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> I only kind of "got it" when I did something nobody would recommend anymore, and learned QBasic, and wrote a bunch of ghastly code with goto's all over the pl
by eckza 7y ago
> I only kind of "got it" when I did something nobody would recommend anymore, and learned QBasic, and wrote a bunch of ghastly code with goto's all over the place and practically everything being a global.
An aside: It's okay to learn that way, when you're 10.
A lot of my own big programming revelations have come from ignoring best practices and accidentally trying to implement or construct them from first principles once my problem becomes unmanageable.
"Doing it wrong" is an even better teacher than "doing it right all of the time", because the mistakes you make can lead you to a deeper understanding of why things are done a certain way.
- overgard 7y agoTotally agree. I think we make a mistake trying to harp on doing things "right" too much for new programmers, because they end up with analysis paralysis.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThat's my current approach to teaching people programming concepts. I try to provide an example of not using that concept, point out the quickly growing complexity of the code, and then show how that complexity can be reduced with the new concept I'm introducing. (And yes, as a kid, I was hurt by all those "Cat : public Animal" examples too. It took me many years before I figured out why they didn't work in practice for me.)
- abricot 7y agoI think this is why you often see people reinvent GOTO. Everyone who started with BASIC (and moved on) knows why you won't do that any more. But someone today starting with python might not understand. [replace GOTO with any bad example]