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Is learning to ride a unicycle hard? It is if you don't have inherently good balance. Is linguistics hard? It is if you don't have a good associative memory.

by 51Cards 16y ago

Is learning to ride a unicycle hard? It is if you don't have inherently good balance. Is linguistics hard? It is if you don't have a good associative memory. Is math hard? Is carving a wooden bowl on a lathe hard? Is pro-Hockey hard? Is sculpture hard? Metal working? Philosophy? Music? The percentages of people with specific inherent skill sets will vary widely in society, so 'hard' is best defined as 'requiring a skill a smaller percentage of the population possess'. Good programming does require specific skills, but I don't see it as being any more difficult than other specialized tasks. I don't find programming hard at all... perhaps that is because I started very young, perhaps it is just a 'natural' ability to understand and evaluate systems. To me it's second nature. However when I watch an artist form a mental image then extract it from a block of stone, or I watch my math PhD friend throw around set theory and abstract dimensions like cake recipes... I am fascinated.... and lost. Hard is relative.

jseliger 16y ago
Is learning to ride a unicycle hard? I think the difference here is that riding a unicycle is a fundamentally bounded problem: you balance, you move your feet, you do a couple of other things. By contrast, programming is effectively unlimited in its potential problem domain. Philosophy? Music? These are both hard to do really well, but they have a much greater margin for error and often aren't provably correct or incorrect. When I write an academic paper, if I have a typo on the fourth page, the entire rest of the paper won't catastrophically fail. When I write a program, however. . . Hard is relative. Very true! But some fields still, at least to my mind, feel harder than others. One (limited) way you could look at "hard" is in the context of universities: I've seen dropout graphs for various majors. It's not at all unusual for someone to go from electrical engineering to com, or CS to English, but I've yet to hear any English majors say, "English was too hard for me, so I switched to Chemical Engineering."
- mootothemax 16y ago
  When I write a program, however. . . It might not catastrophically fail, but it might mean anything from not compiling through to not outputting a newline or create a possible security issue via a buffer overflow. Like the majority of things in life, it comes down to shades of grey, and that's why it's tricky at times ;)
Someone 16y ago
'hard' is best defined as 'requiring a skill a smaller percentage of the population possess I disagree about the 'skill' bit. Skill can be acquired. There are many skills that few possess that many could acquire, if they wanted to. For examples, consult the Guinness book of world records.
aridiculous 16y ago
Forgive the pedantry, but riding a unicycle is not difficult even if you have bad motor coordination. I'm fairly janky in terms of my motor skills and learned to unicycle in a week or two. It consists of hacks, concepts, and fundamentals just like most seemingly complex tasks.
- chopsueyar 16y ago
  But what if you don't have legs?
  - alanfalcon 16y ago
    Then you have an advantage! http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/11/aimee_mullins_12/ http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/11/aimee_mullins_12/
pamelafox 16y ago
On the note of linguistics - I started a linguistics course at the same semester as a compilers course, and I found them to be a perfect complement to each other; it was all patterns and parse trees. My non-CS classmates in the linguistics class had a much harder time grasping the concepts, and the professor had to come up with some crazy curve to account for the difference between our levels. So, depending on how you approach computer science, you may find that those same skills have prepared you for linguistics, or vice versa. Either way, I highly recommend learning linguistics; it is a fascinating discipline.

by 51Cards 16y ago

jseliger 16y ago

Is learning to ride a unicycle hard? I think the difference here is that riding a unicycle is a fundamentally bounded problem: you balance, you move your feet, you do a couple of other things. By contrast, programming is effectively unlimited in its potential problem domain. Philosophy? Music? These are both hard to do really well, but they have a much greater margin for error and often aren't provably correct or incorrect. When I write an academic paper, if I have a typo on the fourth page, the entire rest of the paper won't catastrophically fail. When I write a program, however. . . Hard is relative. Very true! But some fields still, at least to my mind, feel harder than others. One (limited) way you could look at "hard" is in the context of universities: I've seen dropout graphs for various majors. It's not at all unusual for someone to go from electrical engineering to com, or CS to English, but I've yet to hear any English majors say, "English was too hard for me, so I switched to Chemical Engineering."

mootothemax 16y ago
When I write a program, however. . . It might not catastrophically fail, but it might mean anything from not compiling through to not outputting a newline or create a possible security issue via a buffer overflow. Like the majority of things in life, it comes down to shades of grey, and that's why it's tricky at times ;)

Someone 16y ago

'hard' is best defined as 'requiring a skill a smaller percentage of the population possess I disagree about the 'skill' bit. Skill can be acquired. There are many skills that few possess that many could acquire, if they wanted to. For examples, consult the Guinness book of world records.

aridiculous 16y ago

Forgive the pedantry, but riding a unicycle is not difficult even if you have bad motor coordination. I'm fairly janky in terms of my motor skills and learned to unicycle in a week or two. It consists of hacks, concepts, and fundamentals just like most seemingly complex tasks.

chopsueyar 16y ago
But what if you don't have legs?
- alanfalcon 16y ago
  Then you have an advantage! http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/11/aimee_mullins_12/ http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/11/aimee_mullins_12/

pamelafox 16y ago

On the note of linguistics - I started a linguistics course at the same semester as a compilers course, and I found them to be a perfect complement to each other; it was all patterns and parse trees. My non-CS classmates in the linguistics class had a much harder time grasping the concepts, and the professor had to come up with some crazy curve to account for the difference between our levels. So, depending on how you approach computer science, you may find that those same skills have prepared you for linguistics, or vice versa. Either way, I highly recommend learning linguistics; it is a fascinating discipline.