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It's not just the passion but the ability to excel at it. I believe it's correlated with IQ. Most people want to believe it's teachable, because stating otherwi

by hasenj 9y ago

It's not just the passion but the ability to excel at it. I believe it's correlated with IQ. Most people want to believe it's teachable, because stating otherwise sounds cruel and elitist, but I see no reason to believe that it's not innate. If you have it, then learning and practicing can help bring it your potential. If you don't have it, you'll just be frustrated all the time trying to wrestle with the computer.

psyc 9y ago
As a teacher, I think of innate ability and teachability as separate issues. Innate ability almost certainly (imo) sets an ultimate limit, but there's plenty of room for accomplishment before it's reached. I actually do believe that every programmer is ultimately constrained by individual neurological factors. But I've also taught 'normal' people to code. They may not have what it takes to independently arrive at using BSP tree traversal to solve visibility in a twitch FPS at age 23, but I doubt most working programmers do, either.
- metaphor 9y ago
  I fail to see the relevance of comparing most working programmers to John Carmack.
  - psyc 9y ago
    Programmers don't abandon all hope because they aren't John Carmack. For the same reason, people below some IQ threshold shouldn't abandon all hope of contributing to software. There is a lot of different kinds of work needed, and a minimum intelligence level to contribute anything at all hasn't been established, to my knowledge.
ilaksh 9y ago
Well there's built-in cognitive ability and then there are practical skills and knowledge in particular areas. The built-up wiring often factors in more I think. The main feature of intelligence is actually compression. So its like judging the performance of a compression library in the case where you need to add one file to an archive -- you need to factor in the size and contents of the existing archive. https://www.quora.com/Information-Theory-What-is-the-relationship-between-intelligence-and-data-compression-algorithms https://www.quora.com/Information-Theory-What-is-the-relatio...

by hasenj 9y ago

psyc 9y ago

As a teacher, I think of innate ability and teachability as separate issues. Innate ability almost certainly (imo) sets an ultimate limit, but there's plenty of room for accomplishment before it's reached. I actually do believe that every programmer is ultimately constrained by individual neurological factors. But I've also taught 'normal' people to code. They may not have what it takes to independently arrive at using BSP tree traversal to solve visibility in a twitch FPS at age 23, but I doubt most working programmers do, either.

metaphor 9y ago
I fail to see the relevance of comparing most working programmers to John Carmack.
- psyc 9y ago
  Programmers don't abandon all hope because they aren't John Carmack. For the same reason, people below some IQ threshold shouldn't abandon all hope of contributing to software. There is a lot of different kinds of work needed, and a minimum intelligence level to contribute anything at all hasn't been established, to my knowledge.

ilaksh 9y ago

Well there's built-in cognitive ability and then there are practical skills and knowledge in particular areas. The built-up wiring often factors in more I think. The main feature of intelligence is actually compression. So its like judging the performance of a compression library in the case where you need to add one file to an archive -- you need to factor in the size and contents of the existing archive. https://www.quora.com/Information-Theory-What-is-the-relationship-between-intelligence-and-data-compression-algorithms https://www.quora.com/Information-Theory-What-is-the-relatio...