who invented the wheel was the first programmer.
benaadams 10y ago
> The problem that I see is the imprecision of english when it comes to the word "hard". Learning to code is NP-Hard ?

danielmeneses 10y ago

Yeap.. people usually forget how hard it was. Programming is not a natural thinking so when learning, first forget what makes sense in "real world" and embrace a new way of seeing thinks. I understand why some say that it's easy, they're trying to bring more people to tech side, but my truth is: i do programming because i really like and all the hard times to get there are battles won, but don't try to win battles from something that don't stand out for you, remember, you really need to like what you're doing. Peace.

erlend_sh 10y ago

For an alternative take on the exact same subject matter, see Quincy Larson's "One does not simply learn to code" https://medium.freecodecamp.com/one-does-not-simply-learn-to-code-f25bacdc5b62 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/one-does-not-simply-learn-to...

codingdave 10y ago

I work mostly with people teaching kids to code, and for our goals, it is easy. We aren't trying to teach them how to write the most elegant and efficient code... we are trying to get them to understand basic logic and building blocks. We are teaching them how to solve problems, and debug their work. And we are teaching them basic computer literacy. If they are good at it and go deeper into software development or computer science, then it may get hard. But it is a pessimistic view to look for reasons why something will be hard, and pontificate on those problems. Why not just help people take some simple steps, get a few successes under their belts, and decide for themselves if they want to go into deeper more difficult waters.

jokoon 10y ago

I learned C/C++ by myself with "C++ for dummies". I was already taught assembly at school at a very short class. I learned more from linux and C through a linux fanboy, and I seriously learned industrial C++ at school, but I already knew most of the basics. I was obsessed about learning how to code because I always played a lot of video games and loved electronics. I don't have a degree, am chronically unemployed. I admit that learning code is really about understanding the details. Having a taste for computers and math is a huge advantage. If you don't, you will quickly hate it and only learn it for a job, but not for passion. I agree that code looks lame and is really not accessible, while most people who need it, can't always afford to work with a programmer. There needs to be solutions like MIT's scratch or anything that is more intuitive than textual syntax. It's amazing what some people can manage to do with excel.

mrcabada 10y ago

I disagree with this, maybe not because coding is easy, and I can't really measure that because I've been coding since I'm 10 years old (I'm 26 now) so it's been "normal" for me. But what I can tell is that learning to code is like learning to do something else that requieres skills and time. It is as easy as learning something else completely unrelated with computers, it depends on you and how dedicated you are.

Mandatum 10y ago

I think learning to code _is_ easy. I've recently pointed a friend towards FreeCodeCamp, he's never tried development but was asking about it (previous non-tech related jobs) so I pointed him to the website. Yesterday he must have spent 8 hours doing tutorials, occasionally asking questions and has started building his first website. He's beginning to pick up the basic building blocks of programming, not for loops and if blocks, but data structures, debugging (Chrome is amazing), etc. I think the hardest part of learning to code is choosing a language and deciding what to build. The rest is Stack Overflow and online tutorials. Oh, and a whole lot of time. Sure to become an "Expert" you'll need to learn about a vast range of things that are not code, but affect code - like security, best practices, readability and maintainability, different stacks, etc. But getting your foot in the door with the basics is pretty easy.

brianwawok 10y ago
So this applies to anything. I helped my friend learn to paint. Bought him a canvas and 4 brushes and some paint. He watched YouTube all day yesterday . I think he painted this circle thing that looked like a sun. Painting isn't hard.

pier25 10y ago

Anyone (probably) with a few tools and some wood can build a dog house. But you need real pros to build a skyscraper.

wcummings 10y ago

Yeah, seriously, and stop teaching people how to code. You people are seriously letting the cat out of the bag.

digi_owl 10y ago

For me at least learning to code have two different requirements. The first is shared across languages, getting to grips with ifs and cases and all that. That is relatively easy. The second is pr language, and it involves learning what is available in the libs and similar. And how to use those to do things like read and write files, connect over networks, or draw a UI on screen. And those are bloody hard.