27 ms·

Learning to program is getting harder

• socialist_coder 9y ago
  Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling. Younger programmers seem to commonly have zero knowledge in this area. If they run into some problem with their environment, they are completely stuck. Oh, they're asked to install a VPN client but it doesn't work and they have to debug it? They're completely blocked. They have no idea how to continue. For me, I learned these basic computer skills first (because I was obsessed with computers as a child). Then I learned to program. I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. You have people that want to be programmers but don't include "computing" as one of their hobbies. So of course they don't know anything about how to debug computer problems. This is totally expected. Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • leggomylibro 9y ago
    But those skills have nothing to do with computer science as a field of study - wouldn't they be more useful to teach in general education like K-12? Like I remember in middle school, we had an elective option between woodshop and CAD. The 'CAD' class was really more about performing simple automation in programs like MS Word/Excel, but that sort of thing is still useful in just about any job these days - not just programming. I really like the idea of starting to call 'CS' something like 'Informatica' so people might stop looking at the field as just a valuable career skill. Google tells me that there is now a startup called 'Informatica', but that is also what the field is called or translates to in some other countries like the Netherlands; I think https://www.cwi.nl/ https://www.cwi.nl/ could probably claim prior use. Speaking of, it seems odd to try to use an existing commonplace phrase as a trademark in the industry that the phrase was born from - it seems like it'd be impossible to argue that anyone was infringing - but I guess I'm not a corporate lawyer.
    • chuckdries 9y ago
      ASU has a degree called 'informatics' that's run by the computer science faculty but focused more on <the application of technology to other things> rather than <the technology and creation of technology itself.> I just transferred into it from computer science, because I spend all my free time making games anyway, and the informatics program lets me take an elective track to get credit for that. I do think CS is probably a better fit for what I see as my long term plan, but I think this program has a lot of potential for people who wouldn't otherwise call themselves engineers.
    • currymj 9y ago
      in some other languages it's basically called that. "Informatik" in German. there's still the vestigial title in some department names in the US, "Department of Computer Science and Informatics". I agree it would be a better name but I think the battle is lost, informatics now refers to an applied discipline (closely related to library science) involving building up big systems to store and organize data.
    • zerkten 9y ago
      I think you are trying to make some good points, but your language could have been clearer. If I'm understanding correctly you mean: 1. Treat Computer Science (CS) as a specific field, and don't dilute the curriculum with related items. 2. Introduce a course that covers these broader, non-CS items, and actually push it out beyond the audience of CS? Did I get that right? I think you might have meant the term "informatics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics). Depending on your position CS is either subordinate, equal, or above informatics. I have a degree from a UK university and there is a much wider spectrum degree types in this field than exist here in the US where I now live. I'm conflicted on the original post that elicited your response. I have that background where I inherited a broken PC, a bunch of floppy disks, and some manuals. In some ways this gives me an advantage, especially given that I'm comfortable being dropped into a messy project or some problem that is debugged. I've seen lots of folks who can't handle this, but can churn out code on to need more support around the edges. I now see more and more folks attempting things like devops and at least being able to learn some of these skills later on. I think where it stands me in better stead is problem avoidance, but even that is subjective.
  • mirashii 9y ago
    > Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. This is the one thing I don't agree with. A better placement for these skills is a generic course required for any degree, or an optional course that anyone could take to shore up these skills (and you could recommend it for your CS major). Importantly though, this isn't part of the field of computer science, and so it doesn't really belong in that curriculum. Now, if we had more of a "software development" or "software engineering" major, or even trade school, I think that would be a perfect area to cover practical aspects of tooling that are required to work in the field. There's a large gap between what you need to learn to become a reasonably competent programmer at most organizations and what you learn in a computer science major, and it really shows if you've ever interviewed a lot of fresh graduates. Great algorithm and theory skills, but no idea how to set up a build system. There's definitely room for a more practical education that transitions more directly into industry.
    • tj-teej 9y ago
      I don't think the experienced engineers earlier referred to learned these things in a CS curriculum.
    • Retric 9y ago
      There are a lot of useful skills. Teaching people how to fix a flat tire would also be rather useful. Basic computer administration falls into that huge category of useful skills that are not worth teaching to a general population who have completely viable alternatives. Specialization is extremely valuable for society and having more competent doctors etc is worth doctors having a more narrow focus.
      • Griffinsauce 9y ago
        I disagree. Having a broader skill set means you can be more creative with problems. The separation between doctors and computer science is holding both fields back. Think of machine learning and big data, we are _just now_ starting to apply those ideas to medical problems, while those problems are fundamental to our existence as a species. Computers in hospitals are a chore and a drain on doctors. They should be empowering, instead doctors spend the majority of their time typing reports. Reports of things that are already registered in other parts of the system. (You're already thinking of a solution right? That proves my point) Hearing about how hospitals handle technology from my SO (neurologist) makes me want to rip my hair out. Specialization is a great thing but we need generalists to bridge the gap to help specialists empower each other.
  • gricardo99 9y ago
    I have not seen any age-correlation in what you describe. For sure there are "career" programmers who don't know much about computers beyond their narrow scope of expertise. You're admittedly obsessed with computers, which presumably means you spend a lot of your free timing tinkering and learning. You've picked up a lot of very useful knowledge, but surely there's room in a profession for those who are not obsessed with their field? The programmer who doesn't know anything about a BIOS perhaps spends their free time bike riding.
    • sametmax 9y ago
      Yes but computing is a very young field. It's not like architecture or cooking. Everything sucks. Most stuff breaks, are buggy, badly documented and poorly explained. Things gets obsolete fast. If you are "just a programmer", you will be half productive and very dependent on others.
    • namelost 9y ago
      Being a programmer without advanced computer skills is like being a paramedic who can't drive. Sure it's possible and there's probably some niche where such a person can fit in, but definitely career limiting.
    • adrianN 9y ago
      I know a couple of grey haired professional programmers who have only rudimentary "computer" skills. They're still decent programmers though.
  • el_benhameen 9y ago
    I think this skill is what kept me going through the frustrating patches after I decided that I wanted to be a programmer. I started programming later than many here (after I had obtained a degree in an unrelated field), but I'd always enjoyed breaking and fixing computers and software as a kid and so I'd picked up "computing", as you put it, as a hobby. That sort of hobby teaches you to keep ramming your head against the wall until the bricks start to crumble, which is helpful when you're trying to learn a language but the package you want fails to install on Ubuntu, or your program won't run despite you having checked the syntax a thousand times, or a concept doesn't click until you've re-read it every day for a week. You learn to see computers and software as a mess that you will necessarily have to untangle and rearrange for things to work properly, instead of thinking of things that don't yet work as "broken". And you learn to Google until your eyes start to melt.
  • zappo2938 9y ago
    I'm a relative newcomer and didn't have a problem downloading Android Studio and setting it up on Ubuntu to run an emulator to develop React Native apps. Learning to program is getting harder because the programs are far, far more complicated than they were 10 years ago.
  • blackbagboys 9y ago
    I agree with your observation, but I don't agree with your diagnosis of the cause. I think it's mostly down to the increasing abstraction and ease of using software. When I was a kid, I wouldn't have described "computing" as a hobby, but just getting certain games to install and run on my parent's cheap Gateway PC would require a lot of fiddling around. My younger siblings have no more or less interest in computing than I did, but if they want to play a game they can seamlessly download and run it from Steam or the app store.
    • mathgeek 9y ago
      > but just getting certain games to install and run on my parent's cheap Gateway PC would require a lot of fiddling around Ah, that brings me back to memories of boot floppies in order to change the memory settings of the system.
      • stryk 9y ago
        IRQ conflicts! Holy mother of hell IRQ conflicts! particularly when dealing with those early gen Sound Blasters -- and trying to get that Roland MT32 you borrowed from the greasy weirdo in your big brother's band hooked up and pumping out that sweet, sweet midi
        • stinos 9y ago
          IRQ conflicts! Recently I had this surface, some RT kernel extension we use would display possible conflicts. Despite programming a lot these days, my background is electronic engineering, so I still have a rough idea of what an IRQ is and does even on the lowest level. However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer.
          • ZenoArrow 9y ago
            > "However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer." Interrupt requests are easy to explain to even a novice computer user if you frame them in the context of something they're familiar with. For example, when you press a key on your keyboard an interrupt request will be created to make sure the computer knows you've pressed the key. So in simplified terms, you could say when you press the "A" key on your keyboard, there is a part of the computer that says "pause what other things you're doing, respond to the "A" key press, then continue with what you were doing before".
  • xbryanx 9y ago
    I think another big culprit in this situation is the IT department. I visited a research university recently in a computer science related field. The IT department wouldn't allow even graduate students and researchers to have admin access on their machines. Even if the programmers could debug basic issues, they often had to go track down and IT staff member to install some library or program for them. If this is happening at the computer research level it's happening even more in non-tech company business environments. How do we expect staff at non-tech companies to experiment with new skills in programming if they can't even use their computers at their full potential?
    • Clubber 9y ago
      Ya, I had an intern position at my school that did computer lab build support (the hardware and network, not as a teacher). We installed Windows NT 4 Workstation everywhere and it wasn't overly secure. At least 4 times, someone changed the default background to a porn still. Blame that guy.
  • Clubber 9y ago
    I'm and older programmer. I learned how to build a computer because my parents scraped enough money to buy a computer when I was young, but not wealthy enough to get it fixed when I inevitably broke it. This was back when PCs were friggin expensive as were parts. Fellow computer friends (we had few back then) would let each other borrow hardware (parts) and whatnot, so we had to learn how to install it and configure it (IRQ's COM ports, etc), but it was fun, and without internet! It's what I liked to do in my spare time. The funny thing is the C64 and VIC-20 were self contained, for the most part. You didn't have to add cards and swap out processors and all that. All you really had to do is know how to put wad of aluminum foil where your fuse should go when your fuse goes out. :) When the dot boom came around, I had to learn how to not only write web sites, but I had to learn how to host a website out of my house, which includes everything you would need to host a website, which involves a lot. DNS server, mail server, database server, server admin, TCP/IP, security, and more. I still host out of my house today.
    • drharby 9y ago
      I tried hosting my own mailserver out of an ec2 instance in an excercise. Learned lots in those hours and hours
      • behringer 9y ago
        It took me a month to setup a mail server including redundancies. But now I can postfix like none other :)
  • AlexCoventry 9y ago
    I too am obsessed with computers, and will push through "helpdesk" type issues to get my work done. However, I don't consider that to be a remarkable skill. Such issues can almost always be resolved with a bit of googling. Perhaps I'm too close to see the foundational knowledge I'm depending on, though.
    • fenwick67 9y ago
      Here's the thing: You need to know what to look for. You can't just google "The internet won't work" or "blue screen help" or "I can't see files". Web search is a super powerful tool but it requires some fundamental knowledge before it can help.
      • megaman22 9y ago
        Actually reading error messages is an apparently very rare skill. Almost always, if you just google what it tells you, you'll hit something... Yet I constantly see people automatically click through popups milliseconds after they appear, only to fume about things not working. It takes a surprising amount of effort to get them to do it over and slow down long enough to figure out what went wrong.
        • DoreenMichele 9y ago
          I confess, I was very guilty of that at my old job, which was very fast paced. Whenever reflexively closing the pop up resulted in things not going as I expected, I would, indeed, do it over, slow down and carefully read the messages.
        • nikofeyn 9y ago
          i would just like to get error messages that actually said something more than something went wrong. yea, no shit something went wrong, i already know that, but what and why and how do i fix it are questions i want answered. i know the code knows what went wrong, so just tell me.
          • 9y ago
  • rhizome 9y ago
    There's lots of money in computers, which has increased the proportion of graduates who know only how to add an IDE to the factory install of their computer. I saw this a lot back in my desktop support days.
    • shagie 9y ago
      This brings up another interesting point... "back in my desktop support days." I had a few jobs once out of college (phone support, QA (before automation was much of a thing), sysadmin, back to phone support) before I got a programming job. That was a good two years out of learning the other parts of a computer. It was because I knew perl that I was able to do the sysadmin - web programmer transition. That wasn't too unusual of a path back in the mid-late 90s. A good chunk the developers over in the engineering department and nearly everyone in the programing wings of IT and customer support had done tech support or system administration. It was just part of the "working your way up" within the career path. Many of my classmates in college went to a "the computer guy" job which did all of the computer stuff for a small company (hardware, software, helping with excel, writing programs to serve dynamic text to the web server). Being a computer person back then was a much more generalized skill set. As an aside, recently I was tapped on my team (Java developers) to do work on an older website. LAMP. I had to brush up on Linux from the past decade (I was another decade out of date with some of the package management)... but being able to do that sysadmin, read perl (I know of one other perl coder in the department, but he doesn't have any sysadmin background) and get it running was a skillset that didn't exist much of anywhere else.
      • mattmanser 9y ago
        I was telephone support for people installing freeview boxes in the UK in the early 2000s. Same skills. Same skills as programming your VCR without the manual. Same skills as getting Doom to work over a direct pc to pc connection. None of that crap worked first time. We had to learn how to debug to get basic stuff working. In some ways computers are too usable these days. In other ways the experienced programmers are too sloppy and put in too many barriers to get their tools to work flawlessly in the modern world. We don't live in the tinker world any more. But ultimately to be a good dev you must learn to debug. Hard problem to solve.
  • rconti 9y ago
    I absolutely agree with your first few paragraphs. As a hobbyist before I was a professional (Linux desktop since '95), I'm surprised when I meet people who have a technical skill but not a hobbyist background. I first encountered it with Oracle DBAs who sometimes were amazing at Oracle but had rudimentary Unix skills, and that's becoming more commonplace as people do things like phone app development but without the background "we" expect (whether rightly or wrongly). That said, my background as a Sysadmin/Ops person also landed me in my own silo. I don't have much programming experience, and running production systems means NO, the environment does NOT give you access to wide-open CPAN, RPM, pip, whatever downloads. It's a regimented release process where someone upstream has to provide the relevant dependancies and you don't just go around installing stuff, running services, etc. As a result of my background and not being a developer, on HN I hear of new languages/frameworks/libraries/methodologies on a daily basis. Things that, clearly, a large number of readers hear must already be familiar with, even though many of them will be out of fashion in 6 months. And then the process to install a lot of these things is "oh, just pipe a wget of this script into bash, RPM install this, pip install that, don't worry, it's all quite safe for your system..." In many ways, it feels like worlds are diverging.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      > In many ways, it feels like worlds are diverging. We are specializing. Enterprise shops have always wanted stability, and so they develop ever more elaborate build processes to control exactly what versions go into production. Embedded systems have always wanted to run only what needed to run, and so we have developed ever-improving systems to pick out only exactly what needed to be run. Developers, in the meantime, have always wanted the newest and shiniest, and so have gotten 10,000 ways to install newer and shinier toys. Edit: typo
  • TallGuyShort 9y ago
    I think that's a side-effect of degrees that focus only on coding or applied math, whereas before the computing industry was as developed as it is now and there was less specialization within it, a CS degree would have covered the basic data structures and algorithms that were common knowledge then and still had plenty of time to cover systems things. My degree wasn't in CS - it included basically a CS minor, but it also focused on network protocols and hardware architectures that most CS students had never heard of. So when I was interviewing for jobs around graduation and was asked to explain everything that happens after someone types "google.com" in their browser, I could explain all the network protocols in detail right down to how binary was encoded into specific 5V fluctations on certain lines, DNS resolution, routing algorithms, the server's filesystem, etc. But when I was doing a coding problem and they asked me what the invariant was in my loop, I had to ask what an invariant was. And yet I had been coding full time for 4 years by that point and never needed to know that term. I knew stuff CS majors didn't, and they knew stuff I didn't. It was different specialities, each of which really filled 4 years of heavy, heavy semesters.
    • NTDF9 9y ago
      Reminds me of a recent interview where they asked me, "How does the client to a server?" I replied "over the socket" To which they replied, "Using REST over HTTP" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      • __blockcipher__ 9y ago
        I would have murdered them on the spot for that response
        • aurelianito 9y ago
          Probably both are correct. But which one is more useful in this context?
          • __blockcipher__ 9y ago
            The interviewer or whoever should provide the context. Otherwise it’s a pointless question. The issue is when they don’t provide context and expect you to list off some random framework or something.
  • Globz 9y ago
    You couldn’t have said it better, I had the same kind of learning path as you did and I believe it makes everything a lot easier to understand since you can clearly see the full spectrum of what you are dealing with while programming and usually it helps open new doors so you can explore a problem from a different angle since you have a deep knowledge of your stack available to you from the start.
  • pasabagi 9y ago
    I don't really think of programming as a career skill - I'm a hobbyist. But I love it, and I love learning about it, even the really low-level stuff. I like reading about algorithms, and data structures, and architecture. Computers, on the other hand, I despise. Every piece of knowledge I have to learn about how a specific computer works, not in the sense of ALUs and registers and whatnot, but in the sense of 'if Windows gets a BSOD it's probably the boot usb you've left plugged in', I hate - and only let into my brain with a great deal of teeth-grinding and swearing. Fundamentally, computers are interesting devices. Using them, however, is generally horrible. So I can see why people get into programming without really taking an interest on the devices we normally use to program on. I think programming would be an interesting activity if you were just doing it with pen and paper. For me, it's really a shame that the best device we have available for it is some kind of crazy-house compendium of horrors and bizarre compromises.
  • ghrifter 9y ago
    This is a good example. Im in my mid twenties and just discovered yesterday that (at least on Windows 10) that a user and a computer have _entirely_ different permissions. I always thought it was account based! At least thats what my coworker and IT guy explained it to me as.
  • southphillyman 9y ago
    That's something that shocked me as I began to help onboard new developers. Some of them can't set up an IDE, local server, or get a build to compile in the first couple of days. Onboarding documentation is key to smoothly integrate new team members if your process is convoluted. Even without documentation I feel like guys should be able to get projects up and running just by having general familiarity with how most set ups are configured. My first "project" as a newbie developer was performing pseudo dev ops setting up continuous integration and then creating a project set up guide for the existing project, with no help.
  • userbinator 9y ago
    I agree completely --- being one of the "older programmers" --- and think it could be phrased thus: a new generation of "coders" is being forced to learn how to write instructions for the machine, when they are barely computer-literate. Having taught some introductory CS courses a few years ago, the amount of struggling with basic things like file naming, directory hierarchies, and even simple hardware use was a constant distraction. On one memorable occasion, I had to help a student by turning on the monitor: he would sit down at a workstation, move the mouse and tap the keyboard, and seeing nothing show up on the monitor after a moment, go to another unoccupied one. I watched, without intervention, him try this with all the unoccupied workstations in the lab until he finally came to me and said, in an exasperated tone, "all the computers left are broken!" I lead him over to one, and upon pressing the power button on the monitor, the expression he made was quite unforgettable...
    • skookumchuck 9y ago
      There aren't really any clues as to how a computer works on an iphone. There isn't even a visible filesystem. It's no wonder students today have no idea how a computer works.
      • ajmurmann 9y ago
        This! I'm very concerned that we are growing a population that is more and more monitored by their devices and has less and less understanding of how they work and how they or even if they are being monitored.
      • Arkight 9y ago
        Aye, I second this, got me really pissed off when fellow CS student told me he has ''experience'' in using Iphone extensively, and that counts towards computing. Makes you wonder what does computing mean to people nowadays.
        • mrexroad 9y ago
          I ask this out of genuine interest... why does it matter? Why’d it piss you off?
  • northwest66 9y ago
    I've never met a good programmer that wasn't (at least initially) self taught. Presumably they exist, but I've never met one. I do agree though, I find when I'm teaching my juniors I sometimes have to give a little history lesson as part of it (things like why 8.3 filenames).
    • sevensor 9y ago
      > why 8.3 filenames Why is that, exactly? I grew up in that era, I remember when floppies were actually floppy, and I've been well into computers ever since, but I don't believe I could tell you why. If I had to guess, I'd guess that FAT used a fixed number of bytes for each filename.
      • jclulow 9y ago
        It did.
      • northwest66 9y ago
        Yep you got it. My first actual PCs (I don't count the Apricot PCs haha) were DOS 3.3, and I still remember the transition away from 33MB partitions although it's so long ago I can't remember if that came in with DOS 4.0 (abort abort!) or 5. I thought I was so cool having a PC with drives A B C D E F G H I.
        • u801e 9y ago
          I had a 486 PC with a 100 MB hard drive running Dos 5.x (can't recall the minor version). The hard drive was definitely a single partition.
        • FranOntanaya 9y ago
          Oh man, rich kids had a D: drive. The rest of us had to make do with A: and C:
      • skookumchuck 9y ago
        It was 6.3 before that. The PDP-10 system :-)
  • piracykills 9y ago
    Yeah, I'm always amazed when someone my company hired as a developer doesn't understand what "open a terminal" means on Windows or I have to coach them through digging up the environment variables screen in control panel. I assume it's because I was a power user before I became a developer and so had that foundational knowledge and interacted with OS APIs to build on it... now people just go right into mashing JS code at web browsers which seem to be hacked into everything.
  • acdha 9y ago
    One other factor I've wondered about over the years is how quickly they give up when they hit a problem. In the 90s and early 2000s people had to develop local diagnostic skills, read documentation, etc. more before things like Stack Overflow were so pervasive. I wouldn't say it's a scientific observation but I've definitely gotten the impression that it's taking people longer to outgrow the cycle of immediately searching for a copy-paste answer and moving on without developing a better understanding of the issue for the next time something similar shows up.
    • eadmund 9y ago
      > I wouldn't say it's a scientific observation but I've definitely gotten the impression that it's taking people longer to outgrow the cycle of immediately searching for a copy-paste answer and moving on without developing a better understanding of the issue for the next time something similar shows up. I wonder if that's a phenomenon on the same spectrum as HN-Driven Development, where whatever one has last seen posted on HN is clearly the New Best Thing Evar. It's a bit like a voluntary outsourcing of one's own agency.
      • acdha 9y ago
        I definitely see a connection between that and complexity: people think that they need what someone else with a bigger, different problem did and amplify the number of things they need to learn.
      • gonzo41 9y ago
        Your right there arnt that many top rated post on HN about someone running up a small ec2 instance with wordpress and mysql. A lot of web stuff is plugging in the DB and not tripping over the cord. Yet thing of all those crazy frameworks that keep popping up and they look so impressive! Just something to think about aswell. When things were simpler and there was less choice there was also more concentrated documentation. It wasn't a bad investment to by a book about a language.
  • waxwander 9y ago
    I've had the opposite experience, with older programmers balking at new libraries, techniques, and setting up any environment they're not used to. If it doesn't work right away they go back to what they know. I know one guy who absolutely refuses to learn c++ because it doesn't compile for him and he only "trusts" c. Another who writes only in good ol' python2.7 (scipy dropping support; subprocess bugs; cough cough). Younger people tend to be aware of and use newer tools. But we're all bias I suppose.
    • telchar 9y ago
      I dream of the day I'm happy and productive enough with one set of tools that I refuse to switch to another. I still largely feel like I'm wandering the desert when it comes to tooling, where a new toolset looks good from a distance but when I start using it I discovered the ugly underside and start looking for greener pastures.
      • blt 9y ago
        Tell me about it, I'm using tensorflow now and it does amazing things, but the API is so bulky for anything besides setting up the computational graph... Planning to check out pytorch for next project. Imo most dev environments and software leave a lot to be desired, we should not settle.
  • matchagaucho 9y ago
    The downside of growing up on Commodores was their default imperative and procedural programming environment. My introductions to object-oriented and functional programming came much later in life, and I can't help but wonder how many bad coding habits I had to "unlearn" as a result of my Commodore foundation.
    • u801e 9y ago
      > The downside of growing up on Commodores was their default imperative and procedural programming environment. That could be an upside if you wanted to learn assembly since BASIC really wasn't that far removed from it in terms of what you could do and how you did it.
      • matchagaucho 9y ago
        Good point. The commands were really hands-on with memory and CPU.
    • KMag 9y ago
      One thing about non-imperative languages (functional, logic, etc.) is that they tend to encourage a much higher level of abstraction that's useful for dealing with complexity, but difficult for most novices to deal with. In particular, young children have relative trouble with abstract reasoning. If your standard library makes pervasive use of higher order functions, and you haven't yet wrapped your head around elementary algebra, you're going to have a bad time. I'm having a hard time thinking of an existing functional or logic programming language that requires a minimum of abstract thinking. You can use many languages in a functional style, but if e.g. you're using Python with a low level of abstraction, then you're likely using it as an imperative language.
  • hobs 9y ago
    I am 31 years old. Reading this makes me feel like a million years old.
    • sdwisely 9y ago
      perfectly normal - it's quite overwhelming to think about how much computing has changed in the last 30 years.
      • hobs 9y ago
        Right, except I wasnt using computers when I was born, and really wasnt using them well until I was maybe 24. We are taking half a decade until my cadre is unfamiliar to me. That's insane.
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    I know plenty of younger programs who can diagnose their own problems, so the generalization doesn't hold so well. I think the issue is more about experience and need: when we were learning to program, we HAD to do those things. For the younger generation, it is totally possible to get by without because the ecosystems are so much easier, coupled with a lot of online knowledge that they can access quickly, which was mostly missing in our age. On the other hand, those young programmers that are faced with a complex ecosystem will usually learn how to deal with it. Heck, with the web and its many step backwards in programming environments (e.g. try debugging in Chrome!), many things are actually harder for them and they acquire skills that I didn't need!
  • titanix2 9y ago
    Personal anecdotes here. I never occurred to me that people who could program couldn't do some sysadmin stuff to some extends until I work a small contract in a company. A day I was to demoing something there was a problem, so I fired Powershell to to some command line stuff... and someone asked "why do you have IT skills?". At first, I didn't even understand the question, I mean, installing systems, playing with VM, and the like was my daily bread, so I thought it was the some for every programmers... Another day, I went to the local of the university's CS student association. I was excited about what I did the previous day so I told after entering: "yesterday I installed FreeBSD in a virtual machine and did XX". One people replied by what is a virtual machine, and another by what is FreeBSD. I explain to them briefly then left wondering where the people actually interested by the field were. It turns out I met some of them a few months/years later. Both mostly self learners, one with formal training in theology and the other a musicology.
  • xstartup 9y ago
    I have these skills too and yes they prevent me from getting blocked when I run into these issues. I hate relying on others for help on small issues like this. But I also get not everyone would want to waste their time with issues with do not challenge them. As a company owner, I will prefer a dedicated help desk to sort my programmers with these issues but as an entrepreneur, I want to be self-reliant.
  • ende 9y ago
    I disagree. These skills might be applicable to a Software Engineering degree, but not Computer Science.
  • analog31 9y ago
    >>> I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. You have people that want to be programmers but don't include "computing" as one of their hobbies. It may be the result of the competitiveness of the education system. Everything is more competitive. As I understand things, CS is the hottest undergraduate major right now. You can't just sign up because you learned to program in high school and think it's cool. You have to be a top student just to get admitted. So it may be that the kids who want to be computer scientists just aren't able to have hobbies at all, or their hobbies are chosen to look good on their college applications. One of the things I've noticed between then and now, is that when I was in high school, I learned programming because I had a lot of spare time to kill. My kids have no spare time. >>> Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. Granted, I didn't study CS, but instead math & physics, decades ago. But I think that some things don't belong in a college curriculum, especially given the price tag. I didn't take college courses to learn soldering, or even programming. But also, not all CS majors are destined to become hackers, and there has to be room for a student who might be all thumbs but really has a deep interest in the subject matter of the field. In physics, we called them "theoreticians." A deeper question is why someone is studying theoretical computer science for 4 years in order to become a coder. Programming is getting harder, but that much harder? When my mom taught programming in the early 80s, her students were getting jobs after one year of coursework.
    • Nullabillity 9y ago
      > It may be the result of the competitiveness of the education system. Everything is more competitive. As I understand things, CS is the hottest undergraduate major right now. Hardly. Looking at the Swedish admissions statistics[1] from this year (because that's what I'm familiar with): - Of the top 5 programmes, 3 were for physicians (doctors), with the required GPA ranging 22.09-22.29 - The hardest engineering programme to get into was no. 8, technical physics, requiring 21.98 - The hardest computer-related programme to get into was no. 56, software engineering, requiring 20.73 That said, it was above 20.0 (straight As), so the requirements do seem to have increased in the last few years [1]: https://statistik.uhr.se/uhr.html https://statistik.uhr.se/uhr.html, to see applications to programmes based on high school GPAs you'll want to pick "Bara program", "Urval 1", and then set "Visa urvalsgrupp" to "BI". You'll want to sort by "Antagningspoäng".
  • Figs 9y ago
    > Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. It was included in my college CS curriculum, using the most obvious text (Debugging, by Agans) almost 10 years ago -- though I had a head start, since I read a copy of it from my public library about 4~5 years before that. If other schools haven't followed suit, I have to ask "What on earth is taking them so long?"
    • kbwt 9y ago
      The consensus seems to be that those types of skills do not belong in a Higher Learning institution. In Germany, the saying is "You do not need a Computer to study CS", although it sounds wrong in English because CS literally contains the word "Computer" while the German term for CS (Informatik) is a mashed-together version of Information and Mathematics. Some German Universities (TUM, KIT) pride themselves on that last point so much, they actually pass off the CS degree as an Informatics degree on the English version of their diploma transcripts.
  • PeterStuer 9y ago
    (btw, I'll use 'older' and 'younger' as a sort of statistical reference, not implying a strict age separation exists and all on either side are clones of a prototype) I recognize this. My 'younger' colleagues can't install a computer from scratch, a get completely stuck on the slightest network issue. But I don't thin it is related to education. The 'older' programmer had to squire these skills by necessity as it was completely impossible to use a computer otherwise. For us getting a new release of Windows or VS usually meant wiping everything clean and install from scratch a we all knew how dodgy 'upgrading' was. My 'younger' colleagues wouldn't know where to begin when they can't hit update and everything works. They have to wait and rely on a system manager to re-image their machine for them.
    • cheschire 9y ago
      The youngest guy on my team refuses to reinstall his development environment like the rest of us when new major platform changes occur. Then every few months complains when his environment causes an error in the build.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  • rorykoehler 9y ago
    Another anecdote... My experience with older programmers and sys admins is that the vast majority of them know a lot about how a computer works (as you mentioned) but many also haven't kept up to date on tools available to simplify and automate processes. This leads to unnecessarily convoluted and confusing configurations that are far from optimised considering todays available tooling. This frustrates me to no end as it creates a load of needless busy work which at the same time makes the dev/admin feel both smart and productive whilst not optimising for what the business actually cares about.
    • bazfoo 9y ago
      On the flipside, I see a lot of tools pushed that are more complicated, less flexible, and far buggier than the old tools. And then inevitably in a few years they're deprecated in favour of something newer and shinier and the old tools are still perfectly fine (e.g. Make).
  • mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Interesting, I'm old enough to have grown up before the scourge of Wintel PCs in the 90s. Had a Commodore Vic-20 instead. You'd hit the power button and about 5 seconds later a BASIC interpreter started. There was no complicated debugging to be done to get it working. Still, I learned to manage/hate computers by the Win '95 era and grow to love them again by the time Linux became tolerable about 10 years later.
  • btschaegg 9y ago
    I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. My guess is that you don't even have to go as far as "computing" in order to see the negative effects of this. I've had a couple of encounters where I helped out a peer that was stuck in a particular problem merely by applying some basic deduction. And I had those situations both with fellow students and later on in the workplace. In all those situations, the underlying problem was that the person in question didn't have a firm grasp of the programming language they were using, but seemed to program in terms of "patterns" -- they knew how a for loop has to look like, but as soon as there was a slightly more nuanced problem (say a parsing expression in Boost.Spirit), they weren't able to see how the underlying syntax was treated by the respective language. While I get that it's almost impossible (and certainly impractical) to learn every edge case in most modern programming languages, I couldn't help but think of cargo cults. Edit: On second thought: OTOH, it seems to me that it isn't helpful to view what a software engineer does merely as "programming" in this regard. I don't see a problem if, say, an electrical engineer is missing said "computing" skills, but they are in their way to complete a program. Many modern professions benefit greatly if the respective person is able to program (maybe only in a specific language, e.g. Matlab or LabView), but that doesn't mean they have to know their working machines inside out.
  • j45 9y ago
    This is a subtle and sublime point - it may not just be a function of age, maybe somewhat about having a wider interest in computers and tech. 10-20 years ago, it was a requirement to learn the layers support your own hardware, network, security, hosting.... all for the opportunity to try to build a piece of software. You could spend a few years improving at each and it was perfectly normal. Now there seems to be a rush to get through it all to become awesome by skimming the surface. As a result of learning multiple layers (because there was little other choice), one picked up a lot of transferable skills. You can sometimes literally traverse debugging an issue between all of these layers. In school computers were taught, first from how a computer physically worked, booted up, etc. Then, you learned some basic operating system, applications, and how they interacted with the computer. Once that was completed, you started some amount of creation, whether it was visual design, games, programming, etc. Not to create a programmer, but as a form of creation with the computer.
  • klum 9y ago
    Agreed. The article sort of presents these kind of "computer problems" as a barrier to getting started with programming. I don't quite agree -- or maybe they are, but only in the sense that they "filter out" those who don't really want to be programmers at an earlier point in time. Don't get me wrong; I don't think there's any point in making new programmers jump through arbitrary hoops because "programming should be hard". But I think that today, programming is necessarily intertwined with computing and problem-solving in general, and all the Dockers and specialised positions in the world don't change that. To be a good developer, you need to have some idea about the systems your code will be running on. A program doesn't just exist in a bubble. (This is more true for some kinds of applications, less for others, of course.)
  • gutnor 9y ago
    Well, that's an effect of experience. You don't just become a better programmer with experience, you become better at software development. Better handling stress, better understanding requirement, gathering requierment, better navigating political corporate structure, better explaining yourself, better defending yourself, ... and yes, better getting your environment sorted. That said, the specific point you raised is interesting because I was having the same problem at work. Except it was caused by automation. We have automated pipeline for everything, zero downtime deployment, containers, ... all of that is working very well - so well that there is just no enough big stuff to do so that newcomer on the project can build enough experience with the pipeline to master it. The best people achieve is some sort of very rudimentary debugging capability, earned from the monthly minor tweak the system require. Basically either you build similar pipeline on another project, something that is extremely unfrequent, or you missed the train.
  • andredublin 9y ago
    Interesting point, I'll add that we don't see many desktop computers any more. Kids or those wanting to learn to program don't see the whole machine. Instead we have these slim downed devices that require existing knowledge to take apart and put back together again.
  • SophosQ 9y ago
    Perhaps it's more to do with the stock of people who learnt CS. In the older generation, CS was a relatively obscure and difficult skill with little to no easy-guides that it filtered the set of students to only those who were insatiably curious and were fuelled by learning new things. In contrast, CS has become so ubiquitous that nearly everything has a "how do it" guide that eases the entry of nearly anyone, with little or not interest or whose motivation might be less than ideal. Thereby, possibly leaving room for more anecdotal evidence for this perceives shift in skill.
  • koffiezet 9y ago
    Has little to do with age, but more with the amount of people in the CS field right now. Only a fraction of them are enthusiasts. I notice that especially with my "front-end" developer colleagues - of whom 3/4th is here to do a job and at home many of them don't even have their own computer. Sure they play video games on their XBox or PS4, but that's the extent of their technical interest. For them it's simply a well-paid 9-to-5 job. Now my other colleagues are mostly doing back-end and embedded C++/Python stuff, and are in general a lot more interested in the technical side. I think it's more or less the other way around, 1 out of 4 is not really tinkering with tech at home - but even they are more interested in tech outside of their field. I show them stuff like docker, kubernetes, time-series databases and metrics collection stuff, ansible/tower and what we can do with those things, and how they could make changes in the way they design their software to make things more reliable or easier to deploy/monitor - and their reaction is "oh cool!". Our front-end team? Completely the opposite attitude and completely averse to changing the way they work. I hear "we'll do this manually" or "why? this works too"... Most of the front-end dev roles seem to attract people who're not really into tech, but can code a bit. I think because of the immediate visual feedback? They end up hiding behind their frameworks with a lack of even basic understanding of HTTP or networking. Me as an embedded developer rolled into sysadmin role then has to tell them what the hell HTTP2 is, catch their screw-ups when they serve mixed http/https content on their site, ... Now they're not all like that, there are some pretty good guys there - but the majority can write basic code, and that's where it ends. Sadly it's no surprise their team-leads all fall in the wrong category. On the other side, I have the last say when stuff is deployed in production, so they are forced to adapt to certain things - but they'll always complain.
• sien 9y ago
  This is presenting a wildly rosy view of the past. In Commodore 64 days you got some book that was all you had. You couldn't email the author of the book or look online. If you got through the huge filter of the initial steps being much harder than today then you were doing well and would go on. However, the endless set ups and downloading every library that is used is going to make maintenance of programs in 5, 10 or 20 years a nightmare.
  • bitwize 9y ago
    Not just some book, usually lots of books, from the fundamentals of BASIC to technical references with complete schematics for the entire machine. I had a Commodore VIC-20 and it certainly came with all these. And even then, experts and resources were available online, for suitably primitive values of "online". Think CompuServe. Another thing we had back then but less so today was magazines, full of programming and technical tips and info, usually tailored to a particular computer family. (So, Commodore magazines, Tandy magazines, Apple magazines, etc.) Once business computing took off, the dominant players (PCMag, MacWorld, etc.) became more productivity-oriented -- but I still learned Windows programming from the free utility and programming columns in early 90s PCMag. And then once the Web hit, the dead tree publishers were fighting over scraps.
    • astrodust 9y ago
      The manual didn't tell you anything. The books didn't tell you anything. They scratched the surface, which if you knew nothing might have seemed profound, even mind-blowing, but if you were trying to do anything non-trivial you were left grasping for answers. I tried to build games on the C64 using BASIC and, while I had some success, the results were always limited by the fact that it was in BASIC, it was going to be slow, and that planning and editing your code was extremely painful, you didn't even have a proper text editor. The real way to develop on the C64 was with assembly. Unfortunately, finding information on how to do this was virtually impossible. Almost no books existed, and those that did were rare and expensive. Even when you got the book you were missing huge chunks of knowledge: The CPU itself is just 10% of the problem, the rest is knowing the memory layout, the supporting chips, and so on, stuff that wasn't well known. The methods employed by actual production games were dark and mysterious, often close to protected secrets. You were welcome to painfully disassemble these games, but you also had no tools, not even a basic assembler, unless you went out and bought one. Today it's easier than ever to build games for vintage hardware because everything, every little thing, is lovingly documented. This was absolutely not the case in the 1980s.
• bpicolo 9y ago
  While it could be easier, there are few languages I've ever felt I had to go through extraordinary lengths to get running. Having the patience to set them up is probably a good indicator for having the patience to learn them. (Or rather, the reverse is probably more true)
• lbotos 9y ago
  This is what glitch is looking to solve: https://glitch.com/ https://glitch.com/ To add my take here, this was a problem in 2003 too when I wanted to learn, but C++ was such a hard starting point. The big takeaway is modern commercial programming is so far from "learning to program". That's a hard gap to bridge when a newbie is learning "making a terminal based calculator and wondering how do I build an 'app' or 'web app'?". One Month a YC company tried to solve this but the market is hard to reach because education is hard.
• TimJYoung 9y ago
  It's getting harder because it's become fashionable to shun IDEs that make most of these issues obsolete, and have done so since at least the 90's. It's ridiculous to expect newcomers to a language and/or programming in general to slog through a 20 or 30-step environment setup process. This idea that using an IDE will discourage someone from finding out the more detailed workings of the language, compiler, etc. is nonsense. If anything, immediate progress and reward will encourage new developers to keep going and exploring further, whereas an overly-complicated, tangled mess of setup instructions will just make many people throw their hands up and quit. Case in point: my first experience with the Delphi IDE in 1996 had me immediately writing a basic text editor without knowing anything about Delphi/Object Pascal at all prior to sitting down with it. Drag, drop, consult the context-sensitive help, write some code, and compile/run, all in the same IDE. It also helped that Delphi shipped with the entire source code to it's RTL and the VCL (Visual Component Library), but that's more important as you get deeper into the language/product.
  • danaliv 9y ago
    Indeed. There's no way I would've learned how to program at such an early age if the process had been any more complicated than "install Turbo Turtle." (And later, HyperCard, THINK Pascal, THINK C, and finally CodeWarrior.) It wasn't until I had basic command of a few different languages that I was thrust into the world of UNIX, emacs, Perl, CPAN, and so on. By that time I was able to handle it, but if that had been my first go of it, I'd have run for the hills and never looked back.
  • hyperpape 9y ago
    I do Java programming by day, and I still find the IDE to be a pain in the ass. It offers me a lot of power (enough that I still use it for all my Java code), but the configuration is so opaque. It's a GUI, but what a confusing, complicated GUI. In contrast, opening a repl in python/node is super easy, and it was super easy even when I was a beginner. Building a GUI like you said would be hard, (though I did a very simple tkinter gui in my first year), but I think that even for a beginner, opening a repl and starting to muck around is easier without the IDE in the way.
  • pjc50 9y ago
• jakelazaroff 9y ago
  There's another option the author doesn't consider: Change programming, or create fundamentally different programming paradigms that entirely obviate some of the requirements we have now. One idea that's a fairly natural progression from where we are now is Luna, a WYSIWYG data processing language: http://www.luna-lang.org http://www.luna-lang.org A loftier re-imagining is Dynamicland, co-founded by Alan Kay and Bret Victor: https://dynamicland.org https://dynamicland.org
• amasad 9y ago
  To add to this, one other way programming is getting harder is that there is no incremental path to becoming a developer. In the past, you could easily become a programmer by accident. You wanted to edit your MySpace page, google around, learn some HTML and do it. You wanted to mod a game, you started messing around with the game, download other mods, and change them. I think this incrementally is gone in two ways. One is that programming is so abstracted away from how we use computers that it's almost in a different world. But even if you figured out what programming is, when you actually attempt to do it, the sophistication of our tools make it a lot harder to get started. Everything that makes us programmers more productive: compilers, build systems, package managers, etc make programming less accessible. There is a lack of coherence between all these tools, no one person designed them, they're the product of bottom-up innovation (the bazaar) which has the problem of making things messier. I think open-source/bottom-up innovation is great, but eschewing "the cathedral" for a wholly bazaar-based approach is making it a lot harder to learn to program. What I'm working on now (I'm the founder of Repl.it) is taking a lot of these awesome tools and putting a nicely designed experience on top of them. We want to bring back the welcoming cursor that invites you to program the computer and bring back incrementality to programming, you start from a repl, and from there you can move on to web-dev or what have you. You'd be surprised how fun it is for kids to build CLI programs before moving on to build other things. We put together a page where kids can post about what they're building with Repl.it and it's really inspiring to see: https://repl.it/ibuiltthis https://repl.it/ibuiltthis I've written more about what I call a "Holistic development service" here: http://repl.it/site/blog/holistic http://repl.it/site/blog/holistic And also here I describe how we went wrong with "Disintegrated Development Environments — How Did We Get Here?": https://amasad.me/disintegrated https://amasad.me/disintegrated
  • bomb199 9y ago
    I guess it depends on what you mean by "become a developer". I think a lot of the increased difficulty is the skill of developers. At one point, knowing how to edit HTML would get you an interview. Now, I feel like I might need a successful Python library so I can get an interview... Not sure if it's a bad thing or not, since the art is just becoming better.
• commandlinefan 9y ago
  Not only that, but the perception is going in the opposite direction - as learning to (or actually practice) programming gets harder - non-programmers seem to think that the proliferation of graphical tools ought to have made programming easier.
• linguae 9y ago
  One of the consequences of the transition from command-line interfaces such as DOS and Unix to contemporary GUIs such as macOS and Windows is we have moved from environments that do not make a sharp distinction between programmer and user to environments that make a sharp distinction. One of the nice things about command-line interfaces is being able to make powerful tools that are composed of smaller tools. Unix has a powerful collection of tools, and if those tools aren't powerful enough even with combined by pipes, there's awk and sed, and then there are scripting languages. Contemporary GUI applications, however, work very differently. Instead of being composed from smaller programs, many contemporary GUI applications such as Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, and iTunes are large monoliths that are expensive to write (just consider how large the teams engineering these products are, and consider how much effort it would take to write a clone of these programs from scratch), difficult to combine, and are difficult to script unless they are specially designed to support scripting (e.g., AppleScript, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, etc.). Web applications are even harder to write than native GUI applications, and they are even more difficult to deal with in regards to interoperability and scriptability. It didn't have to be this way, and there's room for a future where it doesn't have to be this way. The Smalltalk-76 environment demonstrated that it is possible to construct composable and interoperable GUI applications. The Genera operating system for LISP machines worked similarly. Apple's OpenDoc initiative would have introduced the wider world to the concept of composable GUIs, although it was canned as a consequence of Apple adopting the tried-and-true OpenStep platform as the basis of future Mac development. An operating system environment inspired by the Smalltalk environment and LISP machines that provides both a REPL for tasks that are equivalent the Unix command line and an OpenDoc-like API for designing composable GUI or even web applications would create an environment that is both easy to use and programmable. I've been growing more and more excited about the possibility of such an operating system for workstation users that could one day serve as an alternative to contemporary desktop operating systems and environments such as Windows, macOS, and the Linux desktop.
  • scroot 9y ago
    I want a machine like that.
• codazoda 9y ago
  The problem described is exactly why I wrote a short "How to Code" primer a couple years ago. It teaches some basics of Javascript. Javascript, at least in the browser, can be run with no extra dependencies. Everyone has a web browser these days. https://www.joeldare.com/blog/post/how-to-code/ https://www.joeldare.com/blog/post/how-to-code/
• PacketPaul 9y ago
  The author is making an excuse for not including an intro chapter and tool in his book to get the reader to a place where they can start using the book. My sixth grader checked-out a Python game programming book from the school library. He was able to install all the tools necessary to follow along and learn from the book. Today you have Google, Youtube and every programming language available from scratch to assembler at your fingertips. There is no way it is "harder". Yea the C64 dropped you into basic. But this was my first experience on a Commodore 64: "Play A Game" -Syntax Error "Play a Game of Chess" -Syntax Error "Let's play Global Thermonuclear War" -Syntax Error
  • fleitz 9y ago
    Yeah, typing in LOAD "Blah",8 whatever it was was so much easier and more intuitive than jupyter python notebooks. /sarcasm.
• henrik_w 9y ago
  My first computer was a VIC-20 (I later got a Commodore 64), where you also start with a BASIC prompt. I too have been thinking about to the barriers to starting to code. Last fall, I helped in my son's grade 8 class to teach them python programming. There we wanted the students to be able to start coding with minimal effort, and minimal magic. They already had MacBook Airs, which had python 2.7 already installed, so there was nothing to install. Then we concentrated on a few core programming constructs (no classes for example), and no libraries. This was an attempt to recreate the environment I had when I learnt to program on the VIC-20. I think it worked really well. The students were able to write fairly advanced (a few pages full of code) with that set-up. If you want to do more advanced programming, you'll need to install more, but for a start it was really good. I've written more about it here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/12/17/programming-for-grade-8/ https://henrikwarne.com/2017/12/17/programming-for-grade-8/
• ewjordan 9y ago
  I remember when I was first learning Java, whacking my head repeatedly against all these sorts of problems - WTF is a JRE vs. a JDK, why is it asking to install a browser toolbar, WTF is Eclipse and why doesn't it just let me run the file that I'm working on without going through half an hour of researching "Run configurations" and classpath BS first, etc. It was doable, but as a new person to the whole ecosystem, it was seriously painful to even get to the point where "Hello, world!" would run. Then I tried to get OpenGL working (I wanted to do games), and I probably blew an entire week futzing with configuration just to draw a rectangle on the screen. TBH it was harder than getting the same thing done in C++. And compiling it all into a Real Executable that would run on Windows like a normal program? Forget about it...not even to get into Web Start, applets, Maven and JavaFX (remember that disaster?), oh my! Then I discovered Processing, which bundled everything (Java runtimes, libraries, etc.) together in a nice tidy package, and its own IDE where you could just open up the thing, type in some code, and hit the big obvious "Run" button. Want a library? Download it from the nicely curated set that are guaranteed to work! Wanted to create an executable, click "Export", and it just works! All the nastiness of linking native dependencies, bundling the JRE, handling classpaths and linker flags, it was handled once by the devs working on that project, and end users could just focus on code. Things are getting better with other technologies these days, but it's still rare that I see an environment as zero-config as Processing, apart from web-based Javascript playgrounds. All it takes is a pure focus on usability, which I think is something that as devs we often overlook because once we've gotten over the installation problems that we're familiar with ("well of course brew is better than MacPorts, and you'll need to install nvm and pick the right version before this library will work, except for this one dependency that's only available through RubyGems, and this other one that") we forget that they can be confusing and really off-putting to newbies. Python environments are particularly bad, IMO because of screwy webs of dependencies that more often than not fail to install cleanly and the Python 2 vs 3 split.
  • icebraining 9y ago
    On the other hand, Python's "batteries included" means you can go a long way without installing anything. Sometimes I think people forget to look in the stdlib: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html
• frankc 9y ago
  There is a certain amount of systems administration knowledge you need to have if you are going to be an effective programmer. No, you don't need to be a sysadmin, but but source code doesn't live in a vacuum. I vote for face the pain.
• stephenblum 9y ago
  specializing is getting harder. DevOps, BigData, AI/ML, Blockchain, Full stack / MEAM, Front-end, Mobile Android Studio, XCode
• drenvuk 9y ago
  This is why I recommend people learn how to program using javascript at first. There are no downloads, there is no setup and given some simple instructions you can mess around with fully formed pages just by typing into the console what you want to do. The modern browser has all the tools for a programming course that takes place almost entirely in the console. I lean more towards the python/C++ side of things but for just diving in and seeing something cool for quick, colorful motivation to learn, javascript fills that need better than anything else.
  • zbentley 9y ago
    > There are no downloads, there is no setup... For a REPL/solving an algorithms problem? Sure. And the first time they want to use some code from StackOverflow that uses a library, god forbid, it's off to the races. Require? Script tag? Webpack? Transpile? Minify? All of those things are important tools, but their use (and presumption of their use, a la "just import 'map' from underscore.js; you know the drill") is so widespread as to present a major stumbling block for first-time programming explorers.
• edmundhuber 9y ago
  I don't understand this viewpoint at all. There's a breathtaking amount of tutorials, Q/A (stackoverflow), forums, chats, that can get someone started with a fraction of the effort it took for me to learn programming 20 years ago. There are one-click installers for programming languages and for IDEs. There are entire free books online to learn specific languages or frameworks. I think people have gotten lazier and they expect to be taught, rather than seeking out materials. Or perhaps the people wishing to learn, are not as interested in programming as they think they are. That being said, yes, learning "cloud" is an enormous sink of time that requires some exposure to lots of different silos of information. Doesn't that make sense though? It's a complicated subject.
  • jonny_eh 9y ago
    > I think people have gotten lazier My only response is this famous quote: "The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise"
    • edmundhuber 9y ago
      Yeah, I realize how it sounds. Angry old man yells at cloud.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
        The quote you're responding to is also ~2,000 years old.
        • analog31 9y ago
          It may be more recent. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-ancient-times/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-childre...
          • marcosdumay 9y ago
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• sametmax 9y ago
  I disagree. Creating a program that meets todays' users expectations is what's harder. But learning programming by itself, is way easier. We have Python, Ruby, Javascript... We have the Web as a platform and as documentation. We have communities and cheap, fast computers. The hello world has never been easier to do. What's hard is to make a real time offline first SPA with a beautiful responsive design that uses the same API backend as the mobile app while integrating with third party Saas and leveraging social medias.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • rconti 9y ago
    But the learning curve of getting an environment setup to do that is steeper.
    • user5994461 9y ago
      It's not. Installing a C++ tool chain two decades ago is much harder than any current environment.
      • umanwizard 9y ago
        "Learning programming" doesn't mean "learning C++". A lot of people learned on some BASIC that came pre-installed on whatever device they bought.
        • sirmarksalot 9y ago
          And you're typing this comment from a full-featured Javascript IDE.
      • rconti 9y ago
        For decades, "development tools" was a (relatively) standard bit of kit on any Linux distro; in fact, you needed it to compile basic software you needed to run on the machine. These days, every environment/framework has a different distribution method/model involving running random shell scripts or learning git or whatever. For example, on OS X (I imagine this is harder on Windows, possibly easier on Linux) Python: To install REAL Python on OS X: * Install GCC * To install GCC you need XCode * To install Homebrew, use Ruby to curl to a random shell script on github. * Export a path * Use brew to install python3 * Brew installs pip for you (and then?) React Native: * Assuming you have Node installed (yeah, sure, why not!): * npm install * create-react-native-app * npm start * Then download Expo client on iOS or android phone and scan a QR code...
• RawData 9y ago
  I don't know...if you can't figure out how to install python on a local machine...maybe you don't have any business being a coder to begin with. I mean, come on... edit: the downvotes from the delicate snowflakes crack me up...
  • plusone111 9y ago
    Agreed sort of. Especially when the solution is often easily searchable. I’ve hired interns and junior folks who have trouble with the command line (special circumstances for FT hire). I offer help, but also tell them that it’s their responsibility to understand any extant skill gap and learn. I’ve worked with at least one older boot camper who threw fits when they had to learn something new on their own to debug a problem. I’ve worked with much older career programmers who’ve done the same. I don’t think it’s a matter of being a coder or not, rather some people aren’t problem solvers, and some people are lazy, and some people dumb, and some people want to be somewhere else. If I had my pick, I’d never work with these people. However, sometimes the people doing the hiring shouldn’t be managers, you could say, and sometimes the people making the decisions have incentives to hire bad people. Then you end with experienced newbies, and have to fill a position eventually. A better articulated post would posit the problem is not inherit to people not knowing things, but people not having to.
• solomatov 9y ago
  I work at JetBrains on https://datalore.io/ https://datalore.io/ It's an interactive computational notebook for data science, which automatically recalculates code as you change it. We believe that such an interface lowers the barrier for entry into data science (and programming).
  • sus_007 9y ago
    How is it different from Google's Colab Notebook or Microsoft's Azure Notebook ?
    • solomatov 9y ago
      It has incremental recalculation, smarter editor, realtime collaborative editing and integrated version control.
  • askvictor 9y ago
    Looks great, though I can't find anything about pricing or pricing plans (looks like it's in open beta?) While I've dabbled with using jupyter for teaching programming to high school students, on the whole its usually too difficult to get up and running for someone who's not already moderately tech savvy. Interface is everything when starting off; this looks quite promising if the pricing is affordable for schools
    • solomatov 9y ago
      We don't have billing yet, but we have gift codes. If you want to try larger instances or run out of allotted time, let me know.
• Lerc 9y ago
  I seem to spend a lot of my time attacking this problem from one direction or another. I'm currently writing a browser based editor/assembler/emulator for 8-bit AVR. I've made code-running MediaWiki plugins. I even got to the point where I made an entire client-side browser desktop environment. At the same time as making tools to ease the entry cost, I'm also wary of making tools to conceal the complexity. Helper tools are beneficial, but once complexity is hidden it can grow unchecked. Being able to get a project set-up with ./configure or npm is great, but you have black-box that over time becomes more and more onerous to open up and have a peek.
• majormajor 9y ago
  I agree that it's harder to learn to program now than in 1982 (in terms of "hello world" level simple stuff - but not for advanced stuff), but I believe that it's way easier now than in 1992 or 2002. AppleScript might be an exception in the 1992 case, but it was a fairly specialized case and only for Macs. Otherwise, today you can google stuff easily (vs needing books and such) and even Windows supports installing Linux tools out of the box. The danger, though, is that in the future we could have fewer and fewer general-purpose computers -- iOS is not as dev friendly as OS X. However, even on general-purpose computers, don't seem that interested in making it easier, which is sad from a professional pride point of view if nothing else. I set up Android Studio on Linux recently. It wasn't terrible, but even that wasn't a seamless experience - the emulator stuff had a few problems, including included libs that were incompatible with Intel graphics drivers, that I had to work around. Any time you join a company and have to browse a long dev environment setup wiki or readme, you've seen us all fail. We're bandaging it as fast as we can with stuff like Docker, but that's just delaying the problem until you have to debug your container in prod. ;)
• gxs 9y ago
  I'll be honest with you. Programming is actually pretty easy to learn. As long as you have a vague idea of how logic works and are eager to learn with the right approach, you can pick it up pretty quickly. A lot of the concepts floated around in programming have crazy sounding names but are actually not that bad. What's really hard to learn, however, is full on software engineering. Knowing how something works end to end. Sure, you can learn to program well in JS, but that won't translate right away to knowing how to build an awesome website. You can be an excellent java programmer, but that won't translate right away into architecting a nice Android app. For me at least, when I was an up and comer, these were the things that were hard to put together. Every tutorial site wants to jump into a lot of details right away - I wish they started with a high level overview of where you'd need the language, where it fits in in the larger "app" picture (where app can be a site, an app, etc.) and then dive into the specifics.
  • cchubitunes 9y ago
    Hi, I completely agree you. I am currently learning how to code. I am at that point where I know the syntax of of a few language pretty well and can code up small programs. However, I do have difficulties in architecting and developing a fully functional application. How did you solve this problem?
    • hasbroslasher 9y ago
      I was you a few years ago. There's two ways forward: 1. Get a job programming and slowly build up your skills/expertise by learning from those around you. 2. Develop a lesson plan for yourself and figure out how to build and deploy different kinds of apps. I don't know if you're into #1 but I think it can be massively useful. There's so much stuff you don't know about that some dude who's been working somewhere for 5 years does. You can pick up best practices, design ideas, constructive criticism, better coding, better tools, knowledge that's easier to get in person than from a webpage. Today no single person makes a truly great and novel software application, and working at a tech company will make that apparent to you. As for 2, some ideas assuming you know how to code: 1. Write an HTTP API that talks to several different databases. Learn how the databases work and when to use them. Get good at using them both from their CLI and a programming language. 2. Write a site using React/Angular/etc. and HTML/CSS to query an external API and display the results or organize user input into a fun framework. 3. Find a way to publish both of the above so that mom can interact with them. 4. Figure out how to wire a web app that you wrote to an API you wrote. 5. Find a way to deploy that as a complete system. 6. Figure out how to write a simple iPhone/Android App if you're interested in that. 7. Now make it do something cool, presumably by hooking it up to an API that does the heavy lifting. 8. Now make it all pretty. 9. Now figure out how to get it in people's hands. Collect their feedback and figure out what's working and what's not. 10. Go back to whichever step needs work and fix it. That's easy to say, but there's a ton of work in learning all of these skills. It's one thing to write an app, it's another thing to get it in people's hands, and it's a third thing to get it to really really work to the point where people love it. A lot of people spend 40 hours a week doing that for years and don't/can't do everything - that the reason there's so much specialization in the world of software engineering.
• dahart 9y ago
  > Computer retailers stopped installing development environments by default This is true, but somewhat ignores web browsers. The big ones (Chrome, Firefox, IE & Safari) all have complete and high quality dev environments. The article is Python-centric, and so the best answer for that right now is: install Anaconda! Otherwise, the general argument being made here is solved by JavaScript at the moment. If you use JS to write code, there’s nothing to install, distribution is built in, it comes with the dev environment. All language and feature comparisons aside, this is the strongest reason to use JS, because it makes sharing programs with other people so insanely easy compared to any other language.
  • DanBC 9y ago
    BASIC is easy to understand. Javascript is incomprehensible in comparison. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637866 var drawing = document.createElement('canvas'); document.body.appendChild(drawing); var ctx = drawing.getContext('2d'); ctx.beginPath(); ctx.moveTo(0, 0); ctx.lineTo(100, 100); ctx.stroke(); VS SCREEN 13 LINE (X1, Y1) - (X2, Y2), COLOUR I'm not claiming BASIC is a good language, or that it teaches good programming. But it is very easy to use.
    • dahart 9y ago
      That's true for drawing one straight line, sure! The question here wasn't whether the language is easy to use, the issue raised in the article was whether the language & dev environment are pre-installed, how hard they are to install, and then how hard the programs are to share after you're written them. No version of BASIC is being shipped with any OS today. You still have to download the language and a dev environment on a brand new (Windows) computer. And when you share a BASIC program, you either have to build an executable that will run on someone else's machine, or the recipient has to install BASIC on their own. (The article was about sharing code & learning to code, so a binary isn't ideal.) JavaScript and the dev environment, on the other hand, comes with every new computer, on every OS, because browsers are pre-installed. BTW, is this modern basic? That looks like what I remember from DOS 2.0 in 1980. :P To be fair, you're comparing HTML canvas API to BASIC's native line drawing, this example doesn't actually say much about the JavaScript or BASIC languages. And it doesn't compare BASIC's graphics to canvas's... with canvas you can draw curves and bitmaps and do transforms. I'm not familiar with whether BASIC can do that these days. In my experience, canvas is quite easy to use, even compared to BASIC. I know you were joking, but incomprehensible is what I'd use for, say, Vulkan or DX12. JS+canvas is very comprehensible and easy, at all times, in my opinion.
• fnord77 9y ago
  You don't need a computer to program. Paper and pencil will get you pretty far. Anyone take CS106X at stanford? Most everything was written by hand, only the labs or homework were actually done on a computer.
• gaius 9y ago
  The question of “where to begin” is certainly a lot harder now. Learning to program the way my generation did, the programming itself was obviously harder - assembly vs Python for example - but the path and the progression was laid out for you. For me it was BBC Basic, then 6502, then 68k with DevPac on the ST... myself and a friend wrote our own driver for a modem we found in a skip and that is how we first got online... good times
• Havoc 9y ago
  idk assembly looked pretty damn hard to me so I stuck to modern languages.
• CoC_CRUSHER 9y ago
  This is exactly what TempleOS does.
• alex_young 9y ago
  The point about cloud IDEs being the future is excellent I think. I worked for a bit over a year on a chromebook with no local storage - only a cloud IDE. It was a lot to get used to at first, but once you have made the context switch, it's great to have everything in one consistent place with tools you can use from literally anywhere. Similarly, working on a small display pays the same kind of dividend. When you can't put windows of code all over the place you enforce a kind of mental order that's hard to achieve otherwise. I guess I just want a portable WYSE terminal :)
• loup-vaillant 9y ago
  The fourth option, developing on the cloud and stay there, looks like a good way to lose whatever freedom we had left. Would the cloud provider let me write pen testing tools? Would it let me put profanities in my comments? Would it give reports of my work sessions to my boss? Would it get a licence to my code? I'd rather go dinosaur.
• emilfihlman 9y ago
  The issue is with annoying, irrelevant and complete-but-not-quite-you-must-tinker-actually-quite-a-lot-first frameworks and build systems. Not to mention inadequate documentation. You can learn to program easily still, say with Python or C but learning to use the all the time progressing tools is a completely different thing.
• Pica_soO 9y ago
  Its not getting harder, the old systems just forced the users to learn- today, its just magic who works or wont. Windows, MacOS, Chromebooks - none of them have a compiler and a ide by default. Even the "bash-scripting" is not introduced to new users. So if you do not choose this occupation, you will never grow into it now a days.
• _trampeltier 9y ago
  I also think learning to program is getting harder, but at least you can start easy today. When I started to program in the early/mid 90s it was very difficult for me to start as teenager. I didn't know anybody who did and had a (copy) of a compiler for me. At least I found QBasic (was in DOS included). It was very easy to program and debug something. The program could be as just one line of code. Just hit F5 (as far I remember) and the thing did run. But it was just an interpreter and slow. The included help was pretty good. Later I tryed to program Assembler under DOS. But again, no compiler, I had just the DEBUG function from DOS. With that it was possible to write Assembler direct in memory (but not save to a file). Also no marks for jumps .. you had always to calculate the address by yourself. My QBasic book had (still has) 416 pages. It included EVERYTHING you could do in QBASIC. My Assembler book was a bit more slim (XT-486, before MMX). A "complete" book today would need over 10000 pages. There are sooo many things you can do. There are almost a infinite number of librarys on github.
• ericmcer 9y ago
  I got my CS degree in 2012. It was kinda scary how many students were on the verge of graduation, and were unable to use a terminal, use SSH, or tell you what git is (not that I know exactly o_o). Those aren't particularly complex concepts. It is definitely partially the schools fault, but CS is also a field where you have to have some interest in what you do. You can't just go through the motions.
  • NTDF9 9y ago
    Hey, they can traverse trees though! Isn't that what you need for the job?
    • wrinkl3 9y ago
      That certainly is what you need to get past the interview.
      • adamnemecek 9y ago
        That's the joke.
  • aidenn0 9y ago
    I wasn't able to use version control at all when I graduated; I didn't even realize it was an option. I just every now and then would make a tar of my project in case I lost something. I suppose I had copy/pasted some cvs commands from sourceforge in order to download the source of some open-source projects, but that was the full extent of my interactions with source control.
    • Retra 9y ago
      I know how to write some software before I went to school, but learning version control there was an eye-opening experience. It's the kind of thing I think they should teach in school to non-programmers. Anybody who writes anything, collaborative or not, is advantaged in some way by using it.
  • 9y ago
• heurist 9y ago
  > Some of them send me email. They often express frustration, because they are trying to learn Python, or Bayesian Statistics, or Digital Signal Processing. They are not interested in installing software, cloning repositories, or setting the Python search path! None of that is new. Setting up an environment that is conducive to coding takes effort if you don't have someone to set it up for you, which describes most new coders. I had a hell of a time learning to code on cheap hardware running Windows 15 years ago.
• dba7dba 9y ago
  When I tried to learn Java years ago, I got stuck with setting path on my Windows computer. Afraid to break it somehow, I gave up on learning Java. I picked up Shell scripting and html/css years later but I think the logistics of anything is the really hard part. Not the actual activity.
• brandonmenc 9y ago
  > Computer retailers stopped installing development environments by default. As a result, anyone learning to program has to start by installing an SDE What? Notepad and a browser is all you need to get started learning the most popular programming language in the world.
• fizixer 9y ago
  I'm afraid a very important point was missed. What is it that's being programmed? Commodore 64 programmers were never interested in "Bayesian Statistics" and "Digital Signal Processing". Their main interest was pretty much related to systems programming in one way or another. Today's "programmers" expect to do crazy things like carry out statistical analysis on megabytes of data, in a matter of minutes, with all kinds of insightful plots, and animations and what not. (Same goes with DSP). Today's programmers are NOT asking for what Commodore 64 programmers were asking for. They're asking for way way more. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But who's is to provide such shiny interfaces to future Bayesian-statisticians and Digital-signal-processors? - System programmers do massive research to automate for today's programming demands, workflows, and activities. And a lot of people are working in this space. But it's full of information overload without a clear winner. - Or one of their own takes a hit for the team, transitions into system level programming, and uses his past experience to create usable interfaces, processes, workflows, and associated software. It's not an easy task. I think now we're talking about something I've been struggling with for many years, a computational science workflow software. Again there are hundreds of projects in this space but that makes it even worse. How do you chose between them? Someone says he/she uses Sumatra and it works for him/her. But it may not work for someone else. Someone else says you should follow Cookiesutter Data Science guidelines. But that's also addresses on a small aspect of the overall problem. Etc, etc. The there are the emacs diehards who claim you can do everything in emacs so why leave emacs. Well I can do everything in linux + shell + C so why leave linux + shell + C? (point being emacs only let's you do everything by becoming an OS in itself). I don't have a solution. I'm working on this problem in my spare time from a very very different meta level angle. But that is a massive research project and cannot be finished in a matter of a couple years, much less without funding.
• naveen99 9y ago
  I started with autohotkey. Still think it's the best gateway from user to programmer. keyboard and mouse macros. It's the first thing you learn on emacs and vim also.
  • willhslade 9y ago
    I'd say Excel, but potato, potato.
• zubspace 9y ago
  Well programming is one piece of the puzzle. I also miss the days when qbasic was preinstalled and easily accessible. But what worries me more is the actual deployment of the application you write, which is getting more and more complex quite fast. It seems, I'm in a rare place, where deployment consists of installing a database and extracting an zip file. There's a script you run and the (intranet) service is ready. Updates work exactly the same. Sometimes I feel a bit ashamed, when clients watch me extracting a zip file, but then I experience deployments and updates of other so called enterprise systems and am completely baffled by their complexity. Server provisioning and orchestration. Container managment. In memory caches. Sharded databases with master slave setups. Load balancing with health monitoring and what not... And to manage this mess you need a mix of bash scripts, fiddle with permissions, run terraform which itself runs ansible which deploys some docker containers... And when there's a tiny problem the guys in charge are completely roadblocked for weeks. I have no idea how some people can live with so many layers of complexity and I fear the day, when I need to dig into this mess, eventually...
• bthornbury 9y ago
  This is a REAL problem. The information overload for becoming a coder is going way up with all these "great" new tools we're getting. Try messing with the build of a React.js app, and I'll come see how you're doing next week. Things should be getting easier, and the information overload less. For all scenarios, not just the easy ones. I think more advanced developer tools will be the main driver of this.
• lucidguppy 9y ago
  I find this difficult to understand. Computers in 1979 would be 500 dollars in equivalent today money for something like a sinclair zx-80. Now computers are cheaper than lunch. Computers of long ago couldn't do much... the raspi zero wireless can do a lot. We're looking for treasure - but there's diamonds on the soles of our feet. We just need some curriculum worked out - like the article indicates computer usage + computer programming. We assume a lot is just absorbed by kids - but it isn't it must be taught.
  • sydd 9y ago
    yeah, nowadays you can get a PC which you can use to develop anything under $300. Nowadays there are millions of prime quality materials on the web for free - audiobooks, videos, books, whatever suits you. Nowadays the best IDEs in the industry are free - a few years ago you needed to shell out hundreds of dollars. The only thing that got worse is the confusing amount of choices that you need to make.
• ohiovr 9y ago
  I get along pretty good on blind trust, issuing commands provided in tutorials or setup guides sometimes having little understanding of what the heck it is that I'm doing. There is always an end point that I'm highly interested in and I spend my time learning the ins and outs of. I spend my time learning what I need to learn when I'm stuck. Sure this attitude can be disasterous. I keep current and offline backups at all times and not nuking the production code is a standing order. I know enough to install Gogs, but I am by no means an expert on all things git quite yet. If it weren't for stack overflow and search engines I'd still be writing inconsequencial stuff in Director Lingo. No one can afford the time to really understand the stack, its tens or hundreds of millions of interconnected lines of thought. When I take time to learn something I intend to do something useful with it. At this time my mind is like a buffer. For every new thing I learn, stuff from 10 years ago is fading fast. There is a lot to learn sure. There is even more that is forgetable.
• vinceguidry 9y ago
  I love Ruby the language, but I absolutely hate Ruby the platform. I've never run across a more hostile landmine-ridden terrain for new developers. Every time I have to ramp up a new dev, I just resign myself to the fact that it's going to take anywhere from an hour to three or four to get everything installed. God forbid they've actually tried to use Ruby before on their machines. I've dipped on job prospects which involved code challenges that require me to get their codebase working on my machine. I inevitably wind up having to troubleshoot their broken setup and that takes way more time than doing the actual challenge. Ruby desperately needs innovation in this space. Bundler and rbenv / chruby / rvm just isn't good enough. Vagrant / Chef just isn't good enough. I understand that dependency management is a hard problem, but other languages aren't half the headache that Ruby is.
  • thesmallestcat 9y ago
    Before the tire fire that is rvm became "standard", it was normal to just download the version you needed and build it from source. There's nothing forcing us to use crappy, obscure tools like rvm and rbenv. And I agree with you on all points.
    • vinceguidry 9y ago
      It's a total shitshow. But since ruby manages everything with environment variables, you need some kind of tooling to manage multiple versions. Horrendous. Ruby should just standardize on a way to point projects to rubies. Instead of a zillion environment variables, just a shebang. It's how everything else works.
      • zbentley 9y ago
        > Instead of a zillion environment variables, just a shebang. It's how everything else works. I would like to tell you about an environment variable called PATH...
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
• alant 9y ago
  As many others, I also disagree. Back in the day, laptops are more expensive and less capable. Now you can program everywhere with laptop and wifi. More importantly, sites like SO makes learning to program so much easier than before. Back then, if you don’t know somebody you might be stuck with some silly issues for a long time. Not to mention Windows had frequent blue screen of death.
• conradk 9y ago
  Recently, I've experienced working on a remote server. It was a real pain. You need a crazy fast connection to be productive. Otherwise, you're stuck waiting for changes to save, for pages to load, etc. Of course, you can only hope the network doesn't break down or the cloud IDE company makes a buggy deploy. As a remote developer, I like working in different places. These places don't always have nice internet. Working with a local environment and 4g connection is fine, because 4g is more than enough to look up docs. But working with a distant environment and 4g connection is very slow and unreliable. Nowadays, a lot of people praise the "cloud" or everything. Use APIs for everything, Use public CDNs to load up bootstrap and jquery. Use an online IDE. Make a hosted Git service an essential part of your workflow. The thing is, not only do these services occassionally break, but some might get compromised (https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/browsealoud-coinhive-monero-mining-hack/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/browsealoud-coinhive-moner...) and some even ask you to install closed source binaries to your system without any idea of what's in it (keylogger, ransomware, anything is possible). Given all that, when I read that using a local environment is "anachronistic", I can't help but cringe.
  • figgis 9y ago
    This really just sounds like issues with whatever web IDE you are using. Remote development does not need to be a huge pain like that.
    • conradk 9y ago
      I wasn't using a web IDE, but the dev server was remote. While I suppose remote environments do not have to be a huge pain, I'd be interested to know how to mitigate all of the issues I mentioned in my previous comment. The only solution I've been able to setup is a local environment with minimal set of dependencies calling the network.
      • smt88 9y ago
        I can't think of a reason a dev server should be remote instead of on your machine, unless you're working with large, live data sets that you can't download... Can you explain the setup a bit more?
• tyingq 9y ago
  I personally know otherwise competent Java backend devs that have no idea how http works at all. Pipelining, gzip/deflate, Cache-control headers, XSS, uri concepts, bandwidth consumption, proxies, etc...not even the foggiest clue. There's just so much breadth, abstraction, inversion-of-control, and pressure to deliver in corporate environments. There's little incentive to be a big picture person when you're rewarded solely for closing out stories and pushing out change requests. The resulting hit in quality is atrocious.
• 0xBA5ED 9y ago
  Personally, I feel it's vastly easier these days. The sheer volume of learning material at your fingertips is staggering. I mean, you can just turn on youtube tutorials and soak it in with barely any effort. Most of the time, you can copy/paste whatever error you're getting into a search engine and get instant answers. It's a walk in the park!
• HIPisTheAnswer 9y ago
  Seems to me the author wants nix, the functional build system, with an easy to use ' browser' of nix configurations.
• pdfernhout 9y ago
  I've been programming for about forty years -- starting as a teenager on a KIM-1 with 1K of RAM. I was playing with digital electronics for years before that which is also a good foundation for understanding the basic logic of some programming operations like AND, OR, and NOT. What I feel is also often missing in the programming community today -- as well as computing education -- is people who have the experience of computers from the wires up. Nand2Tetris is a course that provides some help in that direction -- but it is still not the same as having been there: http://nand2tetris.org/ http://nand2tetris.org/ Back then, programming was one of the most interesting things you could do with a computer. One of the biggest challenge for programmers starting out now is that, frankly, much of what you can do with computers is so darn interesting (e.g. Kerbal Space Program, Minecraft, or just browsing the Web). So, those distractions are often more interesting-seeming than the computer basics of logic circuits, machine language, and fumbling around in confusion (maybe for years in some areas) until things click. I see that challenge with my own kid learning programming. Still, there is Redstone in Minecraft -- and even a Forth computer mod for Minecraft. There are lots of programming game-like things like the Smalltalk-derived Scratch now. And great software libraries. And there are places like GitHub and GitLab for sharing code. And even board games like RoboRally. And Arduinos and Raspberry Pis are very cheap. And you can so so much even on just a cheap Chromebook. I'm writing this on a cheap Acer Chrombook 15 running GalliumOS Linux when I now do most of my personal coding and writing -- both to save money and also to keep thinking about what is possible with the current low-end of personal computing. JavaScript is still no Smalltalk -- which was a much easier language to learn and use when it is installed and supported, especially since it was designed for kids and went through many years of refinements to make it easier to learn, use, and debug. But JavaScript these days (especially ES6/ES7) is not that bad -- and it is almost everywhere and almost anybody can start programming in it in their web browser. Here is a browser-based playground I wrote recently for JavaScript using Mithril and Tachyons: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7/master/src/ui/twirlip7.html http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7/master/src/ui/twirlip7... So programming has never been cheaper or more accessible. And the original article goes into that some, like with the suggestion of starting with a Cloud-based IDE (e.g. https://c9.io https://c9.io ) or simulators (e.g. http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/ http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/ ).
• steve_taylor 9y ago
  I would pay $99 for an Apple TV app that recreates the experience of programming a computer connected to a TV, in BASIC. Something like the Amstrad CPC series computers with lots of built-in commands for drawing graphics, making sounds, etc. I’m trying to get my 8-year-old interested in programming, but there’s just too much shit on the computer that gets in the way and too many unrelated parts (text editor, terminal, compiler/interpreter, etc.) for him to think about. I can’t use parental controls to stop him from switching to YouTube the moment I walk away, because just about every piece of software has a long list of websites it needs to connect to. He’s used to playing games on the iPad and none of those would be simple enough to inspire him to think that maybe he could make games too.
• wolco 9y ago
  Things are so much easier to program these days. Compare c or asm or cobol to php,ruby, python or modern javascript things are much easier at a higher level of abstraction.
  • kbwt 9y ago
    > php,ruby, python or modern javascript But do you really understand those? Do you have a complete mental model of how they work down to the fundamentals? For C and even C++, I can confidently say YES.
• hedora 9y ago
  Honestly, if I were teaching someone to program now, I’d just tell them to buy a raspberry pi. For $50 for the nice kit, plus a surplus monitor + keyboard + mouse, you get a fully working toy dev environment preinstalled. You also get piles of programming tutorials written for that exact environment.
• rbongers 9y ago
  There's a big green download button on github repository pages with an option to download the code as a zip file.
• always_good 9y ago
  We like to think programming is hard and that there's a barrier to entry that we somehow surmounted because we're oh so smart. But does anyone here actually know people who learned to program within the last couple years? My co-founder's girlfriend taught herself enough Javascript and React to help out on our front-end in a couple months. Had no experience except for dabbling in Wordpress. Now closes issues for us. My buddy learned enough Python to create a GUI for an old card game. Built it to completion enough to challenge himself against the computer player. Hasn't programmed since. Neither of them had any experience before. These posts really underrate the resourcefulness and intelligence of beginners. And my suspicion is because we like to think it's hard. People here act like installing Homebrew to download python3 is somehow hard for a beginner when there are hundreds of tutorials online telling them how to do it. Hundreds of tutorials are exactly what I didn't have when I started programming Basic even though the hello-world was a little simpler.
  • smt88 9y ago
    I actually think programming is pretty easy. Programming well or in constrained environments is hard. It's easy to learn and hard to master. I've been coding for 22 years, and each year I feel like I can look back to the year before and say, "Wow, I sucked at programming then."
• worker840234 9y ago
  "If someone just wants to learn to program, they shouldn't have to learn system administration first." I may disagree. Even though that's maybe an old school opinion I think every developer should at least understand his own development environment (including the OS), potentially also aspects of the target environment. The reason is because (1) the abstraction between the OS and an(y) (sofisticated) SDE is still leaky (sometimes for a reason) and (2) because a developer that cannot support operations when things turn bad at runtime is just a fair-weather captain.
  • Const-me 9y ago
    Every good developer should understand these things, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to demand them from beginners. I learned to program in Borland Turbo C on DOS, and later in Visual Studio 97. Both were full-featured IDEs, at least by 90’s standards. I’ve only started to learn Windows internals & system administration on my first job in 2000. If knowing system administration would be a prerequisite, I’m not sure I’d become a professional programmer.
• seandougall 9y ago
  My mother-in-law, who learned to program in the ‘60s by carrying her boxes of punch cards across campus while getting tear gassed by Berkeley PD, would probably beg to differ.
• emmelaich 9y ago
  There was a great blog article on all the non-programming "stuff" you have to do get productive in programming. Everyone resents doing it but it is very hard to avoid. And it's unclear whether it's inessential to programming. Does anyone remember this blog article? The author's name might have been Paul, and he might have been a Coursera teacher.
• justinhj 9y ago
  A couple of things bother me about this. First the idea that someone would be a data scientist and not want to first learn how to do the most basic things with their computer. Second the idea that it's hard to do anything on a computer when you can literally type into Google what you want to do, and seconds later can be watching someone else do it on YouTube or reading detailed curated answers on StackOverflow.
• st1ck 9y ago
  For Python, just try Anaconda/miniconda https://conda.io/docs/user-guide/index.html https://conda.io/docs/user-guide/index.html
• iamleppert 9y ago
  Programming is not getting harder, these are just the reactions of people who probably shouldn't be in this discipline in the first place. A great deal of any programming, technical, what have you job is just getting stuff to work. A lot of it has nothing to do with the actual core task at hand or your specialization but still needs to happen one way or another. This means using critical thinking skills, deductive reasoning, the scientific method. It means scouring Google, trying things until you have a clear mental model of whatever insane legacy you're working in. Back in the day, I'd spend my time at home trying random things, looking at files in a hex editor, disassembling software to figure out how it worked because there was simply no other way. There was no Internet, and the only documentation I had was at my library, which was limited to whatever they had and usually was out of date or incorrect. Sometimes they wouldn't even let me bring stuff home, because I was a kid and why on earth is this weird kid wanting some giant technical reference manual? There were no laptops (that I could afford) so I had to read it there, and then go back home and try more things with my hopefully newfound knowledge. Today, we have Google, we have groups, the Internet, mobile devices, tons of high quality blogs, books, free online courses, and the industry itself is infinitely larger with resources that still boggle my mind to this day. As long as I have the time, I'm usually able to tackle most any problem. I couldn't really say that as a kid growing up in the early 90's, trying to learn programming. Those were the literal stone ages. No internship programs, most people thought of tech jobs as vocational IT help desk related (at least in my hometown). There were times when I was legitimately stuck with no resources or recourse. So please, excuse me if I don't find sympathy of these people who cannot be bothered to setup their python envrionment with the aid of stackoverflow.
• saagarjha 9y ago
  > Computer retailers stopped installing development environments by default. As a result, anyone learning to program has to start by installing an SDE -- and that's a bigger barrier than you might expect. Many users have never installed anything, don't know how to, or might not be allowed to. Installing software is easier now than it used to be, but it is still error prone and can be frustrating. If someone just wants to learn to program, they shouldn't have to learn system administration first. I'm not sure I agree with this statement. macOS provides Python, Java, Ruby, etc. out of the box, and a C compiler is one button click away. On Linux a C compiler is provided. For web languages, every browser comes with a full suite of development tools.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • mamon 9y ago
    By leaving MS Windows out of the equation you've just ignored 90% of computer sales worldwide...
• Houshalter 9y ago
  I think it's just a matter that most people use Windows, and programming software is optimized for linux. I once wrote up all the steps required to get youtube-dl working on windows. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453506 Which is quite similar to what you need to do to install a programming language. Nontechnical people will get stuck on things like changing path variables, because they have no idea what that is. Let alone compiling something which is frequently required.
  • cheschire 9y ago
    Programming certain software is optimized for Linux, but with VS Code and VS Community Edition, and the robust project templates that come out of the box, users can easily get basic C# programs working for free in console apps or even windows store apps with powerful debugging and intellisense tools. When someone is learning to code, C# can get them there quickly and easily once they discover the correct docs. If you feel programming is optimized for Linux, that’s because it’s your preference. And a valid one at that! Its just going to tint your view a bit.
    • Houshalter 9y ago
      C# was made by microsoft for windows specifically. The majority of programming languages were not. When I started programming I got very frustrated getting stuff to work right. I remember it used to be near impossible to get pip on windows and eventually found some weird unofficial installer.
• deleted 9y ago
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• _pdp_ 9y ago
  This article lacks any depth! It is easier than ever to program and get started. 5 minute tutorials are available on almost anything and sometimes delivered by 8-9 year old kids. Even low-level stuff are easier to pick up thanks to the explosion of readily available information and IDEs. No one is using Arduino? Perhaps it is true that newer generation is just less keen to put an effort to study anything outside of the norm of but learning old and new technologies has never been easier.
• bsaul 9y ago
  I’m amazed to see that the reaction of many people including the op author, don’t think that this is simply the symptom of a field (ide) that haven’t evolved in thirty years. Whenever i open a terminal to type some esoteric command line i don’t feel like a tech genius. I feel like someone living in the stone age.
• soniman 9y ago
  I had this same problem as the OP describes and my solution after a lot of frustration was taking some tutorials on Linux from Youtube. That actually might not be a bad place to start because bash is a programming language (right?). Teaching some simple bash scripts plus navigating the file system wouldn't be the worst intro to programming and it can now be done in Windows.
  • veddox 9y ago
    Yes, bash technically is a programming language - but it's a pretty horrible one in terms of usability, and not the first that I would teach a newbie. Plus, you really don't need it unless your deep into sysadmin stuff.
• BuckRogers 9y ago
  I enjoyed the article, the author has some good points. I started on the Commodore 128 and I'd have to disagree with the author's conclusion. I think the filter is far less for self-motivated, truly interested users today than it was in the Commodore's heyday. None of the issues presented are really issues, it's just that there's a larger swath of people who have accepted computers as mainstream devices and can now afford one. Or are simply too young and missed the heyday of the truly "personal" computer. If I were to write a response, it would be titled The Great Filter. I was a computer nerd most of my life, by the advent of the smartphone and the majority of people realized how much the career paid, that whole stigma blew out the window. Unfortunately, the Great Filter is gone, people who would've been filtered out in the 80s are only visible by observing the students who aren't even computer literate enough to have bothered to investigating figuring out how a filesystem works before trying to program.
• ozim 9y ago
  For me it looks like inverted survivorship bias. You won't hear from people that succeed so you don't have way to count them. People that nag or email author might be even in some special group of 'someone please make it work for me', I cannot imagine mailing author of a book. I do not believe that such group to be really big, maybe it just visible more than others. Like 'plz give codez' on StackOverflow. Buying a book or reading blogpost does not entitle you to anything more, like wasting author time. Time is most valuable asset and he already spent it on writing book. If that book is crap you can rate it on Amazon or something but directly contacting author?
• nickjj 9y ago
  As someone who makes developer courses / training material I think it's a really bad idea to use online services like PythonAnywhere or Cloud9IDE. It's really important to learn how to set up your own development environment as a developer and if you're making this content, I believe it's our responsibility as teachers to show people how to do this. Personally I use Docker in my courses (because it's what I use for my own stuff) and it's been a smashing success. I do get occasional people questioning "why" but after I explain what the process would be like to set up a proper Python dev environment without Docker they immediately see the wins. Of course I do get Docker related installation questions but it's a small percent compared to questions on the course content. One of my courses is building real world web apps with Flask and it's probably 80% Flask / 20% Docker related questions. That's much better than punting a local development environment off to a third party service / pre-built VM and then leaving people stuck in the dark for getting anything done on their own.
  • prawks 9y ago
    I think I'm in the group that doesn't immediately see the obvious gain of teaching in a Docker container vs. teaching how to install pyenv/virtualenv. Is it mainly cutting out troubleshooting differences between host OS's while also getting isolated python environments? Maybe I do see the win there, after all?
    • nickjj 9y ago
      I think you're starting to see it. By the way, everything isn't just thrown into a single container. We use Docker to set up the whole app over a series of containers. So postgres, redis, the flask app and celery all run in their own containers. Without Docker, you're responsible for getting not only virtualenv set up, but also installing postgres and redis on your box, which is wildly different on Windows, MacOS and Linux. From a teaching POV, it's easier to level everyone off with Docker, but from a student's POV, it's also easier because now they don't need to worry about any of that. It lets them get to the important material faster. They can just install Docker and run a simple `docker-compose up --build` and they are good to go. Compare that to listing out a million steps to install python, setup virtualenv, write special clauses for people on Windows or MacOS, etc.. It's a huge burden for everyone, and it's the main reason why I started using Docker for my own projects years ago. We haven't even talked about installing multiple versions of postgres or redis without Docker too (because apps tend to be developed at different points in time), or deploying an app to production. All of the steps you do to set up a typical real world Flask app on Windows and MacOS are thrown out the window without Docker because your production box is likely running Linux, but with Docker, it's pretty much the same.
• SZJX 9y ago
  Isn't what he said the natural consequence of technology being available to a wider and wider segment of the public, reaching ubiquity? This is to be expected when what was originally something only known in a small circle is now having to be used by essentially everybody then. One thing that can definitely help is to incorporate programming as mandatory into national/state school curricula as soon as possible. Programming literacy could become something like writing literacy, though of course we're not quite there, yet. Everybody having a solid grasp on programming principles would also protect the democratic society in the sense that people would have an idea on how the software they're using daily actually work, what is being done to their data, etc. Leaving such a fundamental fabric of the society in the hands of few is self-evidently dangerous.
• jordiburgos 9y ago
  I has never been easy...
• glorkk 9y ago
  Please don’t hijack the horizontal swipe. It is for going back/forward in navigation histoey, not switching between articles on your website.
• meuk 9y ago
  "For beginners, and especially for people working on their own, I recommend delaying the pain." No, no, no, no, no! This is exactly what caused the problem in the first place. That you need an IDE is one of the biggest lies in programming. From the terminal on most Linux systems, you can download and install everything in a single line. Then compiling is another line.