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I'm largely of the opinion that if an adult really wanted to learn to program then they would already have made the effort to learn to program. Particularly the

I'm largely of the opinion that if an adult really wanted to learn to program then they would already have made the effort to learn to program. Particularly these days with the abundance of free resources online. The key to learning any new skill is motivation and if an adult isn't motivated enough to start the learning process themselves then they'll likely always come up with excuses not to when another tries to instruct them.

emsal 9y ago
Finding resources online is not incredibly easy. I remember that I very much needed a teacher/class in my early high school years to get started to learn to code because trying to google things often led down very disorganized resources. I think the main problem at that point is that I didn't exactly know what to learn other than the fact that it was called "programming". Only after I was taught how to code that I was able to see the power of being able to write software and the applications that I could make. Also, in general, I don't think college students (adults) would be motivated to learn all of their field by themselves because when searching for the information it'll be way too disorganized; it's not curated and sequenced by instructors/professors. I recently took a hardware/architecture course and I realized that I learned bits and pieces of that stuff beforehand but never attained a holistic picture of how stuff worked at the OS level because I just didn't really know what to look up, and learning from my professor also gave me the ability to learn more things about the material by myself afterward.
- laumars 9y ago
  I do agree with you to an extent but I wasn't talking about people mastering the language themselves. I was talking about them starting the process (bear in mind this is in relation to the GP comment about giving his cousin a laptop). Maybe I'm being unreasonable but 80% of what I know is self taught. Though I accept that I'm an edge case here as I -stupidly- decided to go into full time work instead of university. But that's a different topic entirely. However much of what I learned predates the proliferation of the web. In fact the first two languages I learned was in the 80s so literally do predate the web. Yet I managed fine with books borrowed from the library and a lot of trial and error. Perhaps things are harder now because there is too much choice in languages and too many blocks on the software stack you need to be aware of. I also don't particularly consider web development a good starting place to learn development because it's full of different technologies that work semi-independently (server side code, SQL, Javascript, CSS, HTML, different browser rendering engines, etc) and not to mention the complexities of writing stateless and secure code. One of the great things of being a child in the 80s was your personal computer made a great introductory programming system. You got a simple language to code in and instance results back. But I've now drifted way off topic so I feel I should apologise for the soliloquy.
  - emsal 9y ago
    I was about 10 years old in the mid 2000s and much of what I knew about computers at that point were just about the use of weird software (like editing the config files of emulators) and some google-fu. When I was first introduced to Python by my parents and left alone with it, I didn't have any idea of how software was written and didn't even really know the concept of saving code. I downloaded IDLE and it was really confusing that the place where I put my code was also the interpreter by which I ran it, and it really just didn't make sense to me at all and I never got around to doing more with it. I lost a lot of motivation because of all this confusion. It was really the first teacher I had in high school for programming that got me on track to learn that stuff because he introduced me to the concept of doing stuff on the Linux command line. That was the first time that everything really clicked and I did so many stupid Python side projects that year just because I liked how it felt to use a more bare-bones text editor and run things on the command line, and accidentally became much better at writing software because of this. I went on a tangent but my main point is that it often takes even just a small nudge from an external entity to even develop the desire to get started. Perhaps the OP will be successful in nudging their friend into a valuable activity and possibly career path. Perhaps it'll be a Sisyphean struggle -- many of my classmates in my first programming class learned the same material but it never quite "clicked" for them and they ended up failing the class. But I don't believe there are any inherent red flags from how OP described the situation.
- cat199 9y ago
  > Finding resources online is not incredibly easy. I remember that I very much needed a teacher/class in my early high school years to get started to learn to code because trying to google things often led down very disorganized resources. "Initiative" in this case can also take the form of "Hey I'm trying to learn to know how to program but can't find good resources, know any?" Rather than "Hey man can I have a few bucks? Yeah sure I'll learn to code for it."
thephyber 9y ago
I don't buy it. It simplifies motivation down to a boolean. BJ Fogg teaches a Persuasion Techniques course at Stanford. His model describes the threshold at which a person will perform an action as a curve on a motivation / difficulty chart. Persuasion (the act of making someone else more likely to do something) requires reducing the difficulty of that thing, increasing the motivation of the person, or both. If the guy might be interested in programming (or just being able to make a living for himself), perhaps having a mentor lowers the difficulty enough to put him over his threshold.

emsal 9y ago

Finding resources online is not incredibly easy. I remember that I very much needed a teacher/class in my early high school years to get started to learn to code because trying to google things often led down very disorganized resources. I think the main problem at that point is that I didn't exactly know what to learn other than the fact that it was called "programming". Only after I was taught how to code that I was able to see the power of being able to write software and the applications that I could make. Also, in general, I don't think college students (adults) would be motivated to learn all of their field by themselves because when searching for the information it'll be way too disorganized; it's not curated and sequenced by instructors/professors. I recently took a hardware/architecture course and I realized that I learned bits and pieces of that stuff beforehand but never attained a holistic picture of how stuff worked at the OS level because I just didn't really know what to look up, and learning from my professor also gave me the ability to learn more things about the material by myself afterward.

laumars 9y ago
I do agree with you to an extent but I wasn't talking about people mastering the language themselves. I was talking about them starting the process (bear in mind this is in relation to the GP comment about giving his cousin a laptop). Maybe I'm being unreasonable but 80% of what I know is self taught. Though I accept that I'm an edge case here as I -stupidly- decided to go into full time work instead of university. But that's a different topic entirely. However much of what I learned predates the proliferation of the web. In fact the first two languages I learned was in the 80s so literally do predate the web. Yet I managed fine with books borrowed from the library and a lot of trial and error. Perhaps things are harder now because there is too much choice in languages and too many blocks on the software stack you need to be aware of. I also don't particularly consider web development a good starting place to learn development because it's full of different technologies that work semi-independently (server side code, SQL, Javascript, CSS, HTML, different browser rendering engines, etc) and not to mention the complexities of writing stateless and secure code. One of the great things of being a child in the 80s was your personal computer made a great introductory programming system. You got a simple language to code in and instance results back. But I've now drifted way off topic so I feel I should apologise for the soliloquy.
- emsal 9y ago
  I was about 10 years old in the mid 2000s and much of what I knew about computers at that point were just about the use of weird software (like editing the config files of emulators) and some google-fu. When I was first introduced to Python by my parents and left alone with it, I didn't have any idea of how software was written and didn't even really know the concept of saving code. I downloaded IDLE and it was really confusing that the place where I put my code was also the interpreter by which I ran it, and it really just didn't make sense to me at all and I never got around to doing more with it. I lost a lot of motivation because of all this confusion. It was really the first teacher I had in high school for programming that got me on track to learn that stuff because he introduced me to the concept of doing stuff on the Linux command line. That was the first time that everything really clicked and I did so many stupid Python side projects that year just because I liked how it felt to use a more bare-bones text editor and run things on the command line, and accidentally became much better at writing software because of this. I went on a tangent but my main point is that it often takes even just a small nudge from an external entity to even develop the desire to get started. Perhaps the OP will be successful in nudging their friend into a valuable activity and possibly career path. Perhaps it'll be a Sisyphean struggle -- many of my classmates in my first programming class learned the same material but it never quite "clicked" for them and they ended up failing the class. But I don't believe there are any inherent red flags from how OP described the situation.
cat199 9y ago
> Finding resources online is not incredibly easy. I remember that I very much needed a teacher/class in my early high school years to get started to learn to code because trying to google things often led down very disorganized resources. "Initiative" in this case can also take the form of "Hey I'm trying to learn to know how to program but can't find good resources, know any?" Rather than "Hey man can I have a few bucks? Yeah sure I'll learn to code for it."

thephyber 9y ago

I don't buy it. It simplifies motivation down to a boolean. BJ Fogg teaches a Persuasion Techniques course at Stanford. His model describes the threshold at which a person will perform an action as a curve on a motivation / difficulty chart. Persuasion (the act of making someone else more likely to do something) requires reducing the difficulty of that thing, increasing the motivation of the person, or both. If the guy might be interested in programming (or just being able to make a living for himself), perhaps having a mentor lowers the difficulty enough to put him over his threshold.