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I agree, I don't think there is much difference in intrinsic ability. I'm absolutely convinced that every healthy person can become a really good programmer. B

• charlesdm 10y ago
  Well, if you enjoy something, it's much easier to put a lot of time in to figure it out. For example, I became a software entrepreneur about five years ago making money from my own projects. Dealing with a lot of business related "work", I actually discovered I also really like law, in particular tax law. A friend of mine was a pretty good lawyer (hung up his hat to do more entrepreneurial stuff) and I occasionally ask him to look over contracts I've drafted. He said some of the contracts I put together are better than what some of his colleagues put together. I've also defended myself in a few tax disputes with legal arguments, and always won. If I knew more about it before, I think I would've genuinely enjoyed being a lawyer. If you enjoy something, it's not that hard to become really good at something. If you don't, it is extremely hard to become better than the guy who loves what he does.
  • henrik_w 10y ago
    I think the question of whether anybody can get good at programming is very interesting. I often hear "anybody can do it, but you can only become really good if you enjoy it". So then the question is: why do you enjoy something? Are we born that way, or is it something we do? (I don't know what the answer is) Edit: also, it is interesting to replace "programmer" with "math professor". Can anybody become a good math professor if they enjoy doing it? If not, what is the difference (assuming it is true for programmers).
    • alistproducer2 10y ago
      For me I think the determining factor of a good programmer is not enjoyment (although that is necessary), it's curiosity. I work with a guy who I'm pretty sure has a photographic memory and would probably run circles around me in an IQ test and with his GPA, but I'm constantly showing him more efficient ways to write code. The difference is I am forever curious about CS-related stuff. I spend hours a day reading HN and other things like it. I'm orders an of magnitude better prgrammer than he is simply because I'm curious.
    • jaggederest 10y ago
      I'm not sure but I suspect that viewpoint has a massive effect. It's similar to the old saw about growth vs fixed mindsets. I often describe programming as "failing 99 times and succeeding the 100th time, and counting that as success". There are a lot of people who are not wired and acculturated to that sort of "success". That said, I don't (obviously via the growth mindset) think it's a fixed quality, it's more of a learned and acquired routine.
    • matwood 10y ago
      I think it's a bit of both nurture/nature. In hindsight it was obvious that I would be a programmer even though I didn't have much access to a computer until college. Growing up I gravitated towards math/science, loved any sort of problem solving, and enjoyed things that many would consider tedious (building model WW2 naval ships with my grandfather for example). I did have a Nintendo that was in a constant state of being taken apart, but it did work most of the time :) When I finally had school computer time starting around middle school, they literally had to drag me off of them. Trying commands, tinkering, etc... was just...fun. None of my friends (or parents for that matter) understood because they were mostly jocks with a few artists types mixed in. But, my friends never cared as long as they could get me out of the house to play whatever sport was in season. To circle back around, I had a natural inclination with people like my grandfather encouraging it without really knowing.
    • hasenj 10y ago
      I think our enjoyment of an activity depends on how we see our progress. If we keep struggling with it, we will hate it, even if we thought we would like it at first. We could also begin to enjoy an activity if we see ourselves progressing in it. When you see your improvements, your brain probably releases dopamine (or another one of those addiction chemicals) and that makes us want to do it more (to taste that sweet taste of victory/progress).
    • ryuker16 10y ago
      Some subjects aren't really fun until your good at it though. I used to hate it until I forced to do it and found it was fun after I got the basics down pat. When I think of somebody who enjoys programing, they usually have a goal or task to compel them. Just solving random CS questions and math is pretty boring to the majority of folks.
  • phkahler 10y ago
    >> Well, if you enjoy something, it's much easier to put a lot of time in to figure it out. I started programming as a kid because I wanted to make games. It was fun. The problem was that I didn't get the more formal stuff until college, and it made me a much better programmer. But I could also see how boring the data structures class would be to someone with no experience because they really didn't have insight into how applicable some of the concepts could be. I have always advocated for creating games (and other useful things) to teach programming. Most if not all the major concepts can be applied to games. Why anyone would use the fibonacci sequence to teach recursion is beyond me - it's a stupid solution to a stupid problem. Let's talk about board games and minimax search. Yeah, you have to build a lot of code before that comes into play but you'll learn a hell of a lot more and have way more fun doing it. Doing simple games like 2D scorched earth really brings home basic vector math and physics. Any 80's arcade game with a thrust button allows you to apply that stuff. Any kind of 3d graphics goes right along with linear algebra - a topic that is not required by all CS programs even though matrix operations run 24/7 on supercomputers. Text processing. chat bots anyone? I used to have an example that used trees but it escapes me right now. Chess doesn't really count because you don't store the tree. We can go back to 3d graphics of course - photon mapping, kd-trees, various BVH structures. If you start with data structures and algorithms, peoples eyes will glaze over. If you start with simple things that are somewhat interesting you'll get people interested and then you can progress them slowly to more advanced topics by introducing problems they'll want to solve.
    • mafribe 10y ago
      I agree with all that, and in my experience, students really react well to courses and coursework based on doing games. And yet, I will use Fibonacci as introductory example tomorrow when I teach "Intro to computational complexity" this week. The great advantage of Fibonacci over just about anything else is that it is so short, so simple, that everybody can immediately understand it. There is no preparation needed. Just about anybody who can breath, can understand Fibonacci. Despite this simplicity, Fibonacci is so rich: You can use it to illustrate: Recursion, exponential complexity, going from exponential to linear complexity by memoisation. Relationship between loops and recursion. Tail calls. Stack space used by compilers, the limitations of compilers that do not do proper tail call optimisation,generating functions, recurrences, solving recurrences.
  • solatic 10y ago
    It's not really surprising that good programmers are often also good at legal drafting. When you're a programmer, you understand that the processor is dumb and has to be guided through absolutely everything. If you don't factor in the corner cases, your program is going to screw up somehow. Legal drafting is the same thing, just replace the processor with a judge and the programming language with English. If, while writing a contract, you precisely define everything and cover all the ins and outs of what can and cannot happen and what should and should not happen in the event that any or all of the above likely or unlikely events shall happen during the lifetime of the contract. Then if you ever need to get the contract enforced by the judge, you can clearly point out exactly how the opposing party already agreed to resolve the situation in some way. The real reason why you need to hire lawyers has more to do with making sure that the contract you draft is enforceable (considering current law and legal precedent), or else risk having the entire contract thrown out later by the judge. AKA legal system faulting.
    • IndianAstronaut 10y ago
      A lot of less technical management doesn't understand how important being able to find corner caeses is. This is what separates a good and solid application from one that is routinely failing.
• Retric 10y ago
  It's really not about time, it's being able to think flexibly. I have seen several freshman who never coded before where 1/3 of them get it in a few weeks and have an easy 4 years, where the second set either drops out or spends a lot of time trying to keep up. An assembler class where the high end spent 2-3 hours and come in with 3-5 pages of code vs. the low end that spent 50x as long had 100+ pages of code that did not quite work. At first glance the difference was if you looked up how the math coprocessor worked, but more generally how much you tried to brute force the problem vs. look for a cleaner solution.
  • alistproducer2 10y ago
    I don't think he was refering to time spent on a given program; rather, for people who don't intuit CS concepts time spent staring at the page can make the difference between a person who never gets it and one who eventually does. At that point, there isn't much functional difference that person and a person who got it from the start.
    • Retric 10y ago
      I don't think it's really about the CS concepts as it is being able to link them together flexibly. Suppose you want the median value in an array. Well sorting makes it easy, but you don't need to fully sort the array. A modified quick sort seems like a good compromise, then again using a built in sort is probably fast enough and much less code. That's the kind of thinking that really works. Because you can look up well known probelms, but you need to start thinking in terms of trade offs instead of going with the first idea.
      • alistproducer2 10y ago
        I would argue that in order to link them together one must first understand the CS concepts and their uses. Once a person has that understanding, it becomes trivial to know when a naive solution is no longer the right approach. Once a normal person has the ability to see problem solving like that, they've pretty much got it. That's not to say there's not a difference between all possible solutions and the people trying to find them. Some will be able to zip together the objectively most efficient solution right from the start. These are the true "superstars." People for whom doing something once is as good as doing it a million times (ie, they don't forget things). These folks are exceedingly rare and the rest of us will have to settle with kowing enough to know when we need a better way.
• lhnz 10y ago
  Cognitive ability isn't equally distributed. It's not fair to call people that find programming difficult lazy. You can work harder and longer, but it only pays off up to a certain point. There are some tasks which require more intelligence, and some which are easier for more people to do. And thankfully. there's more that can be done to make the former more like the latter.
• gvb 10y ago
  I've been programming for nearly 40 years. Based on my interactions with others, programming is an intrinsic ability. People that don't have that intrinsic ability can cut'n'paste their way through simple programs, but really struggle to understand what they are doing and why their program works (or not). Anecdata: My high school got access to a computer (dialup modem). I essentially taught myself programming and then took the official class to teach me programming. Aced it, obviously. My younger sister saw how much I enjoyed programming so she took the class and struggled tremendously. I tutored her... I recall a problem where she had to do an operation repeatedly, an obvious (to me) application of a "for" loop. She struggled with why one problem pattern required a "for" loop and one pattern required an "if" statement. My sister is very smart and was a straight "A" student in things that she could memorize, graduated from college summa cum laude (IIRC). She became a very good elementary school teacher. Myself, I was very much not an "A" student, especially in things that required me to memorize facts, but I "got" programming instantly. More anecdata: I am now mentoring FIRST Robotics teams. I continue to see a dichotomy in aptitude for programming... two years ago I walked a student through a program for controlling a robot. She got pretty excited and interrupted my explanations and said "wait, let me think this through"... and she (verbally) worked out the logic of a complex "if" statement. She took over programming that year, is now in college pursuing a Computer Science major, and loving every minute of it. Still more anecdata: Last year and this year I have a student that loves computers and intends to pursue it as a carrier, but he isn't a "natural." I spent a huge amount of time last year coaching him, but he still struggles to understand what pattern he is looking at and why e.g. he needs a "for" loop to solve the problem. I could give a lot more anecdata, but I've worked with Robotics students that can program e.g. move sequences once I coached them through the details and I've worked with Robotics students that took off and created complex programs with nothing more than a simple introduction to constants, variables, loops, and conditional statements.
  • MollyR 10y ago
    This is surprising. I used to be like your second student according to my father. He taught me most everything I know, and my brother used to be like your first student. I found what personally helped me to overcome the insight bridge/gap was I had to read several different books to find the right analogy that helped achieve the "insight".